agnes moorhead

My Christmas Wish: Treat Yourself to All That Heaven Allows (1955) This Year

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Last year, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows made it to number 24 on Swampflix’s Top 100 films, so naturally I spent the evening of last Christmas Eve closing that blind spot. If you’re a weirdo like I/we am/are (and if you’re on this site, that’s probably the case), you’ll likely find yourself recognizing the plot from its contours, because what Star Wars is to Spaceballs, this movie is to John Waters’s Polyester. Since Brandon had already written a review years earlier, I repurposed the review I couldn’t stop myself from writing to save for this year as an earnest recommendation to spend some part of your Christmas season with Sirk too, on the 70th anniversary of Heaven’s release. 

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in New England. Her life is quiet, with visits from her two college-aged children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds) growing fewer and further between. Her best friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorhead), takes her out socially; attempts to get her to pair off with older widowers in their social circle are unsuccessful, as she feels no spark with any of them. One day, she realizes that some new hunk is tending to her landscaping, and he introduces himself as Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), the son of the late Mr. Kirby who was previously engaged as the Scott family’s arborist. When she visits him at his home, she learns that he sleeps on a cot in a room attached to the greenhouse, and when he mentions planning to tear down the old mill on the property, she cajoles him into giving her a tour of the long-abandoned building, and she encourages him to convert it into a livable home instead. As their romance burgeons, their love is represented in ongoing changes to the mill house, which comes to resemble a livable home more and more. Ron takes Cary to meet some of his friends, a couple who have given up on the lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses in New York and now instead tend a tree farm. As the night goes on, a party erupts, and the couple introduces Cary to their bohemian friends: birdwatchers, beekeepers/artists, cornbread masters, and lobster-catchers. 

Cary has a wonderful, uninhibited time, but there’s trouble around the corner; her high society friends are rather snooty about her relationship, as are her children. When she mentions selling the house and moving in with Ron (post nuptials, of course), Ned becomes quite upset about his mother selling his childhood home and tells her that the “scandal” she’s bringing upon the family by dating someone who’s merely (upper) middle class could jeopardize his career options. The local gossip hound starts a rumor that Cary and Ron had been an item since before her husband died, which deeply upsets Kay, as she begs her mother to break things off with Ron. Everyone also seems to be utterly scandalized by their dramatically different ages. (Hudson was 30 and Wyman 38 at the time, and those are the ages that they appear to be to me, but the film may be trying to imply a greater disparity.) She acquiesces to the demands of her fairweather socialite friends and her ungrateful children, only to learn some months later that her sacrifice was in vain. Both of her children delay their Christmastime return to their hometown, and when they arrive, they reveal their own new life plans; Kay will be getting married to her beau in February when he graduates, and Ned will be leaving straight from his own graduation to take a position in Europe that will last, at minimum, a year. They present her with a Christmas gift that she doesn’t want (more on that in a minute), and Ned even suggests that they sell the house, since the kids won’t be needing it as their “home” any longer. Via a simple misunderstanding, Cary comes to believe that Ron is getting married to another woman, and the melodrama only unfolds further from there. 

Sirk is a Technicolor artist, and this is a gorgeous movie, and a very funny one at that. One of the things that I really loved about this cast was the opportunity to see Agnes Moorhead play a kinder, more sympathetic role. Just a couple days after watching this one I caught her name in the opening credits of Dark Passage and thought to myself, aloud, “That woman was working.” And, wouldn’t you know it, I tuned into the New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on H&I just in time to catch her episode of that: 

Moorhead’s Sara Warren is the only real friend that Cary has, as she’s the one who encourages her to get back together with Ron when she sees just how heartbroken her friend is. We learn this in a scene that’s perfectly framed and is one of many pointed social critiques that the film makes. We cut to a shot of a housekeeper vacuuming a carpet, as the camera dollies backward through the doorway to the room in which Sara and Cary are talking, and Sara closes the door to shut out the noise so that the two women can converse. It’s a neat gag, but it plays into the overall social critique of the movie, in which even the most sympathetic member of the bourgeoisie is still an aristocrat shutting out her social inferiors, despite her softening her heart towards her friend’s desire to date a blue collar business owner. There’s also a great contrast between the country club cocktail party that Cary attends near the film’s opening scene and the lobsterfest that happens at Ron’s friends’ house, where the upper class is presented undesirably. A married man makes a pass at Cary, kissing her; a potential romantic interest tells her that there’s little need for passion at their age, to which she (rightfully) takes some offense; the town gossip queen is there to do her thing. Ron’s group’s party is a lively place, where he plays the piano and sings boisterously, and people dance with great fervor. It’s never commented upon, but it is present throughout. 

Another fun little tidbit about this one is its distaste for television. Early on in the film, Sara suggests that Cary get a television to keep her company now that the house is empty, which Cary finds to be a contemptible suggestion. When a television salesman sent by Sara calls upon the Scott household, Cary shoos him away in a huff. In the final insult, however, Cary receives a television set as a gift from her children for Christmas. Ned even reiterates that Cary will be lonely and unfulfilled without her children and should have something in the house to distract her from her pitiful solitude, as if he and his sister hadn’t done everything in their power to sabotage her relationship with Ron. After the children have gone off to do their own things, their mother is left alone in the house, lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree and a duplicate fire: one in the hearth and its mirror in the flat TV screen — the giver of warmth and its cold reflected image. It’s striking and memorable, and the relatively tiny window that the TV might give of the world is visually contrasted with the vivid Technicolor world just on the other side of the panoramic windows that Ron has installed into the home he built to share with Cary. It’s good stuff. 

The film doesn’t demand a winter or Christmas time frame to be viewed, but I think it works best in that context. I’m getting the word out now so you can put it on the calendar before we all get Christmas brained. And, while you’re at it, when was the last time you watched Polyester?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

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It’s no secret that, when it comes to director Robert Aldrich’s collaborations with Bette Davis, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the film that everyone remembers and talks about, while Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is normally regarded as a bit of an afterthought. After all, the former has Davis up against Joan Crawford, an onscreen tour de force that captures the energy of their offscreen antipathy, a rivalry with such a legacy that it’s been turned into entertainment several times itself. It’s a well-known piece of trivia that the role of cousin Miriam in Charlotte, which was ultimately played by Olivia de Havilland as a favor to Davis, was to have been Crawford’s. Although I love de Havilland in this role, I can’t help but think that the Davis/Crawford second feature would have reversed this, with Charlotte as the preeminent psychobiddy picture and Baby Jane as the footnote. 

At a roaring party at Big Sam Hollis (Victor Buono, who had also appeared in Baby Jane)’s plantation home in the 1920s, the man himself warns John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) that he is aware that John has been carrying on an affair with Sam’s daughter Charlotte (Davis) and intends to run off with her and abandon his wife Jewel (Mary Astor), and that he will not allow this to happen. John goes to the grounds’ gazebo to break things off, only to be murdered, with his head decapitated and one of his hands lopped off. We then cut to the present of 1964, which finds Charlotte now a shut-in living in a dilapidated mansion with only the company of sourpuss maid Velma Cruther (Agnes Moorhead) and the occasional visits from childhood friend Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten), a doctor. Charlotte’s house is set to be torn down by the highway commission, but her repeated deferral of the impending date comes to a head when she hot-temperedly pushes a large stone planter off of her balcony, coming close to killing the demolition foreman, and she’s been given ten days to vacate. Charlotte’s recluse status is reiterated by the fact that there’s a persistent urban legend that Charlotte killed John Mayhew and got away with it because she was rich, with children daring each other to go up to the nearly abandoned house as if an old witch lived there. For her part, Charlotte believes that her father killed John, but in spite of this she blames Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair and causing everything to fall apart, and part of her stated aversion to moving away is because she doesn’t want Jewel Mayhew to “win,” since her house isn’t in the way of the highway. Despite Velma’s doubts, Charlotte’s attempts to get her businesswoman cousin Miriam (de Havilland) to come to the old house are successful, although Miriam knows that she’s there to get Charlotte out, not stop the bulldozers. Her arrival in town comes at the same time as a British insurance agent’s, who has a special interest in the Mayhew case. 

I programmed this movie for the third of five “spooky season” Friday screenings for Austin’s Double Trouble, a North Loop spot that I frequent and adore (the first two were Rosemary’s Baby and Ginger Snaps, with Paprika coming up on the 24th and Cherry Falls on Halloween night, both at 8 PM). In my ad copy for Charlotte, I described it as “Grey Gardens meets Gaslight,” and given that it had been a little while since I last saw it, I forgot just how much that latter film this one liberally cribs from. I’d go so far as to argue that, if the play and film Gaslight had never been produced, the psychological term that we take from it would instead be called “Sweet Charlotting” or “Hush Hushing.” Poor Charlotte Hollis really gets put through the wringer in this one, blaming her father for John Mayhew’s death for decades and hating Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair, when neither of those things are really true, and that’s before she finds herself psychologically terrorized by phantoms of John and discovering evidence of a potential haunting. Davis is doing some of the most truly compelling work of her career here, and I’ve been haunted by this performance ever since my first viewing of this movie when I was a teenager. Maybe I’m biased and the Louisiana setting and the frequent mentions of Baton Rouge endear this one to me more than Baby Jane, but I really do find the Southern Gothic feel of this one makes it more special (even if the script occasionally flubs and mentions a “county commissioner,” as counties are something that Louisiana does not have). That having been said, I can’t pretend that Baby Jane isn’t a tighter film; although their individual runtimes are within minutes of one another (133 minutes for Charlotte and 134 for Baby Jane), Charlotte feels longer, as there’s a little too much denouement going on after the film’s villains are revealed. This allows for Davis to continue to act her ass off, but it’s not terribly exciting, even if it also gives some time for one or two more twists. 

Although the film is decades old, I’ll give the standard warning here that I’ve got to delve into spoilers to discuss it further. This gets a big enough recommendation from me that I used a platform I was given to show movies to the public to make this one more visible, so that’s all you really need at this juncture if you want to go in unspoiled. Ok? Ok. I love seeing Joseph Cotten and Olivia de Havilland really play against type in this one. I think I remember reading somewhere once that it was only in this film and Dark Mirror in which she portrayed a villain, and in that earlier role she was playing a set of good and evil twins, so that’s a net zero, really. She’s fantastic here, and even though some audience members may find themselves fatigued by the film’s long ending, I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to see de Havilland relish delivering Miriam’s backstory for a shorter run time (even if I would trade it to see Crawford tear into this monologue). Miriam reveals that her resentment toward Charlotte was born the day that she was first brought to the Hollis House to be raised by her uncle following her father’s death, and that old Sam Hollis’s perfunctory hospitality to his niece while he doted on his daughter drove her into a jealous rage. It was Miriam who exposed Charlotte and John Mayhew’s affair, and when Jewel Mayhew killed her husband in a jealous rage, it was Miriam who blackmailed Jewel about it for decades while allowing Charlotte to blame her father, destroying their once close relationship. Miriam’s envy took everything from Charlotte except her house, and now Miriam has come back for that, too (or at least whatever money Charlotte’s entitled to via eminent domain reimbursement), with Dr. Drew as her confidante. His motivation is merely money, which is less interesting, but it’s still nice to see the hero of Gaslight take on the role of accessory gaslighter in this film. 

I’ve barely mentioned her, but I also want to draw attention to the fantastic performance of Agnes Moorhead as Velma. The moment that something spooky seems to be happening, the audience’s initial suspicion must fall on Velma, as the person with the most access to the house and the one who seems most antagonistic toward Miriam, who has yet to be revealed as the villain and seems to truly desire to help. Velma is irascible and her ability to maintain the great old house alone is minimal at best, but she’s also a true and faithful companion for Charlotte despite the fact that she seems to be going feral (when her murdered body is left in her backyard, the authorities say of her place that “I’d hardly call it a home,” which makes it sound like she’s living in a shack). Moorhead really was one of the greats, and she’s just as fantastic here as Davis is. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dark Passage (1947)

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One of the weirdest ways that the right wing griftosphere has managed to warp the minds of otherwise leftward and progressive young folks who are insufficiently critical of the online sources that inform their beliefs in the past couple of years has been the age gap discourse. In a very short period of time, we’ve gone from debating separating the art from the artist with regards to legitimate predators like Woody Allen and Roman Polanski to fully accepting the specious pseudoscience about when a brain is “fully formed” based on a tweet about a tweet about a tweet about a peer-reviewed study. I’m not going to pretend like we don’t live in a predatory world, especially for those who lack (or have been prevented from having) the ability to advocate for themselves. But I also can’t pretend that every time I see another young YouTuber fully and uncritically spread the idea that all age gap relationships are inherently unethical or immoral, it makes my heart preemptively hurt for all the ways that these uninformed blanket ideas are going to hurt the people that the purveyors of social commentary think they’re helping. If the right can get the left to eat itself by pushing the idea that women can’t make their own decisions at 18, or at 25, then they’ll eventually move the Overton window far enough to get people to think that women can’t make their own decisions at any age, or use this same logic to prevent trans people from living as their most authentic selves at any age. We’re only going to see it get worse. Luckily, Humphrey Bogart (born 1899) and Lauren Bacall (born 1924) have been dead long enough that (hopefully), they will escape the scrutiny of the neo-Puritans in Breadtube clothing.

Dark Passage was the third of four film that Bogey and Bacall made together during their marriage, and it’s a great little low-commitment noir. Bogart plays Vince Parry, a man wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife, and Bacall plays Irene Jansen, a woman who is sympathetic to him because of her own father’s false murder conviction. When Parry escapes from San Quentin, he first is picked up by a man named Baker (Clifton Young), but when Baker overhears the radio bulletin about Parry’s escape, the two scuffle and Parry steals his clothing. Before he does anything too rash, Irene appears on the scene and manages to secret him into San Francisco past the manhunt. While she’s out shopping for clothes, her snoopy friend Madge (Agnes Moorhead) appears at her door and, hearing the record playing inside, insists that Irene open up, until Parry has to pretend that he’s Irene’s gentleman caller. As it turns out, Madge and Parry have a history of their own; she wanted him and tried to induce him to an affair, and she provided the damning evidence (read: perjury) at Parry’s trial. Madge is also the ex-fiance of Bob (Bruce Bennett), who is now pursuing Irene. Parry leaves Irene’s and meets a sympathetic cabby named Sam (Tom D’Andrea) who sets Parry up with a discredited back alley plastic surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) to change his face. Unfortunately, upon awakening, Parry returns to the home of the friend who promised to house him during recovery only to find the man murdered, and Parry once again at the end of a frame job. 

The general consensus about this one is that the first half is much more exciting than the second, and I can see why. For the first forty minutes, the film is shot almost entirely in first person from Parry’s point of view, and it’s such a refreshingly modern and unconventional stylistic device that you can’t help but marvel at it, even nearly seven decades later. It’s Bogart’s voice throughout, of course, but we only ever see “Vincent Parry” as a photo in the newspaper, and the only time that Parry is on screen pre-face change is when he’s in the back of Sam’s cab and is backlit so that not even the outline of a face can be seen, which lends this one a great noir gravitas. This also allows for the opportunity for Bacall to make long, lingering stares straight down the barrel of the camera, as if she’s looking straight into your soul as she tells you that she believes in your innocence; she’s absolute magic here. While Parry is getting the surgery, he undergoes a marvelously psychedelic subjective dream sequence, with great kaleidoscopic effects and double (and triple) exposure overlays that also manages to feel very modern and fresh. The issue for a lot of people seems to be that this is where they start to lose interest, and the complete abandonment of those ahead-of-their-time visual choices as the rest of the movie plays out as a much more straightforward noir picture. I didn’t mind this, though, as I found the narrative sufficiently compelling and remained invested in whether Parry would ever be able to escape from the city and if Irene would be able to join him, as well as figuring out who actually did kill the late Mrs. Parry and Parry’s friend George. And the film is not completely without some very exciting shots to follow, especially as the action picks up; Parry is nearly apprehended by the police at one point, there’s a sequence of dangerous driving, and there are even two separate fall deaths with surprisingly decent dummy work. I liked it quite a lot. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond