joe-pearce-1

This is the very first serial I can ever recall seeing on a Sunday afternoon. I remembered (and still remember) only bits and pieces of it, most especially the evil Sombra's always calling up the spirit of her even more evil father, who really looks like he belongs in a Three Stooges two-reeler.

Move up in time to 1956. On the late night Steve Allen Show, Steve introduced a comedian named simply "Theodore", who was quite simply hilarious in a monolog that lasted about 8 minutes. Theodore gave "concerts" of what was called "disconcerting humor", and a very short time after the Allen appearance, a friend and I went to see a complete show of his at, of all places, Town Hall, in Manhttan. To this day, I have never laughed harder than I did for the near-two hours he held the stage, a phantasmagorical presence who scared you and made you double over with laughter at the same time. He was billed under the simply name 'Theodore'. Later, however, he added to it and became "Brother Theodore", leading a back-to-nature movement at his concerts, which in time became NYC coffee house presentations on Saturday nights at midnight. We went to some of those, too.

During all of this time, I never even knew his last name, and then another friend, watching this 1947 serial, told us that the villain in the show, played by one Theodore Gottlieb, was actually the current local coffee house favorite, Brother Theodore. Around this time, I was living at the Ansonia, and one day I got onto an elevator with - who else? - Brother Theodore (he could never be misidentified; nobody looked or sounded like Brother Theodore). I spoke to him for a moment and he seemed rather disturbed to have been recognized at all, so I retreated quickly and never got to ask him about his pre-Theodore acting career. Looking at it now, he seems to have appeared in a number of films (good ones, too, like THE STRANGER and THE THIRD MAN) but always in little more than walk-ons. His role in THE BLACK WIDOW is by far the most substantial one he ever essayed in Hollywood. And now I've learned that that Steve Allen appearance may have been his first-ever TV appearance, but that he later - in the 1970s and 1980s, appeared many times on the Letterman show, with Johnny Carson, etc., yet I never heard of him again after that Ansonia elevator meeting.

Just putting this in to remind everyone how strange an interest in actors can be, when I can remember the same actor from two entirely different periods in his career, both very meaningful to me at the time, and never have realized (for a good 30 years or more) that my recollections of what I thought were two memorable performances were simply recollections of the same performer in two separate stages of a career, neither of which I could possibly have associated with the other.

Anyway, there was an LP out in the late 1950s recorded at that Town Hall "Concert of Disconcerting Humor", and if you ever see it (maybe it's come out on CD), don't pass it up. It is unique, as indeed was Brother Theodore. His motto was, "As long as there is death, there is hope!" Now, just how unique can a comedian get?

This film is magnificently reflective of the Late Victorian Era in England. I may never have seen it better recreated, but at least there are competitors. I'm going to concentrate, therefore, on what makes this film so special to a movie-lover who also loves all kinds of classical music, but most especially Opera. There have been untold numbers of what might be called "backstage" films, and many of them work quite well - think of ALL ABOUT EVE, THE GREAT CARUSO and SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, (even CHARLIE CHAN AT THE OPERA works well!), but counting this film, I now know of only three that quite literally give you the smell, the aroma, and the excitement of backstage anywhere in the performing arts. The greatest of these is probably THE RED SHOES. I am not a ballet fan (although I love the music), but I recall the first time I saw this wonderful film, at about 18 or so years of age, and I thought that, had I seen it at a particular time in my development, I might have become quite a ballet fan and developed interests in that line. I didn't, but every time I see the film I feel like I am part of a great ballet company and am watching the premier artists of that art, including choreographers, directors, musicians, etc. It reeks of atmosphere. The second of these films, one which had an immense effect on my subsequent life, may surprise the reader. It was the 1943 Claude Rains version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. I was only 8 when I first saw it, but I started loving Opera and everything having to do with Opera at that time, although I didn't become fully appreciative of the singing aspects of Opera until THE GREAT CARUSO came along. But that film has, again, the smell and aroma of a great opera company, and the most fantastic backstage sets I've ever seen in a film on Opera. It also has the most wonderful 'overnight sensation discovery' scene of any film I've ever seen, ten times better than Warner Baxter telling Ruby Keeler that she was going to go out on that stage and come back a star. Okay, now we come to Gilbert and Sullivan. An excellent film of their relationship was made in the early 1950s, with Maurice Evans and Robert Morley as the composer and his librettist. But although it was an excellent film, and peopled with star singers from the then current D'Oyle Carte Company, it did not draw me into it, nor give me an immediate love for G&S. That had to wait 7 or 8 years, and came through the medium of recordings. But if I had seen THIS film back then, my adventures along the G&S trail would have commenced at that moment. There is hardly anything covered in this film that I didn't already know to a large extent, yet I sat there mesmerized by it throughout, most especially by Gilbert's direction of the singers in the THE MIKADO. The characters of the two men are beautifully drawn, but perhaps the film had come along (in 1999) too late to appeal to young people whose musical senses these days are usually pummeled into submission by rock and roll, heavy metal, hip-hop and what have you by the time they start school. The picture, from beginning to end, is a thing of absolute beauty. Amazingly, all the actors seem to be doing their own singing and they do very well at it, although that superb actor Timothy Spall, who plays Richard Temple, does not sound like a baritone who had also sung Verdi and Mozart. But it's good enough, and his reaction to having his big solo number cut is almost truly tragic in scale, that's how great an actor he is. My only complaint: This is a film that I would love kids to see, just to find out if the music heard might have any hold on them, but near the beginning of the film we see Sullivan in what I assume is a brothel, with some nude women seeming to make out with each other. The scene is somewhat superfluous, if not gratuitous, but it is enough to deny the film the rating that would let unaccompanied-by-an-adult children in to see it, and that is unfortunate. (As I said, I saw PHANTOM OF THE OPERA at 8, and went to see it all by myself!) Other than that, though, an absolute masterpiece! Bravo, Mike Leigh.

Back around 1958 or 1959, this film was shown on either The Late Show or The Late Late Show. I had only recently gotten a tape recorder, and I recorded all the musical numbers, and then played them over and over again for about the next ten years. Although Martin had some pretty good opportunities in movies over a few decades, this is the one that catches him, and especially that glorious voice, at his absolute best throughout. Although he never sang opera (except a couple of "doctored" pieces in later films), I've always thought that this was a voice that, with a change in the direction of his voice training, could have served very well in opera, and as a tenor, not a baritone! (I have an unpublished Victor of him doing "E lucevan le stelle" from TOSCA, and he sings it very well indeed.) Anyway, he is showcased here in several very good numbers - "It's a Blue World" (an Academy Award nominated song), "Poor Punchinello" (which would be heard in the background, especially in carnival settings, of many more Columbia films of the 1940s), and most especially the title song of the film, "Music in My Heart", which he sings in the closing moments of the film and which is downright thrilling in its vocal freedom, so much so that although I collected his records at least through the mid-1950s (there's a great DESERT SONG on Victor with Kathryn Grayson who had just filmed the Romberg operetta with Gordon MacRae), I never heard him sound any better than in this film's concluding moments; indeed, I can't think of a single non-classical singer who ever sounded as good in a movie as does Tony Martin here. And the film itself is really an enjoyable piece of fluff from beginning to end, and maybe your only chance to ever see Andre Kostelanetz on the screen. (If you don't remember him, in addition to his huge classical output, he was issuing albums of "Opera for Orchestra" and loads and loads of top-selling LPs devoted to the great American songwriters from the late 1940s into the mid-1960s, all for Columbia Records, and was also married to diva Lily Pons for about two decades.)