Redux: From Ocean to Ocean

I first put this little number up on July 4, seven years ago. I still think it would make a nifty anthem, and today I kind of feel as if I need a dose of its solid, splendidly kitschy Klezmerische good cheer. 

A Holiday Fashion Moment

Trust dear Miss Alice Faye to have the perfect seasonal outfit.

Just Like a Sweetheart

Let's celebrate our nation's Independence in the very good company of Miss Alice Faye, Mr. John Payne and a gang of specialty acts, here to give a rousing rendition of "America, I Love You."

Shopping Daze

Well, I'm glad to see that Alice Faye, at least has finished her Christmas shopping...

Tin for Ten

Oh, I know it seems like just yesterday that we were getting married, but Mr. Muscato and I woke up this morning to the remarkable realization that today is, in fact, our tenth anniversary.

Birthday Stars: C'mon Along...

It's surely only happenstance that the attractive couple above share a birthday, but it's a pleasing conjunction of circumstances nonetheless.  

Alice Faye and Tyrone Power made only three pictures together; all of them - In Old Chicago, Alexander's Ragtime Band (ballyhooed in this still), and Rose of Washington Square - more significant to the Faye oeuvre than to Tyrone's, but all solid yarns.  Together, the two stars have on each other something of the effect attributed to the more prolific pairing of Rogers and Astaire: down-to-earth, commonsensical Alice grounds the ethereally pretty Power, while his admiration helps the audience realize that she's more than just a prole-pretty face.

I'm not really able to be impartial about Alice, about whom I've already shown myself enraptured.  Power I find a more acquired taste, but he's certainly never less than decorative and frequently a great deal more.  Both had relatively short, intense careers, with Faye walking away from Fox and movies at 40 (with nearly the finality of Durbin, athough she continued to flourish on radio for a decade after leaving Fox) and Powers dead at only 44.  

They certainly make a pretty pair,and they seemed thoroughly to have enjoyed each other's company.  They're both good eggs, wielding a kind of star power that's hard to imagine these days, and I hope that over the years they had many an amusing shared birthday.  Do you think that in sixty-odd years anyone will wax nostalgic over the memory of any of today's screen couples?  

Birthday Girl Next Door

May 5 must have been an auspicious date for Twentieth Century Fox - it's the birthday of two of the studio's biggest stars:  Tyrone Power and the lovely lady seen here, Miss Alice Faye.

It sounds like an odd sort of compliment, but Faye might have been the most normal person ever to have achieved Hollywood's heights.  And make no mistake:  Alice Faye was a very big star, in films of course, but also on radio, before and after movies, and just a touch of theatre at either end of her career.  Throughout, though, she gives every impression that her work was just another way to make a living - honest work, and work she gave her best to, but no reason for a little girl from Hell's Kitchen to get a swelled head.

Certainly, it would be hard to make a case for considering much of her oeuvre as art.  Fox was a factory as much as a studio, and one of the reasons Alice was such an ideal Fox star is her utter predictability.  Within her fach, as it were, there's no one better, but there's no denying it's very narrow terrain. 

She began in Hollywood with something of a false start, as a kind of singing, sometimes dancing Harlow, all platinum hair and surprised-looking pencilled eyebrows.  A few quick adjustments, though, and after half a dozen pictures, the real Alice emerged:  plucky, yearning, good-hearted and commonsensical.  She stayed that way for the next twenty-odd movies, moving from turns supporting Shirley Temple to leading spectacles like In Old Chicago to helming her own Technicolor epics (as above - here she's waxing sentimental in Weekend in Havana).  In each of them she sang - romantic songs, mostly, and often old-fashioned even when the movies were new, but with the occasional up-tempo novelty thrown in; she submitted to being romanced by Tyrone (and Don Ameche, and John Payne, and others in the Fox leading-man ranks); and she adroitly wore the almost uniformly horrifying costumes that the studio's not-exactly-Adrian designers came up with for her(When she turns up in Travis Banton's stunning gowns, simultaneously period-authentic and subtly Moderne, for Lillian Russell, it's something of a shock).

And then, once she had a family and it all started to seem a little silly (and is there anything sillier than her last big picture, The Gang's All Here?) - she decided she had better things to do.  Miscast - and fatally undercut by Fox's Daryl Zanuck, who was smitten by newcomer/supporting actress Linda Darnell - in her attempt at a noir, the Preminger-directed Fallen Angel, Alice took one look at the final cut and drove away.  She sang on her huband Phil Harris's* radio program (together they were more or less radio's last big stars; their eponymous show held out against TV until '54).  Much later she made a couple of perfunctory movies, seemingly more out a sense of obligation to her persistent fans than for any other reason (and heaven knows she didn't need the money), and she had a late-in-life stint as a motivational speaker for Pfizer pharmaceuticals (she came and talked at Mother Muscato's ladies' club, once upon a time - needless to say, a massive hit - "Such a lady!  And still so lovely!").  But mostly she lived the life of a prosperous California matron, and good on her for it.

Over at the Redundant Variety Hour, Thom & Co. are considering the not-dissimilar career of Miss Bobbie Gentry, another star who burned bright but briefly, and who has become even more resolutely private than did Alice.  When you think about it, the ones who leave on their own steam seem to have a pretty good time of it. 

Some are too big really ever to disappear (think of Garbo's 40-year undercover act) and some too small to have their disappearance make much of a ripple (would anyone really miss Amanda Bynes, Penny Pingleton notwithstanding, were she actually to make good on her retirement promises?).  In between, though, bracketed somewhere between Doris Day and Kristy McNichol, there is a fascinating stratum of performers who for various reasons reinvent themselves as private citizens.  Some, to quote that song, "met a big financier" (think Theda Bara, lucky lady).  Some, like McNichol, realize that the limelight is no place to deal with tricky personal issues. 

Nothing so complicated for Alice; she'd simply worked hard enough, long enough, to make her own choices.  Let her stand as the patron saint of graceful exits.  She would have been 97 today.

* Originally I had Phil Baker here - I always mistake the two.  Baker is a now-forgotten gadabout who pops up as "himself" in Fox pictures for reasons no one today can fathom.  Harris, of course, in addition to being Mr. Faye, is the voice of Ballou in The Jungle Book and so still beloved by legions of Disneyphiles.

Smart Shopper

I don't know about you, but dear Alice Faye is way ahead of me when it comes to being ready for Christmas.

For one thing, I've got no idea where I put my matching gloves and hat...

"From Ocean to Ocean"...

If I had more free time, I would devote it to making this little ditty the new anthem. Forget "America the Beautiful" or that godforsaken old drinking tune we have to put up with now - I want a national song that requires an accordion solo, a coloratura obbligato, and the appearance of no fewer than three vaudeville acts.

I think Alice is fabulous, but that's hardly news; John Payne is dreamy as always, but he really isn't even trying to act like he's playing the piano. Fox as usual plays it a little on the cheap side, but I'm terribly fond of the bugling ladies. All in all, despite being a blatant Irving Berlin knockoff, it's a winner.

Alice

Judging from her expression here, the mysterious Zizzi brought out the minx hiding just below Miss Faye's demure surface...

The Many Moods of Alice Faye

Sometimes I worry that I don't spend enough time considering the life and career of Alice Faye.

This post should take care of that for a good six months.







And, yes, of course I realize. She doesn't actually have many moods. Basically plucky to yearning and back again. But that's really her charm, isn't it?

And something about her makes me quite unreasonably happy.

Musical Nirvana

Over on Fabulon, a major discussion of the most, well, Fabulonian films of all time brought back memories of this glorious achievement in Technicolor.

Featuring Carmen Miranda in one of her best-ever entrances, a sneak Alice Faye appearance, and a parade of producers'-girlfriend chorus girls, carefully parsed out one line each...

Watch, and adore!

Go Ask Alice

I have been remiss, and I am ashamed: May 5 was the birthday of one of the Very Great Stars, Miss Alice Faye.

Alice walked away from pictures while she was still big (and before they got small) and had a very nice rest of her life, including the occasional television outing, as here, introduced by Der Bingle.

Enjoy.