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A Message From Bernie and Ernie: Hello Bradford:
 This is a DDD Web Site (No.6)
THIS WEB SITE WAS UP-DATED ON: 10/10/03
Hello from Bernard and Ernest, we are known as ‘The Dynamic Duo in Derbyshire’, and we manage ten Web Sites on the Internet. Do you like reading stories about film stars, the cinema of the past, and old movies that we don’t see on television now? If you do, then our Web Sites are for you!
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There are also stories about World War II, and peoples experiences during the period, and you can also submit your own for inclusion on the site. Bernie, was in the entertainment business for about 35 years, while Ernie, a staunch film fan for 70 years, contributes his views and opinions.
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We are based in The Heart of England, near the beautiful Derbyshire Dales. We enjoy making new friends, and invite you to send us an e.mail with any questions you might have about our sites.
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For a sample of our sites click on either of the links on this page,and we hope you will find interest in what you see.
Link to our information site:
http://www.bumpkinproductions.co.uk
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Westerns Ride Off Into the Sunset:
 | IN A WAY, this is a eulogy for the old-time westerns, which have almost totally faded from the screen. The revisionists and multiculturalists declared that they needed to be killed and have almost completely done the job. Gone, but not forgotten, these films at least deserve a decent burial. Their genre went through a brief revival when TV came into prominence, as "Gunsmoke," with Marshall Matt Dillon, and "Have Gun, Will Travel" and its Shakespeare-quoting Paladin, entertained us. Few knew what a paladin was, but the audience liked him. (A paladin was a knight-errant.)
"Centennial," a masterpiece of research which embodied nearly all of the mythic West, was even better on television than in print. The same can be said for "Lonesome Dove." Too bad they never played on Cinemascope, which could better capture the vastness of the American West. Recent decades witnessed few good westerns gracing the tube or the silver screen. The spaghetti westerns produced in Italy and Spain were mostly slow-motion brutality without a message.
Those seniors who grew up on westerns during the Depression years of the 1930s uniformly loved the cowboy films and remark how those early westerns sustained them and gave them hope and diversion from the problems of difficult everyday life. The early inexpensive and quickly made B-films, produced in black and white, often were prefaced by one of its cowboy stars urging children to obey their parents and be good to others. Many of these pictures served the roles of morality plays of medieval times, teaching character and integrity.
"The Virginian" was a prototype. The law was the law for the title character, as he hanged his best friend turned rustler. "Red River," the story of a cattle drive with dissension among its leaders, as John Wayne clashed with Montgomery Clift, revealed how stubbornness became a vice rather than a virtue. The 1950s brought what critics called the first adult western--"High Noon"--in which Gary Cooper won an Academy Award for his role as Marshal Will Kane. Shot in black and white, the movie was a metaphor for the fanatical Red-hunting of the times. The film's message was the need to do one's duty', regardless of the consequences. The lead had been offered to John Wayne, who turned it down. He even condemned his friend Cooper for taking the role. Wayne was shocked at the final scene, which depicts the marshal contemptuously casting his badge in the dust. "High Noon" has consistently been voted the best western. The film subsequently was colorized, but not until forced by lawsuits. The starkness of black and white was lost in the color version.
"Shane" and "Monte Walsh," both written by Jack Schaeffer, were offbeat westerns. The first combined the stunning beauty of the Grand Tetons with the struggle for land use between cattlemen and sodbuster homesteaders. The actors were stars who showed why they were stars--Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, Jack Palance, and Brandon de Wilde. "Monte Walsh" portrays the love and commitment of a cowboy to his job during economic depression. Lee Marvin is superb as the simple cowhand, and Jeanne Moreau exudes the futility of hope in trying to transcend her "profession" as a soiled dove. The theme music is positively haunting.
"The Gunfighter" was as close to film noir as westerns got. There is no glorification of the criminal, only a portrait of self-loathing by Gregory Peck. Ironically, his character's attempt to reform himself was cut short by a back-shooter. John Ford's discovery of Monument Valley in Arizona provided the stupendous backdrop for a series of movies, such as "The Searchers" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." The sun-drenched buttes and their dark shadows gave one a symbolic feel for the Great Southwest. One other film that deserves mention because it is a "thinking man's western" is "Ulzana's Raid," a sleeper that came close to becoming a cult movie. Starring Burt Lancaster as an old scout showing the ropes to a religiously oriented and newly minted cavalry lieutenant, it tracks an Apache breakout. The idiocy of war was never shown more effectively.
The symbolic white hats vs. black hats in most of these films taught a clear-cut difference between good and evil. The lessons learned were that virtue was its own reward and that good eventually would triumph over evil. (Clayton Moore, who played the Lone Ranger on radio and in film, said the role made him into a virtuous man.) The western presented reality in simple (not simplistic) terms. Justice was swift, as revealed in the miner courts, and, although there were excesses, vigilantes served a needed role where there was no formal law.
In the western, the individual made the difference, bearing out the insight by Albert Schweitzer, the famed medical missionary to Africa, that "the individual is the sole agent responsible for the renewal of civilization." The actor's part in each movie was clear. Bosses were bosses; ramrods were ramrods; and hired hands were just that. Women were women, and men treated them with respect. The women took care of their men, their kids, and their homes, and were rewarded with love by all. The western showed that a spacious, clean, non-urbanized world was still out there, waiting for those with pioneer guts to win a share of its largesse. The West revealed itself as a different culture from the rest of the country. On the silver screen, the big sky of the West, its high plains, and its shining mountains beckoned the post World War II migrations.
The westerns are dead. It wouldn't hurt to shed a tear as we say requiescat in pace and turn on an all-cowboy movie TV channel featuring the good old days.
(c) Bernie Bumpkin 2003
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The 'B' Movies
 | A "B" movie, according to industry lore, is a movie in which the sets shake when an actor slams the door. Although it has come to mean any low-budget feature that appeals to the broadest possible audience, the term "B" movies was first applied to movies of the 1930s and 1940s that were made quickly, cheaply, in black-and-white, usually without notable stars, and usually with a running time between 60 and 80 minutes, in order to fill out the second half of a double feature. During the Great Depression, the movie business was one of the few businesses earning profits, and many distributors competed for the patronage of increasingly frugal moviegoers by offering them more for their money: two films for the price of one, plus cartoons, a newsreel, and several trailers. The practice began in 1932, and by the end of 1935, 85 percent of the theaters in the United States were playing double features. Some suggest the "B" stands for "bread and butter," others suggest "block-booking," but most likely "B" was chosen simply to distinguish these films from the main, or "A," features. At first only "Poverty Row" studios, such as Republic, Monogram, Majestic, and Mayfair,, produced "B" movies, but soon all the major studios were producing their own "B"s in order to fill the increased demand. In the 1940s, with moviegoers seeking escapism from a world at war, theater attendance reached an all-time high; of 120 million Americans, 90 million were attending a film every week, and many theaters changed their fare two or three times weekly. During this time, the business of "B" moviemaking reached its artistic and commercial apex, with Universal, Warner Brothers, Twentieth-Century Fox, Columbia, RKO, and Paramount all heavily involved in production. For the first half of the 1940s, Universal alone was producing a "B" movie a week. In 1942, a number of "B" units were set up at RKO, with Val Lewton assigned to head one of them. According to his contract, Lewton was limited to horror films with budgets not to exceed $150,000, to be shot in three weeks or less, with an average running time of 70 minutes--but within these confines, Lewton produced such classics as Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, The Seventh Victim, and Isle of the Dead. A common practice for "B" directors was to shoot their films on the abandoned sets of "A" films, and Cat People (which cost $134,000 and grossed over $3 million) was shot on the abandoned set of Orson Welles' second film, The Magnificent Ambersons.
What separates "A"s from "B"s has little to do with genre and everything to do with budget. Film noir, Westerns, straight detective stories, comedies, and other genres had their "A" and "B" versions--The Maltese Falcon was an "A" while The House of Fear was a "B." At the studios making both "A"s and "B"s, specific film units were budgeted certain limited amounts to quickly produce films generally too short to be feature films. But just because these films were being churned out doesn't mean that some of them weren't even better received by audiences than the big-budget, high-minded "A" features. Some are now considered classics. Detour (1945) has become a cult noir favorite, and The Wolf Man (1941) is one of the best horror films ever made. The award-winning The Biscuit Eater (1940) was distinguished by its location in Albany, Georgia, deep in the South's hunting country, with Disney producing its "A" version 32 years later. Successful "A"s often inspired sequels or spinoffs that might be "A"s or "B"s. King Kong and Dead End were "A" films, while Son of Kong and the series of Dead End Kids films spun off from Dead End were all "B"s. Frankenstein was an "A," but then so were The Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein. It all boiled down to the film's budget, length, stars and, ultimately, whether audiences saw the film first or second during an evening out.
Because the "B"s were not expected to draw people into theaters--that was the job of the "A"s--these films were able to experiment with subjects and themes deemed too much of a gamble for "A" films; Thunderhoof showed sympathetic Indians, Bewitched involved multiple personality disorder, and The Seventh Victim touched on Satan worship. Technicians were forced to improvise with lighting, sets, and camera angles in order to save money, and the more successful of these experiments carried over into "A" films.
Many "B"s were parts of series. More than simple sequels, these were more like the James Bond series or a television series of later decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, a successful film might have two or three sequels but a single old-time "B" movie series might include up to 30 or 40 films. Besides the Dead End Kids series (which begat the Bowery Boys and East Side Kids series), there were Sherlock Holmes, Dick Tracy, Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Mr. Wong, Boston Blackie, Michael Shayne, The Whistler, The Saint, The Falcon, The Lone Wolf, Tarzan, Jungle Jim, the Mexican Spitfire and Blondie, to name but a few. The Sherlock Holmes series produced a number of classic films, and many film buffs still consider Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce the definitive Holmes and Watson. The Holmes series took an odd turn after the start of World War II, with the turn-of-the-century supersleuth and his loyal assistant suddenly working for the Allies against the Nazis. A few of the series, such as the Crime Doctor films, were based on successful radio shows, while most came from books or were sequels or spinoffs from successful "A" films. For example, Ma and Pa Kettle first appeared as minor rustic characters in the "A" hit The Egg and I before being spun off into their own series.
Most of the studios used the "B"s as a farm team, where future actors, actresses, writers, and directors could get their start and hone their craft before moving up to the majors. Frequently, young actors who were on their way up worked with older actors, who, no longer finding roles in "A" movies, were on their way down. John Wayne, Susan Hayward, and Peter Lorre appeared in a number of "B" films. Director Robert Wise's first film was the aforementioned Curse of the Cat People, though he is better known for The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Sand Pebbles, The Sound of Music, and West Side Story. "B" director Fred Zinneman went on to direct High Noon, From Here to Eternity, and A Man for All Seasons. Other noted directors beginning in "B"s include Mark Robson (who later directed Von Ryan's Express), Edward Dmytryk (The Caine Mutiny) and Anthony Mann (El Cid).
In the mid-1940s, theater attendance started waning, and Universal was hit quite hard. In a November 1946 shake-up, the studio attempted to turn things around by shutting down all of its "B" film units and announcing that, henceforth, it would be making only prestige pictures. What ultimately put an end to the "B"s, however, was the Justice Department and the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 3, 1948, in U.S. v. Paramount Pictures (334 U.S. 131), the high court found that Paramount, Columbia, United Artists, Universal, Loew's, and others had violated antitrust laws by engaging in price-fixing conspiracies, block-booking and blindselling, and by owning many of the theater chains where the films were shown, thereby stifling competition. "It is clear, so far as the five major studios are concerned, that the aim of the conspiracy was exclusionary, i.e., that it was designed to strengthen their hold on the exhibition field," wrote Justice William O. Douglas.
The studios agreed to sell off their total of 1,400 movie theaters, though it took them a few years to do so. With theater owners then acting independently and free to negotiate, an exhibitor could beat the competition by showing two "A"s, so the market for "B"s quickly dried up. The days of guaranteed distribution were over, though with television coming around the corner, it is doubtful the "B" industry would have lasted much longer in any case.
Once the "B" market dried up, there were still moviemakers with limited budgets who carried on the grand tradition of guerrilla filmmaking. Purists would not use the term "B" film to describe their output; in fact, most purists strenuously object when the term is used for anything other than the "second feature" short films of the 1930s and 1940s. These new low-budget films were usually exploitive of current social issues, from teenage rebellion (The Wild Angels) to drugs (The Trip) to sexual liberation (The Supervixens) to black power (Shaft). The name Roger Corman has become synonymous with this type of film. The book The "B" Directors refers to Corman as "probably the most important director of "B" films," yet Corman may be one of those purists who objects to the use of the term "B" movies being applied to his work. In a 1973 interview reprinted in Kings of the Bs, Corman said, "I'd say I don't make B movies and nobody makes B movies anymore. The changing patterns of distribution, and the cost of color film specifically, has just about eliminated the B movie. The amount of money paid for a second feature is so small that if you're paying for color-release prints, you can't get it back. You can't get your negative costs back distributing your film as a B or supporting feature." Corman said every film is made in an attempt to make it to the top half of the bill, with those that fail going to the bottom half. He admitted that the first one or two films he made were "B"s--though film historians who aren't purists still consider him the King of the "B"s. With the widespread popularity of drive-ins in the 1950s and 1960s, many of his films not only appeared as second features, but as third or fourth features.
Working as a writer/producer/director for American International Pictures, Allied Artists, and other studios in the 1950s and 1960s, Corman's output was phenomenal; between 1955 and 1970, he directed 48 features, including such classics as The House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Premature Burial, The Wild Angels, and The Trip. Nearly all of these films were directed on minuscule budgets at breakneck speed; his The Little Shop of Horrors was completed in two and a half days. In 1970, he began his own company, New World Pictures, which not only produced "B" films and served as a training ground for younger filmmakers, but also distributed both "A" and "B" films. Corman produced one of Martin Scorsese's first films, Boxcar Bertha, one of Francis Ford Coppola's first films, Dementia 13, and Peter Bogdanovich's first film, Targets. Jack Nicholson appeared in The Little Shop of Horrors and scripted The Trip, and while filming The Trip, Corman allowed actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper to direct some second unit sequences, just before they went off to make Easy Rider, another low-budget classic. James (Titanic) Cameron began his film career at New World, and Jonathan Demme's first two films were New World's Caged Heat and Crazy Mama. Demme showed his appreciation to Corman by giving him acting roles in Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, just as Coppola gave Corman a role in The Godfather: Part II.
According to Corman, after a couple of decades in Hollywood, a veteran filmmaker who is any good will have moved onto bigger budget films; if he is still working in "B"s, the best you can expect from him is a competent "B." "And what I've always looked for is the "B" picture, the exploitation picture, that is better than that, that has some spark that will lift it out of its bracket," Corman said, explaining why he liked employing younger filmmakers. When he allowed Ron Howard to direct his first feature, Grand Theft Auto, for New World, Corman told the young director, "If you do a good job for me on this picture, you will never work for me again." A 1973 Los Angeles Times article suggested that Corman was doing more for young filmmakers than the entire American Film Institute.
While it may be easy to dismiss the "B"s of the 1930s and 1940s or Roger Corman's films as popular trash, even trash itself has undergone a significant reappraisal in recent years. In her seminal essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," film critic Pauline Kael said, "Because of the photographic nature of the medium and the cheap admission prices, movies took their impetus not from the desiccated imitation European high culture, but from the peep show, the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic strip--from what was coarse and common." She argued that, while many universities may view film as a respectable art form, "It's the feeling of freedom from respectability we have always enjoyed at the movies that is carried to an extreme by American International Pictures and the Clint Eastwood Italian Westerns; they are stripped of cultural values. Trash doesn't belong to the academic tradition, and that's part of the fun of trash--that you know (or should know) that you don't have to take it seriously, that it was never meant to be any more than frivolous and trifling and entertaining." While the "A" film units were busy making noble, message films based on uplifting stage successes or prize-winning novels, the "B" film units were cranking out films that were meant to be enjoyed--and what's wrong with enjoyment? Isn't enjoyment exactly why we started going to movies in the first place, not to be preached to but to get away from all the preaching, to enjoy the clever plot twist or intriguing character or thrilling car chase or scary monster? Over time, trash may develop in the moviegoer a taste for art, and taking pleasure in trash may be intellectually indefensible but, as Kael argues, "Why should pleasure need justification?" Acclaimed writer-director Quentin Tarantino had his biggest success with Pulp Fiction, the title of which refers to the literary equivalent of "B" movies: less respectable fiction printed on cheap paper, sold for a dime, and containing a heady mix of violence, black humor, criminals swept along by fate, familiar scenarios with unexpected twists, and postmodern irony. Most of the film covers the same ground as some of Corman's films, and as Tarantino has said of Corman, "He's the most. That's all there is to say. I've been a fan of his films since I was a kid."
(c) Bernie Bumpkin 2003
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The Atchison, Topeka, and The Santa Fe:
 | A profitable trade between Santa Fe and the eastern U.S. existed since 1811, when William Becknell led the first expedition there. It took 80 to 90 days for a wagon train to reach Santa Fe from Missouri. Enter Cyrus Kurtz Holliday. He wanted to build a railroad to connect Santa Fe with the east. He also meant to establish a new town that would be at one end of the route. This he accomplished first, when he established Topeka, Kansas. In 1860, he joined forces with Luther C. Challis, to build the railroad from Topeka to Atchison, Kansas.
In March 1863, Congress granted land use of nearly three billion acres. However, the grants would be rescinded if the railroad had not reached the Colorado border. On October 30, 1868, ground was broken for the railroad. The first project was a bridge across the Kaw River. Pauline was the first station, just six miles from town. The first train was called the Wakarusa Picnic Special, which took its inaugural run on April 26, 1869. By 1871, the tracks reached Dodge City, an important center in the cow business. The line took some of the business away from a pre-existing line known as the Kansas Pacific Railroad.
The track reached the Colorado border by 1872. As the railroad went west though, its builders realized it couldn’t make any profit unless the territory through which it passed was populated. So it opened a land office and vigorously promoted land in its right of way, offering discounted train tickets to inspect the land, which was applied to the purchase if the prospect bought land. The 1870s did not produce much result, as that decade was marked with grasshopper plagues and severe droughts. One group of Russian Mennonites stayed and grew hardy strains of grains. The railroad helped them out by hauling seed grain and equipment for free. The favor was repaid when successful farms were established that shipped via the railroad.
On March 1, 1876, the line reached Pueblo, Colorado. The railroad was especially excited about this accomplishment since rich coal mines in the area would ensure a steady stream of goods passing from west to east. From there, the railroad turned its sights south. It wanted to reach Santa Fe to open up grade. So did the Denver & Rio Grande. The race was on to conquer Raton Pass, a strategic location on the route. Through legal maneuvers, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe acquired the rights to lay track. A couple of times crews nearly came to blows over the right of way. Finally D&RG was confined to Colorado, while the ATSF built into the southwest.
The line reached California on March 8, 1881, making it the second transcontinental railroad. From there the railroad also bought half interest in the St. Louis & San Francisco Railway, known as the Frisco. This extended their domain up the coast. In the east, they bought the Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis Railway. Now the ATSF had over 7,000 miles of track. By 1880, the railroad had 5,530 pieces of rolling stocks (locomotives and boxcars). The Baldwin Locomotive Works built many of the early steam engines.
During the depression of the 1890s, the railroad had difficulty paying its bills. The railroad went into receivership. Edward Ripley became its president and rescued it from ruin. He helped win over the people of California, when he led some California investors to build a competing line in the San Joaquin Valley, where the Southern Pacific was charging exorbitant rates.
Starting in the 1870s, Fred Harvey built his famous Harvey Houses. Up until that time, meals provided to railroad passengers were unappetizing and scanty. He opened his first restaurant along the Santa Fe line in Topeka. It was a huge success. He built one after the other along the line and gained a reputation for fine dining with good service at a reasonable price. He even operated at a loss much of the time, so much did he want to provide good food.
He also recruited heavily for “girls of good character” to serve in his restaurants. The “Harvey Girls” frequently married Santa Fe engineers, conductors, and other railroad people. The railway is glorified in this film. There are many terrific musical moments, but the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe production number stands out as simply enthralling. Ray Bolger's specialty dance numbers are delightful, and Virginia O'Brien is wonderful with the droll comic delivery on The Wild, Wild, West. Judy Garland's solos are perhaps somewhat less memorable, but she is absolutely wonderful in all the ensemble numbers. Garland oozes winsome charm with innocent grace and delicious spunk. I can't imagine anyone asking the Harvey Girls to listen to her letter with such sweetness. Her centerpiece performance with a talented musical supporting cast is amongst her best. John Hodiak may be a pretty stiff specimen of a leading man, but the musical talents of Ray Bolger, Virginia O'Brien, Kenny Baker. Even Angela Lansbury delivers the good in her first musical work as dance hall queen Em.
Fred Harvey also took control of the service that provided snacks and reading material while on board. He upgraded the quality of both, resulting in a huge increase in sales. When dining cars were in regular use, Harvey also took on that business for the ATSF.
In 1905, the railroad was in the spotlight when Walter Scott, better known as Death Valley Scotty, hired the railroad to take him from Los Angeles to Chicago. The challenge was to make the run in the fastest time ever--less than 46 hours. The Coyote Special left Los Angeles on July 9. Crowds lined the route, watching the progress of the special train. A newsman was on board, wiring stories of the train to the press. Several speed records were broken on the route. The train arrived in Chicago on July 11, 44 hours and 45 minutes later.
In World War I, the ATSF and other railroads faced a serious situation. Trains were being taken over for shipment of soldiers and war materiel. This was seriously affecting regular traffic. In addition, union representation had scaled back the work day to eight hours and there was threat of a strike. The federal government stepped in and created the U.S. Railroad Administration. This agency organized traffic flow, repaired equipment, maintained the tracks, and paid wages.
After the war, control was returned to the individual railroads. During that time, railroads had to use competitor rails to maximize efficiency. Railroads frequently had to repair stock belonging to someone else. The agency allowed a rate increase but it barely covered higher wages for employees and higher taxes. The railroad itself became almost totally unionized.
In 1933, the first diesel prototypes were made by General Motors. The railroad industry was interested in these because it needed something to revolutionize the industry to make up for passengers lost to automobile traffic. The ATSF completed its first diesel locomotive in 1937, called Super Chief. It required $4 million in upgrades to the rail due to the higher speed and greater weight of the train. It would make better time too because water stops would no longer be required. The trains also towed Pullman sleeper cars. They could also pull a bigger load up a grade. The Jeep, a second diesel was purchased in 1938, a 5,400 hp engine. The El Capitan arrived on the Los Angeles to Chicago line in 1938. The Super Chief was used extensively in Hollywood pictures. By 1959, ATSF retired all of its steam engines. Eventually it also sell all of its passenger service to Amtrak in 1973.
The railroad somehow survived the Great Depression. But what affected it more was the dust bowl drought years because so much of its track served those states affected. Workers agreed to a 10% reduction in salary to minimize the need for layoffs. New track laying projects were abandoned and so were some lesser used routes. Samuel Bledsoe became the new president and kept the railroad afloat. One new line was completed in the Pecos Valley. This line was connected to a potash company, a sure revenue generator.
Bledsoe also started buying up trucking lines, so that at least some of the competing transportation was its own. By the end of the decade the railroad was once again buying stock. And work started again on a track between Boise City, Oklahoma, and Las Animas, Colorado that has been halted in 1931. Purchase of the Frisco line in Texas also helped cut off 117 miles on the Fort Worth to California route.
Bledsoe unexpectedly died in 1939. The board quickly appointed Edward Engel. Engel continued the upgrade to diesel locomotives. He also began air conditioning passenger cars. For the first time since 1931, shareholders received a dividend $2.50/share. Some of the lines main stations were remodeled.
World War II once again brought enormous freight and passenger business to the railroad. It ran the main route between Chicago and the west coast. The railroads experienced labor shortages as men went to war or worked in war industries. Many women came to work at the railroads. The railroad bought excess steam engines from eastern railroads that were no longer using them. The railroads experienced heavy losses, however, because the government only had to pay half fare and freight rates. The ATSF asked federal permission to hire Mexican labor to replace the many employers who had gone to war. Some 4,250 Mexicans were employed at one time.
Fred Gurley took over as president in August 1944. He purchased a new line in Oklahoma City, giving access to a lucrative stockyard and meat packing industry. It also reached Long Beach, California, a new center for aircraft plants and harbor operations. After the war, money was spent to upgrade communications and dispatch systems. Two-way radios were used by on board crews and remote switching was used for routing. Service and speed was improved tremendously. It also took steps to unplug bottlenecks, such as replacing two strategically important but outdated bridges that required too much reduction in speed.
After the war, the ATSF started an airline that was strictly for freight. Many of the early flights supplied foodstuffs for the Harvey Houses. Unfortunately, it only lasted two years, since the Civil Aeronautics Board would not grant a common carrier license. So the railroad found other ways to survive by getting more efficient and faster. It specialized in produce trains that used special ice cars. More population growth and raw businesses in the southwest resulted in new business. The railroad also purchased more feeder lines and small railways to service specific manufacturers, such as the International Harvester Co., near Chicago.
In the 1950s things were shaky because both taxes and wages were increasing rapidly. Passenger fares were also declining. Ernest S. Marsh became president in 1958. His contribution was to modernize some of the freight cars and tracks. He also acquired some subsidiary lines in Texas. In 1967, John S. Reed took over as president. He started a training program through the University of Southern California for executives. He started a piggyback service for transporting truck trailers. New low maintenance welded rails were installed. He also continued to acquire new lines.
Other equipment and rail improvements continued throughout the 1980s. The railroad also finally merged with the Southern Pacific. The railroad was renamed the Santa Fe Southern Pacific. Its logo was redesigned and the engines were painted a different color. Some layoffs were required to cut expenses, though early retirement packages were offered when possible. The railroad expanded its interests to include real estate, petroleum products and pipelines, and timber. Today the SFSP is at the front of its game and is still going strong, through diversified interests.
(c) Bernie Bumpkin 2003
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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were the greatest dance team in the history of American movies. In the course of developing their partnership and dancing before the movie camera they revolutionized the Hollywood musical comedy in the 1930s. Though their partnership only lasted for six years and nine films between 1933 and 1939, with a tenth film as an encore ten years later, they definitively set the standards by which dancing in the movies would be judged for a long time to come. Although they both had independent careers before and after their partnership, neither ever matched the popularity or the artistic success of their dancing partnership.
The dancing of Astaire and Rogers created a style that brought together dance movements from vaudeville, ballroom dancing, tap dancing, soft shoe, and even ballet. Ballroom dancing provided the basic framework--every film had at least one ballroom number. But tap dancing provided a consistent rhythmic base for Astaire and Rogers, while Astaire's ballet training helped to integrate the upper body and leaps into their dancing. Because Astaire was the more accomplished and experienced dancer--Rogers deferred to him and imitated him--they were able to achieve a flawless harmony. "He gives her class and she gives him sex," commented Katherine Hepburn. Astaire and Rogers developed their characters through the drive to dance that they exhibited and the obstacles, spatial distances, and social complications they had to surmount in order to dance. "Dancing isn't the euphemism for sex; in Astaire-Rogers films it is much better," wrote critic Leo Braudy. In their performances, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers suggested that dance is the perfect form of movement because it allows the self to achieve a harmonious balance between the greatest freedom and the most energy.
Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1899. By the age of seven he was already touring the vaudeville circuit and made a successful transition to a dancing career on Broadway with his sister Adele in 1917. After Adele married and retired from the stage in 1932, Astaire's career seemed at a standstill. Despite the verdict on a screen test--"Can't act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little"--he made his first film appearance in Dancing Lady (1933) opposite Joan Crawford. Rogers, born in 1911 in Independence, Missouri, made her performing debut as a dancer in vaudeville--under the tutelage of her ambitious "stage" mother--at age 14. She first performed on Broadway in the musical Top Speed in 1929, and two years later headed out to Hollywood. She was under contract to RKO where she began her legendary partnership with Fred AstairWhen sound came to film during the late 1920s, Hollywood studios rushed to make musicals. This created vast opportunities for musical comedy veterans like Astaire and Rogers. From the very beginning Astaire envisioned a new approach to filmed dancing and, together with Rogers, he exemplified a dramatic change in the cinematic possibilities of dance. Initially, the clumsiness of early cameras and sound equipment dictated straight-on shots of musical dance numbers from a single camera. These straight-on shots were broken by cutaways which would focus on someone watching the dance, then on the dancer's feet, next to someone watching, then back again to the dancer's face, concluding--finally--with another full-on shot. Thus, dances were never shown (or even filmed) in their entirety. Because of this, Busby Berkeley's big production numbers featured very little dancing and only large groups of dancers moving in precise geometric patterns.
Astaire's second movie, Flying Down to Rio (1933), was a glorious accident. It brought him together with Ginger Rogers. It also brought together two other members of the team that helped make Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers the greatest dance partnership in American movies--Hermes Pan who became Astaire's steady choreographic assistant, and Hal Borne, Astaire's rehearsal pianist and musical arranger. Before Flying Down to Rio, no one had ever seen an entire dance number on the screen. Starting with the famous "Carioca" number, Astaire and Pan began insisting that numbers should be shot from beginning to end without cutaways. Pan later related that when the movie was previewed "something happened that had never happened before at a movie." After the "Carioca" number, the audience "applauded like crazy."
The success of Flying Down to Rio and the forging of Astaire and Rogers' partnership established a set of formulas which they thoroughly exhausted over the course of their partnership. In their first six films, as Arlene Croce has noted, they alternated between playing the lead romantic roles and the couple who are the sidekicks to the romantic leads. Their second film, The Gay Divorcee (1934), was based on Astaire's big Broadway hit before he decided to go to Hollywood. It provides the basic shape of those movies in which Astaire and Rogers are the romantic leads--boy wants to dance with girl, girl does not want to dance with boy, boy tricks girl into dancing with him, she loves it, but she needs to iron out the complications. They consummate their courtship with a dance. Most Astaire and Rogers movies also played around with social class--there is always a contrast between top hats, tails, and evening gowns, and even their vernacular dance forms aimed at a democratic egalitarianism. These films were made in the middle of the Great Depression when movies about glamorous upper class people often served as a form of escape. Dancing is shown both as entertainment and an activity that unites people from different classes.
The standard complaint about Astaire and Rogers movies are that they do not have enough dancing. Amazingly, most of their movies have only about ten minutes of dancing out of roughly 100 minutes of running time. There are usually four to seven musical numbers in each film, although not all of them are dance numbers. On the average, a single dance takes approximately three minutes. Certainly, no one would ever watch most of those movies if they were not vehicles for the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That these movies find viewers on the basis of no more than ten or 12 minutes of dancing suggests the deep and continuing pleasure that their performances give.
Each movie assembled several different types of dance numbers including romantic duets, big ballroom numbers, Broadway show spectacles, challenge dances, and comic and novelty numbers. In the best of the movies the song and dance numbers are integrated into the plot--Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936), Shall We Dance (1937). The centerpiece of most movies was the romantic duet. The incomparable "Night and Day" in The Gay Divorcee was the emotional turning point of the movie's plot. Other romantic duets like "Cheek to Cheek" in Top Hat and "Waltz" in Swing Time, are among the great romantic dance performances in movies. Some of the movies tried to replicate the success of the big ballroom number in Rio and the popularity of "Carioca" as a dance fad. Each movie also included an original variation on the different types of dances showcased in them.
For example, "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" in Shall We Dance included Astaire and Rogers dancing the entire routine on roller skates. "Pick Yourself Up" from Swing Time shows them using dance as an example of physical comedy: Astaire stumbles, falls, trips, and otherwise pretends he can not dance in order to flirt with Rogers, who teaches ballroom dancing. Another familiar genre is the "challenge" dance where Astaire does a step, Rogers imitates it, he does another, and then she tops it. Challenge dances usually played out Rogers' resistance to Astaire.
Shall We Dance (1937) has music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin including such well known songs as "They All Laughed," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "They Can't Take that Away From Me," and "Shall We Dance." The movie stages an encounter between high art and popular forms of self-expression, ballet and tap dancing, and seriousness and fun. Astaire plays the Great Petrov, star of the Russian ballet, whose real name is Pete Peters, from Philadelphia. The film opens with Petrov's manager surprising him in the midst of tap dancing. The manager is horrified: "The Great Petrov doesn't dance for fun," he exclaims. Ballet is a serious business to which the artist must devote his full time, the manager explains. Shall We Dance mocks ballet and European culture, and offers up instead popular American dance forms. The encounter is first staged when Astaire and Rogers dance to "They All Laughed," another example of a challenge duet. Astaire begins with ballet-like steps while Rogers, feeling left out, stands still. She lightly snubs him by starting to tap. He responds with tap-like ballet, and then, at last, goes into straight tap dancing. Only then do they successfully dance together.
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had long careers after they had ceased dancing together. Rogers went on to expand her range. She was an excellent comedienne, and in 1940 won an Oscar for her dramatic role in Kitty Foyle. Astaire appeared in over 40 movies, and unlike Rogers, he continued to dance. Among his later partners were Rita Hayworth, Eleanor Powell, and Cyd Charisse. No other partnership, however, produced work of the artistic quality that he was able to achieve with Rogers. The dancing partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers promised a kind of happiness in which two individuals are able to successfully combine freedom and fun.
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Esther Williams - Still in the Swim
 | A lifelong love of water brought America's bathing beauty fame, fitness, and enduring "grace."
Esther Williams didn't plan on swimming into history as America's most memorable mermaid. Blame it on Hitler. The pretty high-school athlete had qualified for three berths on the 1940 Olympic team heading to Finland. But while Williams was busy lapping the pool and perfecting her strokes, Hitler was terrorizing Europe and occupying the Scandinavian countries. The 1940 Olympic Games were cancelled. What Williams didn't know was that showman Billy Rose was scouting for a performer to star in his San Francisco Aquacade. He noticed the young athlete's picture in the local newspaper and invited her to try out. With her shot at the gold medal cancelled along with the games, she accepted Rose's challenge and became an Aquacade headliner opposite Johnny Weissmuller of Tarzan-movie fame.
"So much was going on at that time in my life," Williams remembers. "I was just out of high school, and the idea of starring in a beautiful show like the Aquacade where people swam to music--they called it water ballet then--was certainly exciting." The Aquacade show served as a platform to even greater fame. Williams' beauty and athletic ability caught the attention of MGM. The studio was waiting to discover an aquatic sensation to star in an upcoming series of swimming movies. After a screen test with Clark Gable, MGM put the 18-year-old Williams under contract.
"It was all happening so fast. I suddenly realized when I was under contract that I didn't know anything about being in front of a camera," she says. "I asked if I could take on a couple of little roles before I starred in a big one." Executives agreed and introduced the ingenue to movie audiences the same way they had Judy Garland, Donna Reed, and Lana Turner--in an Andy Hardy movie. Williams' vehicle was 1942's Andy Hardy's Double Life.
"The Andy Hardy series was almost like a screen test for the audience," Williams recalls. "We didn't know it at the time, but Andy Hardy was the precursor of situation comedy as we now know it in television. Years later, Michael J. Fox did "Family Ties." He was the image of Mickey Rooney--a little fellow who was smart, cute, and talented. If you did a clone of the Andy Hardy series, "Family Ties" would be it. The family was just updated to the '80s."By 1944, MGM gave Williams a shot at stardom, casting her as lead in its first aquatic musical, Bathing Beauty, opposite veteran Red Skelton.
"The picture was originally called Mr. Coed. It was going to be Red's starring vehicle," she remembers. "They previewed the picture in a town outside of Los Angeles called Pomona. Audiences in those days wrote on cards what they thought and felt about the picture. The preview audience carried on about the girl in the bathing suit, so executives changed the title of the movie from Mr. Coed to Bathing Beauty. I dreaded seeing Red the day after that appeared in the paper. But he was as sweet as he could be about it. He was a dear, dear man." With Bathing Beauty, MGM transformed Williams from a run-of-the-mill contract player to the reigning bathing beauty. In her 19-year film career, she swam her way through 26 features (and an estimated 1,250 miles).
The most lavish aquatic extravaganzas teamed Williams with Busby Berkeley, the legendary dance choreographer. Berkeley will be celebrated in late January during a Turner Classic Movie original documentary, Busby Berkeley: Going Through the Roof. Williams will be one of the featured interviewees on the special. "I credit Busby with the invention of the Hollywood musical as we came to know it in the late '20s and '30s," she says. Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, and Ginger Rogers were his repertory company people who went from one feature to the next. "These extravagant musicals are what prompted MGM to find Busby for my films. They knew his talent could help the kind of pictures I was doing. You can run out of ideas on how to get somebody in the water. I did three pictures with him."
Berkeley got most of his ideas while soaking in a bathtub. When designing the elaborate water-ballet numbers for a Williams film like Million Dollar Mermaid, he often called her from the tub at 2:00 a.m. to discuss ideas. While the water ballerinas appeared to effortlessly glide across the screen, the off-camera action was not as serene. Many of the performers were professional dancers, but definitely not swimmers. "They were going off high platforms in swan dives and hitting the water, getting water in their sinuses and sinking to the bottom," Williams remembers about the filming of 1949's Neptune's Daughter. "We had to literally teach the dancers to swim."
Asked about the seemingly "effortless grace" in the finished films, Williams confesses, "The directors told us, `You're getting paid, so smile!'" Berkeley's elaborate routines for Esther Williams weren't without risk. In one scene, Williams was hoisted 80 feet up on a hydraulic lift built into the stage. Dressed in sequins with an elaborate metal crown, she did a swan dive into the pool below. "While I was in the air, it occurred to me that the crown should have been made of cardboard, not lightweight metal," says Williams. "My neck snapped and I spent the next six months in a body cast. The doctor told me that I came as close to breaking my neck as I possibly could without actually breaking it."
To recuperate, Williams did what she does best--got back in the water. A studio doctor had recommended intense physical therapy, but his physical therapy hurt, and her water therapy didn't. Within weeks, she was back at work, far ahead of schedule. After swimming her way to stardom in aquatic musicals such as Bathing Beauty, Neptune's Daughter, Dangerous When Wet, Pagan Love Song, and Million Dollar Mermaid, she retired her sequins for a business suit and dove into a second career. She opened a swimming-pool business in 1959; it is still going strong. In 1988, with husband Edward Bell, Williams launched a successful line of swimsuits, The Esther Williams Collection. In between business meetings, the grandmother of three is writing an autobiography. Throughout Williams' life, there has been one constant--water. She has never been far from a pool. But whenever and wherever people see her, "the question" pops to the surface: Do you still swim?
"Of course I still swim," she always replies. "Why would I ever stop doing something that feels so good? When I get in the pool, I know it's the best I'm going to feel all day." Swimming has helped keep Williams vital and strong in her 70s. Ever since the 1940s, she has been one of the sport's most ardent and visible promoters, inspiring thousands along the way to take the plunge. "I'm just glad I could get them in the water," she says.
Through her films, she championed the then-little-known sport of synchronized swimming, After Bathing Beauty became a box-office hit in 1945, women wrote to Williams, asking for advice on how to "swim pretty like I did in the movies." The following year, the sport held its first official competition. In 1984, Esther Williams and Donna DeVarona were invited to host the first Olympic synchronized swimming competition. Today, in YMCAs and pools across the country, men and women of all ages enjoy, train, and compete in the sport. And Williams couldn't be happier "Swimming is for everybody! As you grow older, the thing you notice is that you are not walking as fast or jogging as often because it is so hard on the joints," Williams says. "Women are also prone to osteoporosis and do not have the same strength in their joints. But in water, you are totally ageless and weightless. It's the great equalizer!"
At her Beverly Hills home, she swims "every day." And someone's always popping in wanting a few tips from her. "I'm teaching little ones, older people," she says. "Even my schnauzer swims!" Over the years, Williams has suffered the occasional injury. Once, she underwent knee replacement surgery: the result, she believes, of too much tennis. After the wound healed, she took to the pool, recuperating far ahead of schedule. Later at a party, she discovered singer-dancer Liza Minnelli limping around on crutches after undergoing a hip replacement. The "queen of chlorine" offered the actress the same advice.
"Liza, heat your pool, get in that water, and move that leg! Put a clock out by the pool and for 20 minutes at a stretch, churn away," she told her. "Weeks later, she had an opening in one of those huge auditoriums. She walked over to where I sat in the first row, leaned over, and announced to the crowded auditorium, `This is my coach, Esther Williams, who got me back on my feet!' " Williams attributes her stardom to her athleticism, which got her through the long days of demanding work at MGM. "The agility from sports was a great help," she believes.
The benefits of fitness are still with her today, influencing everyone around her. "My 14-year-old grandson is very talented in sports. I began teaching that little boy to swim at three months; he was paddling around the pool at six months," she says. "What I've noticed is that athletes, people in track and swimming for example, have this easy grace because their muscles respond to them. Muscles that have been trained in a sport do you very well in life, especially in an acting career. The sport has given me grace." Williams believes that sports help one develop an inner strength that is an asset in all aspects of life.
"You develop a reserve that you can reach down and pull out in the last ten meters of a race, when you feel like your legs are going to fall off," she says. "It's a mental thing always at work. Even though you think you are going to die any moment, you say to yourself, `I'll die when I hit the end of the pool' and hear `You won!' " Almost 60 years later, the winner is still in the pool, and she's doing swimmingly.
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In The News:
 | Swedish national figure-skating champion Vivi-Anne Hulten has died at age 91. Now probably most of you are saying...Whooooo? But I'm sure most of you old-timers remember her chief rival during her competitive days: Norwegian Sonja Henie, the three-time Olympic champion known as the "Ice Queen of Norway," and a Hollywood skating star during the late 30s and early 40s.
Hulten was fifth behind Henie in the 1932 Olympics, second behind her in the 1933 world championships and third behind her in the 1936 Winter Olympics in Germany. At that Olympics, medalists were instructed to give the Nazi salute to Hitler when he handed them their awards. Sonja Henie gave him the salute when he handed her the gold medal. But bronze winner Vivi-Anne Hulten refused.
"I told them, 'I'm Swedish; I don't do that," she said. "I just stared at him. He was a scary person. He looked at you with kind of a burning look in his eyes." Henie and Hulten became bitter rivals. In interviews later in life, Hulten characterized Henie as a foul-mouthed, self-centered, ruthless competitor. She alleged that Henie's father made deals with judges at world championships to ensure his daughter's victories. But in 1942, Hulten scored a victory of sorts over the woman she called her nemesis. She married Henie's longtime skating partner, much to Henie's chagrin. After touring as a team with the Ice Capades, the couple opened a skating school in a suburb of St. Paul, MN. Her husband died in 1983, but Hulten ran the school until she suffered a stroke four years ago and moved to Corona del Mar, CA to be near her son, a former skater with Holiday on Ice. Two more women worth noting have also died this month:
Everyone can name several famous men composers of the 1930s & 40s, but can you think of one woman? One of the most famous was Doris Fisher who died at age 87 on Jan 15th. in Los Angeles. In 1944, she collaborated with lyricist Allan Roberts to write hits for Billie Holiday, Louis Prima, and Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Her hit songs included "You Always Hurt the One You Love" performed by the Mills Brothers and "Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall" by Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots. She went on to write music for the movies, including "Put the Blame on Mame, Boys" in 1946 for the movie "Gilda" starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford. Now most movie fans think Rita sang the song. Not so. Rita was tone deaf, so she lip-synced to Marni Nixon's voice. But Rita's sexy dance routine and daring black dress (for those days) caused a sensation and a thumbs-down from the Hayes Office.
Barbara Wace was one of the few female journalists to cover World War II from the European battlefields. She died Jan 16 in London at age 95. In August of 1944 she was heading for the newly liberated Paris when her editor diverted her to Brest, France. A German garrison of 38,000, cornered in the village and hiding in concrete submarine bunkers, was holding off 80,000 Allied troops. She recalled in 1995, "I was relieved at Brest just before it was taken. By a man. His name went on the story." After the war, Wace was a freelance writer and photographer and lived well into her 80s.
(c) Bernie Bumpkin 2003
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