Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber (39 page)

The film adaptation of
Pal Joey
provided vivid proof that the makers of Broadway musicals could do more, show more, and say more onstage in the early 1940s than it was possible to do, show, and say on film in the late 1950s. Portraying behavior such as adultery was possible, but the Hollywood Production Code, which had expurgated Porter’s lyrics two decades earlier, had by now determined that a character engaging in such objectionable behavior would have to pay a clear price for such conduct. A musical based on two sleazy characters, Joey Evans and Vera Simpson, who use one another for sexual and financial gain, would not be permitted in a major motion picture in the United States for yet another decade—until the Code was finally cast off in the turbulent 1960s. It is also possible that the censorship was seconded by the projected onscreen Joey, Frank Sinatra, who may have recoiled from playing such a fundamentally foul character for fear of tarnishing his maturing public image, which was of concern to the broader Italian-American ethnic community as well. In the current era of media multiple choice, it may be hard to fathom the contradictory strictures in a social world with only one source of prestigious public audiovisual entertainment (Hollywood), and only three fledgling television networks still broadcasting only in black and white (CBS, NBC, and the upstart ABC).

Pal Joey
, 1957 film. Joey Evans (Frank Sinatra) and Vera Simpson (Rita Hayworth) take the gloves off.

In any event, Vera, the flagrant adulteress in the stage version, is now a rich widower, and Joey, the heartless philanderer, at the end of the film marries the innocent Linda English instead of walking offstage to catch a fresh “mouse.” Linda, now a show girl infatuated with Joey instead of a stenographer he happens to meet in front of a pet shop, agrees to do a strip number, but in the end the uncharacteristically gallant Joey does not let her go through with it and does not take advantage of her sexually off-camera. Making Vera a
former
stripper sets up an opportunity to have her sing “Zip”
to raise money for a charity. Onstage the song was delivered by the newspaper reporter Melba, who uses the song to describe her interview with the famous Gypsy Rose Lee, in which the surprisingly intellectual stripper shared her musings (including her considered opinion that the philosopher Schopenhauer was right) while zipping off her clothes. The seedy world of blackmailers, strippers, and other low-life characters is now replaced by likable show people and a likable ex-stripper socialite.

Placing Frank Sinatra in the title role removed the dancing component associated with the role first played by Gene Kelly and in the revival by Harold Lang. The non-singing and for the most part non-dancing Kim Novak played Linda English. Novak, then at the peak of her popularity—one year before she starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Vertigo
—and a major money earner for Columbia pictures, gained additional national exposure when she appeared on the July 29 cover of
Time
magazine shortly before the release of
Pal Joey
in September. Perhaps due to the star power of Sinatra and Novak, the film earned nearly five million dollars, one of the ten highest grossing films of the year.

Appealing to a slightly older film audience, the role of Vera Simpson was played by one of the most popular World War II pinups and the major Columbia pictures star of the 1940s, Rita Hayworth. Hayworth herself had been featured on both
Time
and
Life
covers in 1941, the latter in one of the most famous photographs of the era (her image even appeared on an atomic nuclear bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll shortly after World War II). In 1957, she was a mature but still beautiful woman at thirty-nine and appropriate in her new role as the older woman. “Zip” gave Hayworth the opportunity to sing a suggestive but refined strip number without taking off more than her gloves. Its referential gesture to her similar glove-strip in
Gilda
would be familiar to anyone who had seen both films.
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Unfortunately, Hayworth, the first of an exclusive group to have partnered with both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, only dances a little with Sinatra here.

Not only is the Columbia 1957
Pal Joey
bowdlerized, with little remaining from Frank O’Hara’s lively dialogue. It also plays havoc with the score. Nearly every song is either missing, buried in underscoring, or placed in a new and misleading context. Songs retained include the following:

• “That Terrific Rainbow,” originally sung by the main showgirl Gladys and now with Novak as Linda dubbed by Trudi Erwin (about 5 minutes into the film).

• “A Great Big Town” (or “Chicago”) for the showgirls, but only lasting a few seconds (about 9 minutes into the film). On Broadway, Joey sang this song as an audition number to open
the show and the girls reprised the song at the opening of the actual nightclub act, which featured “That Terrific Rainbow.” Since the milieu was changed to San Francisco, the few preserved lyrics did not reveal the earlier town’s identity.

• “Zip” for Vera (Hayworth) once known as “Vanessa the undressa” (dubbed by Jo Ann Greer about 15 minutes into the film). As noted earlier, in the stage version the song is delivered by newspaper reporter Melba Snyder in act II.

• “I Could Write a Book” (about 25 minutes into the film). In the stage version, this was the song Joey sang to Linda English after spinning his yarn about the dog that was killed when Joey was young. Onstage, the fictitious childhood dog was named Skippy; in the film, the dog’s name is Snuffy and their stories are similar. Onstage, Skippy stays in the pet store, but in the film Snuffy remains a continuous presence. Much later, about seventy minutes into the film, the song returns as a waltz which sets up Linda’s striptease (stopped by Joey before it gets out of hand long before Linda runs out of clothes to discard).
²⁹

• “Bewitched” (about 48 minutes into the film). The staged context is changed in the film from a tailor shop where Vera is outfitting Joey in style to Vera’s boudoir. This occurs not long, we infer, after Vera and Joey have finished the early rounds of their non-adulterous and monogamous love making. As a way to stem the shock of moving from speech to song, Vera speaks rather than sings the lyrics of the opening verse before, again dubbed by Erwin, she sings the next part of the verse and the chorus (she also spoke the verse of “Zip”). Some of the less provocative lyrics she sings are not by Hart.

• “Pal Joey” (“What Do I Care for a Dame?”). Onstage Joey dreams of his new club at the end of act I; in the film the dream sequence, which will soon depict Vera and Linda along with the music of “Bewitched,” occurs in the last four minutes of the film (at about 83 minutes).
³⁰

Of these five songs and one fragment, which occasionally recur as underscoring, only one song is delivered by its rightful character (“Pal Joey”) and only one song (“That Terrific Rainbow”) shares a context familiar from the stage version. Other fragments of other songs from the great original
Pal Joey
score appear as fragments, ironically as if to remind those who know the score
well of what they are missing. These include “Do It the Hard Way” at the beginning of the film, a brief orchestral statement of “Happy Hunting Horn” (about 27 minutes and again 54 minutes into the film), orchestral underscoring of “Plant You Now, Dig You Later” (at about 31 minutes), and “You Mustn’t Kick It Around” for the orchestra (at 60 minutes). Spaced out during the film to round out the decimated score are a small collection of hit Rodgers and Hart songs, one from
One Your Toes
and two from
Babes in Arms
.

• “There’s a Small Hotel,” Joey (Sinatra) (
On Your Toes
, 1936) (11 minutes into the film)

• “The Lady Is a Tramp,” Joey, dancing with Vera (Hayworth) (
Babes in Arms
, 1937) (41 minutes); a brief reprise returns late in the film (73 minutes)

• “My Funny Valentine,” Linda’s strip number (Novak) (
Babes in Arms
) (56 minutes into the film); a shorter version is reprised by Joey on a sofa a few minutes later (61 minutes)

With the addition of “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “My Funny Valentine” in their new homes, the least that can be said of
Pal Joey
as a film adaptation is that it included one more song from
Babes in Arms
than the 1939 film adaptation of this earlier, equally song-studded and richly crafted Broadway 1937 score. It’s a sad commentary on the gulf between the creative worlds of Broadway and Hollywood in the 1950s that such a potentially golden era of film musicals is instead tombstoned with many might-have-beens. Happily, when the Golden Age of song was long past, in such television dramas and movies as Dennis Potter’s
Pennies from Heaven
(BBC, 1978) and
The Singing Detective
(BBC, 1986), or Woody Allen’s original film musical
Everyone Says I Love You
(Miramax, 1997)—and also prominently in most of Allen’s richly musical comedy soundtracks from
Manhattan
’s Gershwin tribute to
Radio Days
and
Bullets over Broadway
—filmmakers returned to ancient Broadway melodies for inspiration and sometimes musically felicitous reinterpretation.

The Cradle Will Rock
(1937) inspired no Hollywood adaptations until in 1999 the left-leaning director and actor Tim Robbins gave the work considerable popular exposure in a film that used Marc Blitzstein’s title and historic opening night as a plot fulcrum. Robbins’s original script blends the making of
Cradle Will Rock
(without the
The
) with four other interweaving story lines. As the end credits roll we learn that the conversations at the Dies Committee Hearings in the film, which might appear to be fictional, especially the surrealistic debate about whether Christopher Marlowe was a communist, were in fact “taken directly from the Congressional Record.” Throughout the film Zelig-like parabolic fictional characters interact with historical ones. For example, a major character in one of the subplots is the newly created Tommy Crickshaw (Bill Murray), a conservative vaudeville ventriloquist angry at the arty and (to him) shockingly socialistic Federal Theatre. The character he teams up with to fight the communists, Hazel Huffman (played by Joan Cusack), was based on an actual historical figure, an anti-communist clerk employed by the WPA who testified against the Theatre for three days. Hallie Flanagan, the real-life head of the Federal Theatre played by Cherry Jones, was granted only six hours to reply to Huffman’s marathon of testimony. The film points out this imbalance. Another invented character was Aldo Silvano (John Turturro), an Italian American who opposed Mussolini’s fascist regime and is consequently kicked out of his parents’ apartment where he is living with his wife and family. Casting Silvano as the principled Larry Foreman thus made an effective connection between life and art within the complex plot world of the film.
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Cradle Will Rock
, 1999 film. Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria at the piano) is surprised to see Olive Stanton (Emily Watson) standing up from the audience to sing the Moll’s song on opening night.