Two memorable actors were in the obituary page of the New York Times today. The greats, they are passing on...

Firstly, Jack Palance died yesterday. One of my favorite performances of his was as the Mexican bandit chieftain in The Professionals (1966), with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Claudia Cardinale. Another goodie was his villainous turn in 1952's Sudden Fear with Joan Crawford, where he played her murderous husband. I recently saw for the first time his intense performance as a tormented, doomed bullfighter on the Playhouse 90 tv drama from the late 50s, The Death of Manolete. You see why these supposedly "old" actors never really seem old to me? They did so much work that they're always new--there's always something you haven't seen that you can now get on a DVD.

The other performer who just passed away was Marian Marsh. Less well-known than Palance, but memorable in her own way. A sexy blonde with a doll-like face, she worked mostly during the 30s and early 40s. She co-starred with John Barrymore in Svengali, but I enjoyed even more her turn as a secretary in the racy 1932 comedy Beauty and the Boss, with the suave Warren William. This comedy was made "pre-Code," which was before Hollywood's censors clamped down on the honest depiction of sexual relationships and dialogue. Marsh lived to be 93, and became involved with conservation work.

Below, I've included a link to a site called "Movie Maidens" so you can see some pix of her, both photos and magazine covers from the 30s. Just scroll down to Marsh's name and click for her page. Enjoy!

MovieMaidens

Last night, after briefly stopping by the Hawaiian Tropic Zone restaurant in Times Square for a beer, and to watch the sarong-clad waitresses participate in the dinner hour beauty pageant, I went home to eat a bologna sandwich and watch Portrait of a Mobster (1961), which a friend recorded off cable tv.

The late Vic Morrow was tops in the lead role of Dutch Schultz, the Prohibition gangster whose “anger management issues” (as we would say in today’s jargon) eventually did him in with his ruthless cohorts and competitors. The late Ray Danton, he of the cosmically deep voice, brilliantined black hair, and suavely sardonic grin, also memorably did a cameo in the film as another legendary Prohibition kingpin, Jack “Legs” Diamond.

The late Leslie Parrish, a luscious starlet of the 60s whose face could look both innocent and witch-like, played Dutch Schultz’s moll, named “Iris Murphy.” (I love that name. It just sounds so hot to me.) In classic cinematic fashion, Iris becomes a lush when she realizes the moll lifestyle is not all that it’s cracked up to be...especially when she discovers a very dirty secret about Dutch: that he was the snake who gunned down her own bootlegger father! (I’m not giving anything away. The murder happens in the beginning of the picture.)

Morrow did a lot of cool stuff with his role, little gestures and tones of voice that made the character probably a lot more vivid than it originally was in the somewhat prosaic lines of the script.

This was one of a slew of black-and-white gangster films that were made in the late 50s, early 60s, ostensibly about the lives of famous thugs--but the screenplays took considerable liberties with the truth, and the actors playing the gangsters were usually much more handsome than the originals! At least Vic Morrow had more of the rough-hewn quality of the real Schultz than, say, the extremely studly David Janssen exhibited when he played the short and stout and balding master gambler Arnold Rothstein in The King of the Roaring Twenties (1961).

You’d be surprised at the actors who were good at playing gangsters. One was Boris Karloff of Frankenstein fame. In spite of his slight lisp and British accent, he could make a threatening thug. Whether as a shifty nightclub owner in Night World (1932) or a scarfaced, toothpick-chewing mob boss in Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (1947), Boris knew his way around a gat. And of course, his Edmund Bateman in The Raven (1935) "shot his way out of San Quentin!" And did some nasty stuff with a blowtorch...

Someday someone should make a computer-generated collage film that edits together clips of an army of classic movie gangsters to wreak mayhem on each other, everybody from Karloff to Bogart to Cagney to Garfield to Cochran to Conte to Morrow to Danton to Brando to DeNiro to Pacino and to, yes, even the absurdly handsome David Janssen not trying to act short, stout and balding as Arnold Rothstein.

They could all machine gun each other, and mistreat their molls.

And at the end, they could bring in David Caruso from CSI: Miami to tell everybody that their DNA is on file.

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A footnote: most everybody knows that "gat" is old-time slang for gun, but Portrait of a Mobster taught me a whole new word. Legs Diamond asks Dutch Schultz to hand over his "biscuit" when Schultz threatens to rub out someone he's not authorized to kill. I wonder if this is real gangster slang of the time, or just something that Danton was able to make credible with that great voice of his. I gotta tell you, it still sounded a little weird: "Hand over your biscuit." Huh?

After yesterday's rain, the sunshine was a blessed relief today. I had to do an interview with a fellow for a freelance project I'm working on, and so I took a walk through Times Square to his office. The neighborhood was crowded with people who were obviously enjoying the warm Indian summer as much as I was. Before I met with my interviewee, I had a cup of coffee in a cafe around the corner and treated myself to something called a "chocolate almond horn," a very delicious pastry indeed.

I met with this gentleman in his office high in a skyscraper. What made the location of the building ironic for me personally was the fact it was on 45th near Sixth Avenue--a street which, when I first moved to New York, was lined with the first stripclubs I ever went to. On today's sanitized 45th Street, there are no traces of such venues, but I can still remember where they used to stand...the Club 45 was the furthest west and closest to Broadway (a short scene in the classic movie Midnight Cowboy was filmed there--the joint is recognizable by the zodiac signs above the bar); the Carnival was next (and there toiled some of the most aggressive and hardbitten strippers I ever met--they wouldn't graciously take no for an answer when hustling drinks); continuing eastward on 45th was the Peppermint Lounge in the old Knickerbocker Hotel (the dance craze the Twist was invented here before the Peppermint became a topless joint; but by the time I moved to New York the club featured bare-breasted girls dancing in little cages on the bar); and finally closest to Sixth Avenue was The Turntable, which had a remarkably long bar. Near the center of the block stood a "hot sheet hotel" for use by the various streetwalkers in the area; now, judging from its renovated look, the place is a chic "boutique" hostelry.

The skyscraper where I had my appointment today stands on approximately on the same patch of ground where The Turntable was located. I spent some pleasant hours in The Turntable back in 1973 or 1974, when the simple act of sitting in a bar and watching girls dance with their breasts out seemed like an extraordinary thing for a serious and scholarly young lad to do, especially in the middle of the afternoon, when the sin felt truly the sweetest...

There used to be a massage parlor across the street, too, which I think was called the Lucky Lady...and it was something like $10 or $15 a rubdown...which, however, was the equivalent of $30 or $40 now. Still, cheap at the price.

Ah, New York in the 70s...it could be hell, but it was also a really fun town...

I had to show identification and take a security photo to get a special badge to go up in the building for my appointment, and I inadvertently scrunched my lips as the camera took my picture. My face photographed like that of a toothless denizen of old Times Square, like a go-fer for a stripper's agent who worked for a bottle of rum and a place to sleep it off. Or maybe this photo showed, in the fashion of Dorian Gray's portrait, the inner Sir Cranky, dissipated into premature senility by his happily sleazy memories of 45th Street back in the day...

But by the time I got upstairs, I was back to my youthful middle age, and the interview went very well.

Weather-wise, today has to be one of the most incomparably dreary days in recent memory. Although it is not cold, it has not stopped raining since 6 a.m., when I woke up, and the rain is often hard. I can hear the relentless tap-tap on my windows, and the damp endless rolling of tires on the street. I could go out, but it seems pointless to get drenched since I have nothing urgent to do. We all know how effective umbrellas are.

By the way, who invented the umbrella? Claus von Umbrella? I guess this is a job for Wikipedia...

Save it for later, Cranky.

It was indeed a perfect day to get my bathroom fixture replaced, so now I have softer fluorescent light instead of the old fixture's eight pricey and unusually sized incandescent bulbs (which were damn hard to screw in too).

I can now stare at myself in a fluorescent glow and see my fleshy, cranky hairiness in a new and more revelatory way. Much more humbling.

I swear, at my first glance at myself naked in the new light just a little while ago, I thought I almost looked like one of those grinning satyrs who used to chase voluptuous nymphs in the old Playboy cartoons--except that I don't have a pointy beard or hooves.

Those mythologically-themed cartoons were funny. I believe they were drawn by Eldon Dedini--who died recently. People always sneer when you tell them you read Playboy for the articles and cartoons as well as to look at the nudie pictures, but in my case it was definitely true. In fact, I learned a lot about writing from reading Playboy, since in their heyday (which coincided with the years when I was a very impressionable adolescent) they featured some of the finest writers in the world. Once I became bar mitzvahed in 1964 (age thirteen) my father allowed me to freely look at Playboy. "Today you are a man...and a Playboy reader." He didn't actually say that, but I think it went through my head...

You see what happens when I get cabin fever during a rainy day? I retreat into the past.

I avidly read Playboy stories back then by a writer named Pietro di Donato (1911-1992), and as I recall they were frequently about the seduction of young men by slightly older, earthy yet worldly-wise, beautiful Italian women. I absolutely loved those tales, and anxiously scoured the table of contents whenever I got my hands on an new issue to see if there was another gem from di Donato.

Only years later did I learn that di Donato had also written a famous and very serious realistic 1939 novel about Italian immigrants in America called Christ in Concrete, which was quite different from his saucy short stories.

Also many years later, I found a copy of one of his Playboy stories and re-read it. I was startled to see how much my own romantic-erotic view of women may have been influenced by his storytelling...or perhaps as a teenager I had discovered in his stories a kindred spirit which expressed feelings and attitudes I already had.

And in some dream dimension, perhaps I will awaken as a lad of eighteen again, to be gloriously bedded and initiated into the mysteries of eros by a voluptuous signora of about twenty-eight, with the dimensions of, say, Gina Lollobrigida...

Hmm, I think I'll have lasagna tonight.

Last night I finished watching a couple of the movies I started over the weekend. The Vampire (1957) aka El Vampiro, was a Mexican flick set on a decaying hacienda complete with a Hungarian bloodsucker named Count Duval. It was fun, not particularly scary, although it had a couple of spooky moments with a long-haired lady running around the hacienda with a large crucifix as she tries to save her foxy niece from Count Duval's rather long fangs. Duval was played by German Robles, who I believe is still active in the Mexican film and tv industry.

Orchestra Wives (1942) was a musical featuring big band superstar Glenn Miller, as well as one of my fave starlets of the 40s, Mary Beth Hughes, in a small role. It was about the catty infighting of the women who follow their musician husbands on tour through early World War 2 America. The current edition of the magazine Films of the Golden Age has a long article about Orchestra Wives and lots of good pictures. You can see Harry Morgan of Dragnet and MASH fame in this film, playing a teenage soda jerk! The music is great, particularly the finale "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo." And just watching all the folks in their spiffy 40s duds was a treat...man, we've really lost something with the almost 24/7 informality of our current society.

I'm surprised I didn't dream last night of Count Duval taking a sip from the necks of the orchestra wives...a couple of them looked like they might have dug it!