A Thoroughly Pre-Modern Mary

On January 25, 2017, Mary Tyler Moore passed away at the age of 80. In both of her unforgettable TV roles, as adorable housewife Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show and as self-sufficient “woman on her own” Mary Richards on her eponymous Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore radiated a persona of cheerfulness, optimism and determination despite a personal life with more than its share of challenges, including a lifetime managing Type 1 diabetes, a bout with alcoholism and the loss of a child. Small wonder we’ve loved Mary for more than 50 years—she truly was an all-American girl next door with “spunk,” as Lou Grant would say.

The 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie was Mary’s big-screen debut, after more than a decade of television work culminating in a five-year run with Dick Van Dyke. After Laura Petrie and before Mary Richards, Mary Tyler Moore seemed to be struggling to find a new career direction. During this awkward in-between period, she starred as Holly Golightly in a disastrous Broadway production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s opposite Richard Chamberlain, and even did a stint as leading lady to Elvis Presley in his last scripted film Change of Habit (she played a nun and he played a doctor, famously if not believably!).

Julie Andrews as Millie Dillmount: "The happiest star of all!"

Accepting a costarring role opposite Julie Andrews in a movie musical, playing a naive and virginal young woman of the 1920s, seemed to suit her squeaky-clean, girl next door image. (Born-again virgins must have been all the rage in the mid-1960s, with Doris Day handing her crown as the #1 Box Office Star over to everyone’s favorite nanny Julie Andrews who, incredibly, had played a beloved governess in not just one but two iconic blockbuster movies back to back.)

Thoroughly Modern Millie itself is something of an acquired taste if you’re not an aficionado of gay camp, but if you are, this one is a gem. The plot is silly and outlandish (and very politically incorrect), and the music is quaint and old-fashioned (indeed, many of the tunes were real 1920s hits, like “Jazz Baby” and “Baby Face”). Produced by the legendary Ross Hunter (Pillow Talk, Midnight Lace, Madame X), the production design is lavish and over the top, but its great cast is what makes this movie such good fun.  

Mary Tyler Moore as Dorothy Brown: "It's Miss Dorothy..."

With her clear-as-a-bell soprano (with its fabled four-octave range) and briskly efficient vitality, the brassy Dame Julie dominates the proceedings in the title role of Millie Dillmount, but generously shares the spotlight with her costar Moore, who plays the sweet and guileless Miss Dorothy Brown. (Next to the mannish, short-haired Andrews, the lovely Mary appears even more vulnerable and feminine.) Julie and Mary have good chemistry, especially in the scenes where they must tap dance together to keep the old elevator running in the Priscilla Hotel for Young Ladies where they both live.

Beatrice Lillie as Mrs. Meers: "So sad to be all alone in the world..."

A large part of the farcical plot, dealing with a Chinese white slavery ring that spirits away young women who are “all alone in the world,” is patently offensive today. In 1967, it was still socially acceptable to describe Asians as Orientals and paint them as suspicious, mysterious and “inscrutable” characters. In 2002, the film was adapted into a semi-successful Broadway musical, keeping the “Oriental” plotline.

As Mrs. Meers, the Chinese proprietress of the Priscilla Hotel (not to mention a human trafficking organization on  the side), rushing around in a kimono and high black wig adorned with chopsticks, British stage star Beatrice Lillie makes a wacky villainness indeed. But if you can get past the racial implications, Lillie’s expert clowning, deadpan delivery and unerring comic timing are nevertheless a marvel to behold, and the comedienne neatly steals every scene in which she appears. But there’s no way around the discomfort of watching the cringe-worthy stereotypes that Asian actors Jack Soo (Barney Miller) and Pat Morita (Happy Days, The Karate Kid) are forced to play here.

Carol Channing as Muzzy Van Hossmere: "Raspberries!"

If Miss Lillie were not enough to delight fans of camp styling, the film also stars the legendary Carol Channing as a freewheeling bon vivant named Muzzy Van Hossmere—looking like a glittering diamond-and-sequin studded Muppet, braying, croaking and lisping her way into an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress!  Having lost her iconic stage roles of Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly on film to Marilyn Monroe and Barbra Streisand, respectively, the character of Muzzy is basically a composite of Dolly and Lorelei and allowed Channing the opportunity to emblazon her uniquely zany charisma onto celluloid for posterity.

The cast is rounded out by the square-jawed John Gavin (Psycho, Imitation of Life, and a Ross Hunter favorite) who spoofs his own image as a handsome but wooden leading man, and British actor James Fox (The Servant, Remains of the Day) who dances well and sings with a perfect American accent, leading the slap-happy “Tapioca” number with vigorous, goofy charm. (Gavin, now in his mid 80s, went on to serve as Ambassador to Mexico under Ronald Reagan, and Fox has continued to work steadily in films and television well into his late 70s.) 

Dorothy and Millie with "Silly Boy" Jimmy (James Fox)

Miss Dorothy and her love interest Trevor Graydon (John Gavin)

"Tapioca, everybody!"

Old-fashioned musicals like this enjoyed their last gasp of popularity in the mid-1960s, with My Fair Lady named Best Picture of 1964. 1965’s The Sound of Music also won the Best Picture Oscar and occupied the spot of top moneymaking film of all time until Jaws and Star Wars supplanted it a decade later. (Millie, directed by George Roy Hill, garnered seven Oscar nods, including Miss Channing's; it won the award for Best Musical Score.)

But Millie, though the 10th highest grossing movie of that year, was the harbinger of the death of the Hollywood musical. The next year, Julie Andrews herself would tumble from her box office perch with the disastrous Gertrude Lawrence bio-musical  Star!, and Rex Harrison’s Dr. Doolitle would also prove an ignominious failure. Paint Your Wagon flopped miserably, and even Hello, Dolly starring Streisand and helmed by Gene Kelly, did not meet box office expectations. Yes, Oliver! did win the Best Picture Oscar in 1968 in a mediocre film adaptation that beat out the likes of the groundbreaking Rosemary’s Baby and Planet of the Apes, but the Academy then as now was slow to move with the times.

Mary and Julie in rehearsal

But appearing in a movie musical seemed just the ticket for Mary Tyler Moore, who had first come to prominence as a dancer on live TV commercials (as the spritely and aptly named Happy Hotpoint for the home appliance manufacturer), and had held her own in musical interludes with costar Dick Van Dyke (who, of course, also partnered brilliantly with Julie in Mary Poppins). Though Miss Mary sings nary a note in this film (maybe that’s one reason why her Breakfast at Tiffany’s was such a disaster?) she is obviously having a ball in Millie’s spirited “Tapioca” and “Le Chaim” dance numbers.

After the MTM show left the airwaves in 1977, Moore’s greatest film triumph was playing against type as high-strung midwestern mother who loses a child in Robert Redford’s directorial debut Ordinary People, for which she earned her only Best Actress Oscar nomination. But she retained a passion for song and dance, and in the late 1970s even hosted a short-lived musical variety show (with a cast of regulars that included, incredibly, Michael Keaton and David Letterman). In the 1982 film Six Weeks, she played a former dancer and showed off her balletic prowess and always-lithe figure.

Moore, Gavin, Andrews, Fox, Channing and Lillie

In Thoroughly Modern Millie, Mary acquits herself beautifully in the role of Miss Dorothy, proving herself a versatile entertainer and gifted comic actress. (She did after all learn the art of comedy from masters like Van Dyke and Carl Reiner). It’s a lark to see Mary having so much fun, doing what she loved to do, frolicking with a talented ensemble cast, in a soufflé-light film that has become a camp classic.

To Sirk with Love

I consider Douglas Sirk one of the great auteurs of classic 1950s cinema, because all his films bear an indelible stamp: A Sirk film always presents a glamorized and superbly heightened reality, a story teeming with passion and drama, building to a grand crescendo. Emotions are sensationalized, sentimentalized and romanticized, and clothed in widescreen technicolor splendor, with lavish sets and costumes, sweeping music and of course, bigger-than-life and too-beautiful-to-believe stars. Sirk made many a great picture using this formula, most notably All That Heaven Allows and Written On The Wind, but his masterpiece of cinematic artifice is most definitely Imitation of Life (1959).

The classic tale of the bond between two single mothers, one black and one white, had been filmed successfully before, in 1934 with Claudette Colbert, so the 1959 version had to be bigger and better. Here, producer Ross Hunter (Pillow Talk, Backstreet, Madame X)  enabled Douglas Sirk’s opulent aesthetic vision with a generous budget and full creative control.

Lana Turner as Lora Meredith

Sirk takes the title of Fannie Hurst’s old novel literally in fashioning a film that is a near-perfect imitation of real-life love, passion and dysfunction. He focuses relentlessly on the superficial and cosmetic aspects of storytelling in a style that helped define camp  as “a lie that tells the truth.” Beginning with the casting of glamorous superstar Lana Turner in the lead, opposite a square-jawed, deep-voiced John Gavin, one of the handsomest, if not theatrically gifted, actors of the 1950s, Sirk reveals his aim is far from creating a gritty slice-of-life. No, this is soap opera at its entertaining best, a film that used to be known as a tearjerker, with only a few brief nods toward reality.

Juanita Moore as Annie Johnson

John Gavin as Steve Archer

Susan Kohner as Sarah Jane

Sandra Dee as Susie

A mature, still arrestingly beautiful Lana Turner, gowned by Jean Louis and dripping in David Webb jewels, turns in a skilled, if mannered, performance as selfish actress Lora Meredith, who sacrifices both love and family for the sake of career ambition. In the early sequences, as Lora struggles financially, living in a downtown “coldwater flat” with daughter Susie, Turner adopts the long-haired 1940s coiffure that she sported in films a dozen years earlier, with close-ups lovingly photographed in ultra-soft focus. Later, her hairstyle becomes short and severe after her transformation into the toast of Broadway, an ego-driven diva still burning with ambition to conquer the silver screen. The intensity displayed by Turner’s character is a pantomime of genuine human emotion, designed to reach the back row of the theater, but nonetheless divinely, compellingly watchable. In one of the climactic mother-daughter confrontations that drive the plot of this classic “women’s picture,” a teenage Sandra Dee implores of Turner, “Oh, Mama, stop acting!” But the audience pleads silently--”No, Miss Turner, don’t stop. Please keep on chewing that scenery!”

Turner had developed a flair for this type of melodrama, having earned her only Oscar nod the previous year for Peyton Place. And of course, she was no stranger to off-screen drama and tragedy, either. Just before beginning work on this film, sordid details of Turner’s private life had been splashed across the tabloid pages after her lover Johnny Stompanato had been stabbed to death, reportedly by daughter Cheryl Crane, during a domestic dispute. The scandal boosted publicity for Imitation of Life (with its eerily paralllel mother-daughter plot angles) making it one of the top grossers of 1959.

But beneath the veneer of melodrama and flamboyant production values is a storyline with a soupçon of substance, dealing head-on with one of the chief issues of the time...racial injustice and prejudice. Juanita Moore’s touching and understated performance as Annie Johnson strikes the film’s sole note of reality (erasing the offensive image of Louise Beavers as the Aunt Jemima-like pancake lady in the original 1934 version). Amid the bombast of practically every other performance, Moore quietly underplays, modulating her voice to a soothing whisper as she selflessly looks after everyone but herself, offering comfort and wisdom but suffering silently.

Susan Kohner (better known today as the mom of filmmaking brothers Chris and Paul Weitz of American Pie fame) is much more showy in her role Annie’s rebellious fair-skinned daughter, tortured and embittered by a life of always staying “in the back.” Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations went to both Moore and Kohner for their very different approaches to the material.

But even the racial angle of the story is not immune to Douglas Sirk’s ostentatious, presentational style. Kohner’s Sarah Jane works in “low-down dirty dives” and morally corrupt nightclubs, even lip-synching a song with a highly sexual double entendre, likening an empty purse to a feature of the female anatomy and imploring the sleazy crowd to “fill what is empty.”   Earlier, a young Troy Donahue beats the hell out of Kohner’s character in a startlingly violent and over-the-top manner after asking, “Is it true...is your mother a n****r?”

And the final funeral sequence is pure fantasy, with four white horses, a New Orleans blues band and of course, the iconic Mahalia Jackson singing “Trouble of the World.” (Look for an homage to this sequence in Mike Nichols’s brilliant film of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.) Of course, here is where Sirk gives Miss Kohner the opportunity to throw herself over the coffin of her dead mother and beg for forgiveness, something we in real life very rarely do. But it is a surprisingly effective catharsis...if you are in the right mood, you will cry right along with mourners Susan, Lana, John and Sandra. I know I always do.

Imitation of Life is an artfully constructed and captivating film that’s a feast for the senses and emotions, presented by a masterful auteur. It provides a glorious opportunity to while away a lazy afternoon with a pint of Haagen Dazs, and escape your own real-life “troubles of the world,” knowing that even the rich and beautiful have issues, too, though in Douglas Sirk’s world, they do their suffering in in mink.