Brute Force with Ann Blyth and Burt Lancaster

Brute Force (1946), a powerful prison drama starring Burt Lancaster as the inmate planning a daring escape to reach his love, Ann Blyth, in time airs today on Turner Classic Movies, 3 p.m. ET.  From my book, Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.:

Ann is at first asleep, then he wakes her, and in their tender scene shows us that Lancaster is tired of running, that this will be his last job, and then he will come back to her for good.  He tells her that when he met her, he was a guy who “found the first important thing in his life.”  She doesn’t know what racket he’s in, but she senses he is troubled.  She wants to help him, wishes she weren’t sick so that she could help him.

“There are all kinds of sick people, Ruth.  Maybe we could help each other.”  The scene is gentle, affectionate, somewhat sad.  Ann’s character is not a gun moll; she’s a sweet, decent girl who trusts him.  This is important because it bolsters the visual image we already have of Burt Lancaster in the film as more a wounded animal than a psychopath.  

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Ann and Farley Granger on the beach - OUR VERY OWN

Ann Blyth and Farley Granger share a quiet moment at the beach in OUR VERY OWN (1950).  The pleasant scene is a hopeful reminder to those of us looking forward to summer.  We currently find ourselves in the midst of graduation season, and this film also evokes the momentous occasion of high school graduation, not only for the senior class on the threshold of adulthood, but for their families experiencing ever-changing dynamics.

The heartwarming comedy quickly shifts to a tense drama as a rift in the family occurs and Ann's character is told by a vengeful sister that she was adopted.  Ann's search for her "real" parents and her re-discovery of only family she's ever known is a thoughtful and reflective slice of life.  From my book, Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.:

Our Very Own (1950) is like opening up a time capsule and seeing the world as it was in a year that began a new decade, that oddly seems at once to look ahead bearing unconscious predictions—and, also, to take a brief glance over the shoulder at a world that was about to be relegated to memory and family snapshots.  This film is about a teenager who discovers she was adopted, but it is not about adoption.  It is about belonging, about losing one’s identity and finding one’s place in the new thing called the nuclear family, which would play such an important part of our national identity in the 1950s and ‘60s.  

Our Very Own - 1950 - production still

Ann Blyth gives the evil eye to sister Joan Evans in the above production still of Our Very Own (1950).  Farley Granger plays her boyfriend, and young Martin Milner is a hoot as he pursues Joan (more interested in the food on the buffet table here).  That's Donald Cook in the background as the girls' concerned dad.

From my book, Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.:

Ann Blyth, with top billing here, stars as the teen who discovers she was adopted, and that her adoption has been treated like a family secret.  Unlike some of the other troubled young women she had played up to this time in such films as Mildred Pierce (1945), Swell Guy (1946), and A Woman’s Vengeance (1948), she’s a good girl here, a model daughter, poised, mature, far less mercurial than those other girls, and her strong sense of self is almost a metaphor for her confident and comfortable post-war world—that will be shaken to the core by something so small as a birth certificate.   

For more on Our Very Own, have a look here at this post on my Another Old Movie Blog.
http://anotheroldmovieblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/our-very-own-1950.html

Happy St. Patrick's Day with Ann Blyth and Bing Crosby

We celebrate upcoming St. Patrick's Day with Ann Blyth and Bing Crosby in Top o' the Morning (1949).  As noted in my book, Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.:

Bing Crosby remarked of Ann in a Modern Screen article:

“She looks so small and fragile, but she’s got an awful lot of drive.  There’s nothing in Hollywood that’s going to stop this kid.”

For more on Top o' the Morning, have a look at this post on my Another Old Movie Blog.  I'll leave you today with a foot-stomping scene from the movie and the song "The Donovans."  Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Chip Off the Old Block

Ann Blyth is about 15 years old here in her first movie, Chip Off the Old Block, which was released in February 1944.  Ernest Truex is on the left, and Helen Hinson, center, played her mother.  In this Universal musical, Ann is the third generation of actresses in her family.  Donald O'Connor is her persistent beau and first co-star.  From my book on Ann's career: Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.:


Our introduction to Ann Blyth is on a train.  Donald sits apart from her, doing eye exercises for his lousy vision, and she misinterprets it as somewhat grotesque flirting.  After a spat and reconciliation, they are cozily ensconced on the rear train observation platform (a much-used movie setting for tête-à-têtes) and sing a duet “It’s Mighty Nice.”  Her voice is a pleasing soprano, but nowhere near the range, control and richness she developed with more training by the next decade... 

Sally and Saint Anne

Ann Blyth ages from 12 years old to eighteen in Sally and Saint Anne (1952), but she was really 23 at the time.  A charming and funny coming of age story where a spunky young Catholic school student first picks a fight with a statue of St. Anne, and then develops a warm and chummy relationship with her saintly patroness, the movie is filled with daffy characters and nutty shenanigans.  One particularly absurd scene I like: when their house is being moved across town to a new location, the family innocently stays inside it as it's rolling along.  Ann, coming home from a late-night date, has to run to catch up with it.

Pictured along with Ann in the photo above are Kathleen Hughes as the senior class snob, and Gregg Palmer (aka Palmer Lee) as the local heartthrob.  Edmund Gwenn plays her irascible grandpa, patriarch of her crazy family.  From my book Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.:

Especially endearing is the exchange between Ann and Mr. Shapiro, the local grocer, played by Joe Mell.  His wife’s expecting and he desperately wants a boy this time because he’s already got three daughters.  Ann writes down his wish in her notebook.  “One boy.  Mr. Shapiro.”  He’s officially on her list of petitions to St. Anne.

He’s a jovial guy who shakes his head at her innocence.  “Why would an Irish saint go out of her way for a guy like me?” 

“Mr. Shapiro, Saint Anne was the grandmother of Jesus.”

He shrugs, “So?”

“So she isn’t Irish at all.  She’s Jewish.”

Mr. Shapiro gives her fond grins and free pickles.

Red Canyon location still

The publicity still from Red Canyon (1949) shows Ann Blyth and costar Howard Duff on location in what was Ann's first color film (even though the publicity still is black and white), and only feature western.  We discussed her work in this film on my Another Old Movie Blog:

She was 19 years old and had hit her stride.

It was a pinnacle of a kind, and the beginning of new trail.  After a string of six heavy dramas that gave her intense roles to prove herself a major up and coming actress, her last film before Red Canyon, Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, was a complete change that charmed the public and clued-in the studio that Ann was also athletic, and that her beauty was as much an asset to selling a film as her acting skill.  Her trim body, also, could lend itself to more than posing in a crisp Noir wardrobe. 

It also reminded the studio that she was young.  In those dramas, from Mildred Pierce through Another Part of the Forest, Ann’s characters were increasingly poised, knowing, sophisticated, and wore a mantle of worldly experience even though in real life she was still some years away from being old enough to vote.  Her characters were restless, mean, sad, tragic.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, because of her fanciful character and its exotic costuming, her silent communication through her expressive face, and the joyful silliness of the plot, actually managed to re-set the clock on her screen sophistication.  She was suddenly much younger again.  For the next several films she would play more innocent ingénues, most of them in comedies, and this one western...

For more, head on over to this post at Another Old Movie Blog.

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Also in paperback from CreateSpace, and from my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

Slander (1957) on TCM

Marjorie Rambeau appears with Ann Blyth in the above movie still photo from Slander (1957).  Turner Classic Movies is showing it today at 6:30 p.m. Eastern.

Van Johnson co-stars as Ann's husband, a performer on a child's TV show who has a checkered past, and is blackmailed by a scandal magazine to rat on another celebrity, to protect himself.  A very timely and controversial subject in the 1950s, when scandal mags were first hitting Hollywood.  Careers and lives were destroyed.  Van Johnson and Ann Blyth have to make some hard choices, and suffer monstrous consequences.  Steve Cochran plays the magazine publisher who calls all the shots.

You can read more about Slander here at my Another Old Movie Blog.  Don't forget to tune in to TCM this afternoon!

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Katie Did It (1951) - on YouTube

Katie Did It (1951) is a charming movie in which Ann Blyth, who was known for not doing cheesecake photos, plays a prim New England librarian who poses in a swimsuit for a New York commercial artist because she needs to pay her uncle’s gambling debts to keep gangsters from visiting him.

Cecil Kellaway plays her roguish uncle, and we don’t want him to get his legs broken, either.

Mark Stevens plays her prince charming, here with Ann and Cecil Kellaway in the above lobby card for the movie.

This film was the last movie I was able to obtain when researching my book on Ann Blyth’s career, and for a long, nail-biting, while, I thought I’d never find it.  As with many of Ann Blyth’s films, this one is not on DVD, or VHS, and is not shown on Turner Classic Movies.  Press time was fast approaching, and my year-and-a-half-long hunt came up empty.

Then, with dumb luck, a friend saw a copy for sale on eBay—someone’s home-recorded version—and nabbed it for me.  It’s not a great print, but at last I could fill in the blank in my book.

Wouldn’t you know it? NOW it’s on YouTube.

Someone recently posted this sweet movie, here at this link.  Now you can enjoy Katie Did It, but things have a way of disappearing off YouTube, so catch it while you can.  Below, a still shot that was published in Movie Life magazine of the model and the artist getting to know each other.

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

The Helen Morgan Story on TCM

Just a reminder that The Helen Morgan Story (1957), the last motion picture in which Ann Blyth appeared, will be aired tomorrow, Tuesday, January 26th at noon Eastern Time on Turner Classic Movies.  Ann starred as the 1920s torch singer Helen Morgan.  More on the movie here at this post on my Another Old Movie Blog, and in Chapter 37 of my book, Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.

Ann's co-star in this movie is Paul Newman.  The movie is shown as part of a series of Paul Newman films during the day.