The Chalk Garden (1964) – Deborah Kerr, Hayley Mills, John Mills

1964-65 was a good year for governesses. Julie Andrews accounted for two of them, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, but Deborah Kerr does very well in her own, less known, 1964 governess role in The Chalk Garden. Of course, the film is not very like Mary Poppins and Kerr’s Miss Madrigal is not very like Fraulein Maria. She has a secret. And the child she must care for, Hayley Mills, makes Julie Andrew’s charges look like haloed little saints.

The film stars Deborah Kerr, Hayley Mills – in a brief departure from her Disney films – and Hayley Mill’s father, John Mills. The film opens with Miss Madrigal (Deborah Kerr) applying for the job of governess at a large home near the coast. She has no references and no experience. However, the child she is supposed to take care of, Laurel (Hayley Mills), is a positive terror and scares away the other applicant for the job with outrageous behavior, statements, and tales of horror about governesses being eaten by sharks. But the butler, Maitland (John Mills) rather likes Miss Madrigal. She meets Laurel’s grandmother, Mrs. St. Maugham (Edith Evans), who is at first not willing to hire Miss Madrigal until she discovers that she is extremely knowledgeable about gardens. Miss Madrigal makes the observation that the reason the flowers won’t grow for Mrs. St. Maugham is because the soil, chalk, is all wrong for those particular flowers and mentions what sort of soil she would need. On a whim, and because she has been unable to keep any other governess around for long, Mrs. St. Maugham hires Miss Madrigal.

Laurel is no ordinary problem child. The reason she is living with her grandmother is that several years previously her mother Olivia, (Elizabeth Sellars) had had an affair, divorced her father and remarried. The entire series of events set off something in Laurel, who became convinced that her mother did not love her and is obsessed with the notion of her mother living in sin, a notion reinforced by her grandmother. She feels abandoned and rejected. She is also obsessed with arson, murder, crime and is a chronic liar who likes to make outrageous statements to get a reaction from people. She speaks of having a desire to burn the house down, a desire channeled by her grandmother into simply burning large bonfires. Her grandmother comments wryly to Miss Madrigal that little by little they are making it smaller. “Laurel hasn’t noticed yet. One day it won’t be there.”

Laurel is attempting to scare away the governess while Miss Madrigal, on the right, is unmoved

But Miss Madrigal sees something in Laurel. She sees something of herself when she was that age (it is amusing to try to imagine Deborah Kerr, young and wild and screaming). She sees herself as a liar, unable to appreciate that she is loved, filled with rage at the world and other people and she longs to to help Laurel.

The key, as she sees it, is to get Laurel away from her grandmother and back to her mother. It’s not that Mrs. St. Maugham is evil, but she “does not have a green thumb,” either for children or flowers, as Miss Madrigal tells her. Besides, she suspects that Mrs. St. Maugham is using Laurel to hurt Laurel’s mother, whether consciously or not.

Like Laurel, or perhaps Laurel feels this way because of her, Mrs. St. Maugham feels betrayed by her daughter. She and Olivia have a fraught relationship and the man Olivia left was the man Mrs. St. Maugham had chosen for her to marry. But Olivia desperately wants to take Laurel back with her.

But meanwhile, Miss Madrigal has to deal with Laurel, who specializes in investigating her governesses, snooping in their possessions (she can pick locks), finding out their secrets, or inventing secrets, and generally exposing them and sending them packing. Miss Madrigal is an especially interesting subject. She arrives with all new clothes, still in their wrappings, still with the tags on them. She paces the room at night. And she definitely has a secret, something definite in her past. What occurs is a kind of game of cat and mouse between Laurel and Miss Madrigal, though Miss Madrigal does not put up with half the nonsense that her grandmother does.

Edith Evans. John Mills, Haley Mills, Deborah Kerr

It partially makes me think of an English Country House murder mystery. Mostly because of the setting in a English home by the sea, the eccentric people (Mrs. St. Maugham and the butler, Maitland, who has rare privileges and feels free to make cheeky comments), and also the game of wits played out between Laurel and Miss Madrigal. Laurel is trying to find out who she really is, while Miss Madrigal deflects her inquiries and is trying to reach past Laurel’s lying and outrageous exterior to the wounded child within. Also, Maitland has a great, though healthy, interest in crime and detective stories. Ironically enough, a crime is discovered in somebody’s past, but it is not an indictment of that person and does not come as a huge surprise the the viewer, either.

Deborah Kerr does a marvelous job. She plays it both humorously – at moments she is enjoying this game of wits – but also deeply passionate, initially hidden behind her blank exterior. Ironically, she is hiding something, but must lose her secret and expose her heart to win Laurel. Hayley Mills also does a great job in a role quite different from anything she did at Disney. Underneath, there is a very vulnerable child playing games, until she realizes that she’s stumbled on something that is not a game at all.

The Chalk Garden is an adaptation of a play by Enid Bagnold and Edith Evans played Mrs. St. Maugham in the play as well as in the movie. She’s quite an interesting character, because she is not a villain, nor does she play her like a selfish harpy. She strikes me as one of those ladies who was probably a flapper in her day, witty and, as we learn, with a host of admiring men in her past, some of who she still knows (like the judge played by Felix Aylmer, who she wants to help her keep Laurel from Olivia). But she obviously does not have it in her to raise children. She is kind to Maitland, however, who has sad story in his past.

This trailer makes the film look quite melodramatic, which it is in a way, but not quite as hysterical as all that! I really enjoyed it. There is warmth and real feeling, learning to open up the heart to accept love, wry wit. Maitland, especially, has some good dialogue (he and Miss Madrigal are talking in the library when he notices that Laurel is spying on them and he closes the door, commenting “Laurel is not at her best through mahogany”), though he is not the comic relief. He is almost the heart of the film, though he does not seem to do much. He is the solid, kind presence that balances them all.

 

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

1943 – Starring Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook – Directed by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell – Screenplay by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp manages to be a little bit of everything, and what blew me away was how good each bit was and how well it hangs together. It’s about friendship, love and war, a great romance and a satire of the British military leadership, as well as a reminder that Nazism must be defeated at all costs.

It was made in 1943 by Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell and it really stands out, during a time when most movies were not particularly subtle about their patriotism. It’s not that Colonel Blimp is an unpatriotic movie, so much as it offers a far more complicated perspective on war; it was not made as a rallying cry. You can’t help but feel in this film that war is a terrible event in which sacrifices of human decency are inevitably made, not exactly a message for people who were being bombed (as the British were, at that time)…but it is a powerful human message nonetheless.

Winston Churchill did not actually want the movie released and the government refused to loan Powell and Pressburger any military equipment for their filming (Powell and Pressburger said they stole some). The reasons were the title (Colonel Blimp was a satirical cartoon that made fun of military and political leaders as reactionary buffoons) and that there was a sympathetic German character in the story (Germans are almost always portrayed as bad in movies made during WWII, no matter what time period the movie was supposed to occur, which was not the case five years earlier in films).

Theo and Clive

The movie follows the life of Clive Wynn-Candy (Livesey), from the time of the Boer War to WWI to the then-contemporary time of WWII. He first meets Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Walbrook) in a duel and the two forge a close bond, despite Theo winning the woman (Kerr) that Clive hadn’t realized he loved until it was too late. Clive and Theo reunite after WWI, when Theo is a prisoner of war, and later during WWII, after Theo’s wife has died and he is a refugee from Nazi Germany.

Clive represents the old school of war, were he assumes that everyone, including the enemy, is playing by the same gentlemanly rules that he is. He makes me think of Don Quixote, occasionally a buffoon (especially when he is older), definitely not wise to the world, but with tremendous dignity and human warmth. It’s a very human movie, with very human emotions and experiences.

Theo is the one to remind him, during WWII, when Clive is discovering that he is considered essentially useless by the government, that England cannot afford to fight the Nazis with a sense of fair play; they must be willing to use the same tactics as the Nazis.

Clive and his wife, Barbara

Despite making the case that Clive’s code of conduct and military experience are outmoded, there is a definite sense of loss of human dignity. The new war and the new enemy and new ideologies have a dehumanizing affect.

The story is also about aging and loss and it is heartbreaking to see Theo and Clive age throughout the story; by the end they have very little to offer their countries, but still face the world squarely.

Deborah Kerr is the one person who does not age in this film, because she plays three different women, all of whom are the same age. She is the English governess who writes to Clive to come to Germany and put a stop to the lies being written about England and their war with the Boers. She likes Clive, but he can’t see it and she marries Theo. Next, we see her as a nurse, serving in France during WWI, who looks exactly like the governess. Clive seeks her out and they marry; only for her to die young and in childbirth. Finally, she plays Clive’s driver, who has been assigned to chauffeur him about on his duties in home defense during WWII. As Molly Haskell says, Clive never gets over his first love of the governess and spends the remainder of his days looking for that love in other women…representative of his eternally young love.

Theo, Clive, and Clive’s chauffuer “Johnny”

There are some wonderfully striking and emotional moments in the film; for example, when Theo recounts his reasons for leaving Germany to an immigration officer and speaks of the suffering after WWI, the death of his wife, and how his sons became Nazis. It’s a scene so quiet and yet far more powerful than if we’d actually seen any of what he describes. In fact, it is notable, as Haskell points out, how the tragedy and serious events do occur off screen in this film. It’s part of the film’s power to make one feel, but still leaves room to be thoughtful.

Notes: It’s not a well known movie at all, although recently it seems to have enjoyed a surge of serious enthusiasm and appreciation and I have heard it called the Citizen Kane of Britain. Part of the reason for it’s obscurity is because it wasn’t released in America until 1947, and then only in black and white and not in it’s full length. Martin Scorsese saw it, however, and was a huge fan and proved to be instrumental in having the film restored in its full Technicolor glory and complete length.

Molly Haskell wrote an essay for the Criterion Collection’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, where she analyzes the film in more detail, discussing the attempts to ban the movie, the myriad elements of the film, from romance to critique of righteous war, how the film was rediscovered and restored, as well as a bit about the producers/writers/directors Powell and Pressburger.

Also on Criterion’s site is a video by Martin Scorsese of how the film was restored, which was especially difficult because of the three-strip Technicolor technique, which he describes briefly.

The film made Roger Ebert’s lists as one of the Great Movies and talks particularly about the aging process and the wisdom and youth of Candy.  He writes “Rarely does a film give us such a nuanced view of the whole span of a man’s life. It is said that the child is father to the man. “Colonel Blimp” makes poetry out of what the old know but the young do not guess: The man contains both the father, and the child.”

Click on arrow to see more pictures

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

 

I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story – Marni Nixon

With Stephen Cole

Part Book Review and Part Tribute to A Great Singer

I’ve often read of Marni Nixon described as “The Ghostess with the Mostest,” a phrase which came from Time magazine. It’s very appropriate; though Marni Nixon is much more than a ghost singer for famous Hollywood stars.

Though you have to admit that as a ghost singer, there’s no one quite like her. Most famously, she dubbed Audrey Hepburn’s singing voice in My Fair Lady. She also dubbed Natalie Woods (and Rita Moreno for the one song “Tonight”) in West Side Story and Deborah Kerr in both The King and I and An Affair to Remember. She was the singing voice of Grandma Fa in Mulan. When Margaret O’Brien had to sing a short Hindu song in the 1949 The Secret Garden, they got Marni Nixon (she was seventeen at the time and it was her first job dubbing for anyone). She was all three geese who sing during the chalk picture interlude “Jolly Holiday” in Mary Poppins. And if you happen to notice that Marilyn Monroe hits some unusually lovely high notes in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that is because those notes belonged to Nixon.

Marni Nixon, singing a trio with herself in Mary Poppins

Marni Nixon was not a huge star, like Julie Andrews, but it was fascinating to read her autobiography I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story (2006). She seems to have done nearly everything there is to do in musical entertainment (and even non-musical entertainment) and there’s scarcely a medium she didn’t try (stage, film, radio, television, recordings; she was a dialect coach and teacher), and in the process she encountered many diverse people. It’s a wonderful look at the performance world: the stars, the composers, the music directors, the actors, the directors, agents, musicians, the writers. One comes away from the book with a wonderful sense what a lifetime of work is like – not as abstract art or glamorous jobs – but what it really means, in all its glamorous and un-glamours aspects to

She is quite honest and open in her book, about her personal life (like her nineteen year marriage to the composer Ernest Gold, who wrote the scores for Exodus and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World), her choices, her disappointments and her successes and triumphs. She started young, as a child. While participating in choral works, concerts and shows, she also worked as an extra in movies, such as The Grapes of Wrath, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, In the Good Old Summertime.

As an adult she did everything from working with Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein to recording television jingles. She sang in operas, did a tour with Victor Borge ( pianist and comedian) and with Liberace in Las Vegas. She did musicals, playing the role of Eliza Doolittle and Anna Leonowens on stage. She had a solo career and recorded several albums (for example, Disney asked her to record an album of the songs from Mary Poppins) and also appeared on the radio. Also, look for her, in person, as Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music.

She had a beautiful soprano voice; very clear and bright, and she had perfect pitch, even as a child. Conductors would tell her to sing an A and would tune according to that. She could sight read nearly any piece of music, including difficult modern composers like Arnold Schoenberg, and this ability led her into circles where she met and recorded for Igor Stravinsky.

Of course, it’s for her ghosting that she is most remembered and nowhere is there a better example than in The King and I. Unlike with Natalie Wood and Audrey Hepburn, who both desperately wanted to sing on their own and took lessons while preparing to film (though studio heads were ultimately unwilling to allow them to sing) Deborah Kerr knew that she could not sing the role of Anna Leonowens.

She and Marni Nixon worked very closely together to blend their sound. Marni Nixon would shadow Deborah Kerr while she was blocking out how each song would be choreographed, even imitating hand motions, to try and get inside the character. Marni Nixon also worked very hard to match her voice to the timbre and accent of Deborah Kerr’s speaking voice (Nixon’s various accents in films include proper British, Cockney, Hispanic, and Irish – as well as a song sung in Hindi). They wanted to know exactly how Deborah Kerr was going to act the song, so Marni Nixon could record it to match.

The most brilliant example of their work together can be heard in the song “Shall I Tell You What I Think of You,” which was cut from the movie, though the song can still be heard on the soundtrack. The song alternates between full out singing and talking on pitch and Deborah Kerr and Marni Nixon rehearsed the song over and over again until they could record it, each in separate recording booths. Deborah Kerr started it off, then pointed at Marni Nixon, who would sing the more sustained parts, then point back at Kerr, who would take over the more talking parts; and they did this back and forth for the entire song. (Note: I can’t show the video on this site, but you should definitely watch it, here; which shows when Deborah Kerr is talking/singing and when Marni Nixon is singing).

Sadly, on all three of the top selling albums, The King and I, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady, Marni Nixon’s name was nowhere to be seen (even though her singing made up more than half the music) and she had to fight to earn any royalties at all from West Side Story and My Fair Lady and received none for The King and I.

In all, I Could Have Sung All Night was a very engaging book and I enjoyed learning about her life. She always seemed to be expanding, trying new things, taking opportunities, working to improve her art. She had a remarkable and utterly unique career that was a pleasure to read about.

Notes: for an excellent article about how Marni Nixon went about her work dubbing the singers, see this one in The Guardian, “Standing in for the stars – the art of dubbing singers”. She also makes several spot-on observations about how, in recent movies (like Les Miserables), there has been a dramatic shift from the extreme of the excessive use of dubbing (without credit) to no use of any vocal help for the actors, when they really could use some help. I couldn’t agree with her more on that.

Below, is the clip of Margaret O’Brien, “singing” a Hindu lullaby to her cousin, Colin. MGM had brought in an Indian swami to teach Marni Nixon how to sing the words properly.

Click here for an interview with Marni Nixon, about her dubbing and how the studios attempted to keep it a secret that their stars were not actually doing their own singing, about how the stars felt about her dubbing their voices, and more about how she went about her dubbing work. And it is lovely to finally see her in person and hear her own speaking voice.

If you’re curious what Audrey Hepburn sounded like in My Fair Lady, click to hear the clip of her, in her own voice, singing “Show Me.”