by Peter Cates

You Belong to Me

A 1941 film, You Belong to Me, is thematically a romantic comedy in the old-fashioned, very marketable Hollywood tradition and stars two of its even then very marketable cinematic presences, Henry Fonda (1905-1982) and Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990).

The plot consists of Fonda’s spoiled rich Peter who is skiing much too recklessly down a slope and suddenly topsy turvys, skis and all, just narrowly avoiding colliding with Stanwyck’s Helen, a highly-accomplished general practitioner who is on vacation but otherwise very committed to her career.

Peter’s fall lands him not only upside down but buried in the snow with only his ankles showing.

Of course, Peter lives and, with a few bruises, is okay but he instantly falls in love with Helen and does his fake hypochondriac best to keep her around. One thing leading to another, he persuades Helen to marry him.

After the honeymoon, they arrive back at his fully luxurious palace of a mansion with a domestic staff ready to attend to every need and whim, when the inevitable period of adjustment arrives with a bang.

Peter is the emotionally needy little boy who wants his wife pretty much to himself while Helen is ­ and she gave him fair warning before marriage – also committed to her patients and they include men who are acquaintances of Peter. Problems and jealousy ensue.

However, there is a happy ending with Peter deciding to lead a life of purpose and meaning through investing the family fortune on a much needed charity hospital for the poor that is already on the verge of bankruptcy.

Peter will manage the day to day business details while Helen is the wonderful doctor and they give up the mansion for simpler accommodations in their greater new found happiness.

Despite the charismatic Fonda and Stanwyck, the movie skated on very hokey thin ice, with a lame script, lame jokes and lame just about everything else.

Where credit is due – the black and white cinematography of the opening scenes on the ski slope – the far off stunt skier for Fonda and then the up close Fonda himself, complete with skiing goggles, yodeling his downhill racing; the expansive shots inside Peter’s mansion; the grounds in which actor Edgar Buchanan (1903-1979) as the gardener Billingsley expounds to Peter on the meaningful mysteries of the soil; and the inside of a department store where Peter, under an assumed name, successfully lands a job in the men’s tie department.

Memorable Henry Fonda films include Young Mister Lincoln, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache and Mister Roberts, each directed by Portland Maine native John Ford (1894-1973); Advise and Consent; Yours, Mine and Ours; Gideon’s Trumpet; and On Golden Pond, which takes place in the Belgrade Lakes, but was shot in New Hampshire.

The only other Barbara Stanwyck movie I have ever seen is Sorry, Wrong Number! in which she plays a bedridden wife whose house has been invaded by an intruder.

by Peter Cates

Sir Andrew Davis

William Walton: Belshazzar’s Feast; Ralph Vaughan Williams: Tallis Fantasia. Sir Andrew Davis conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. BBC Music Magazine BBC MM83, CD, recorded 1998-1999.

The late Sir Andrew Davis (1944-2024) first came to my attention just over 50 years ago with a really good record of the Shostakovich 10th Symphony played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. What most impressed me was the manner in which he allowed that hyper-intense masterpiece to breathe naturally, unlike the New York Philharmonic recording under Dimitri Mitropoulos which was a blowtorch in its thrilling from beginning to end eloquence.

However, later Davis recordings from the 1980s proved to be a mixed bag. His conducting of the Grieg Peer Gynt incidental music, Dvorak 8th Symphony, Faure’s Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, and Holst The Planets – each of these works also important in my listening experiences – tended to be quite boring. The Mars movement of the Planets, itself a brilliantly brutal piece of savage rhythms became a sleeping pill in Davis’s performance.

Whereas the Maestro recorded really beautiful and powerful performances of Dvorak’s 5th and 6th Symphonies and the Sibelius 2nd, itself an absolute gem among the several other great Sibelius 2nds. During a 1981 interview with Sir Alexander Gibson, in Houston, himself responsible for putting Scotland on the classical music map as Music Director of the Scottish National Orchestra and Opera for 25 years, he spoke without naming names of these up and coming mediocrities among conductors who were being proclaimed as “shining stars of the firmament” but mentioned Davis and Simon Rattle as two very gifted young conductors well worth watching.

The above CD contains works by two of England’s leading 20th century composers- Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and William Walton’s oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, itself based upon an incident in the Book of Daniel.

The Fantasia is scored for strings and possesses a heavenly beauty that is unique while Belshazzar’s has a massive orchestra and two choirs and is one very exhilarating display piece in its depiction of an evil king hosting an orgy of eating, drinking and some other activities that need not be mentioned and God’s displeasure with this monarch manifests itself with destruction of everybody there that evening.

Sir Andrew did some of his finest conducting here, fully relishing the complicated rhythms and sonorities of the oratorio and the exquisite strings of the Fantasia.

The Maestro also left two distinguished recordings of Richard Strauss’s brilliant celebration of his own narcissism, Ein Heldenleben, translated as A Hero’s Life; one of them an LP with the Toronto Symphony from more than 30 years ago when he was its music director and a CD from the last ten years when he held the same job with the Melbourne Symphony.

Hobo Jack Turner

Hobo Jack Turner – I’m Glad I’m a Bum; When It’s Springtime in the Rockies. Velvet Tone 2128-V, recorded March 19, 1930, ten inch 78.

Hobo Jack Turner was a pseudonym for a very popular 1920s and ’30s singer and radio personality Ernest Hare (1883-1939) and who teamed up with Billy Jones (1889-1940) to form the also then well-known but now long forgotten Happiness Boys.

On the above shellac disc, Hare is a singing, guitar strumming troubadour performing two selections that appeared just one year after the depression began in the U.S., both of them in a most timely manner conveying a mixture of false cheer at being Glad I’m a Bum and the promise of perhaps being able to live happily in Colorado’s Springtime Rockies doing productive work, being married and raising a family. (One other popular folk song from those years was Burl Ives’s Big Rock Candy Mountain.)

This 78 is a pleasant one from the dime store Velvet Tone record label.

Mary Ellen Chase

In her 1939 autobiography A Goodly Fellowship, Blue Hill native Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973) described her village as one of numerous such small Maine coastal villages via which “the onrush of summer residents and tourists, who were soon to afford the one means of livelihood to most coast towns, had in those days hardly begun…and the nearest bank was fourteen miles away, a two-hour journey by horse and carriage through hilly country….Eggs were ten cents a dozen, milk five cents a quart, cod and haddock three cents a pound.”

 

 

 

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by Peter Cates

I recently watched the 1942 film Big Street starring Henry Fonda (1905-1982) and Lucille Ball (1911-1989), both in dramatic roles. Fonda’s Pinks, a very shy waiter in a Broadway night club, is infatuated by Lucy’s torch singer Gloria who has a regular evening gig and who happens to be the girlfriend of the club’s dangerously possessive gangster owner, as persuasively portrayed by Barton Maclane (During the ‘60s, Maclane was a regular on I Dream of Jeannie).

At first, Gloria comes off as a selfish narcissist and brushes off the waiter until he rescues her little dog from being run over in the street. Even then she’s still distant.

But when she informs her boyfriend that she wants out of their relationship, he pushes her down a flight of stairs, leaving her permanently paralyzed, and pays 15 witnesses to claim it was an accident.

After a hospital stay when she can no longer afford long term medical care, the waiter and some of his friends provide support.

As time goes on, the singer and waiter develop a closer relationship.

Here is where I stop with more details.

Both Fonda and Ball did outstanding work, along with a supporting cast including the above-mentioned Maclane (1903-1969); Ray Collins (1889-1965) as a much different character from his later acclaimed Lieutenant Tragg on Perry Mason; the always captivating Agnes Moorehead (1900-1974); Eugene Pallette (1888-1953) – who was the wealthy patriarch in the earlier comedy classic My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carole Lombard; and Vera Gordon (1886-1948) who is the very kind neighbor Mrs. Lefkowitz (Born in Russia, Miss Gordon had the beginnings of a promising career in a Moscow Theater until management fired her because she was Jewish).

Highly recommended suspense TV – Slow Horses, Countdown and Bosch: Legacy.

Slow Horses stars Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, a British MI 5 agent in charge of a group of outcasts no longer allowed to work at the main office but who continually stumble into dangerous situations which they manage to solve by hook and crook.

Jackson Lamb himself is an overweight boozing slob whose personal hygiene and habits are beyond gross and who treats his workers like crap, loading them with useless busy work, hoping they resign which they refuse to do.

The on-location footage of 21st century London contributes vividly to the atmosphere of the series, now in its fifth season on Apple TV.

Countdown has a Belarusian terrorist intending to set off nukes in a major city while Bosch:Legacy has a private investigator searching for and protecting long-lost heirs to a billionaire’s wealth, rescuing his daughter from a rapist and taking down another billionaire who has committed several murders and walked due to the usual lack of evidence.

Ukrainian actor Bogdan Yasinski and Moscow-born Pascha Lychnikoff appear in both series as dangerous Russian gangsters and, despite the typecasting, deliver convincing characterizations.

Another attraction of Bosch: Legacy is the very underrated Mimi Rogers as a defense attorney.

by Peter Cates

Continuing with memories – when I applied at the personnel office of Jordan Marsh, I remember seeing three teenage boys sitting bare-chested, wearing cheap looking hats, giggling among themselves, smoking cigarettes one after another, the sign of “No smoking” apparently not applicable to those who can’t read.

Meanwhile, I was wearing a sports jacket and other gussied up apparel.

I remember a rather blotchy red-faced gentleman with longish silver-colored hair, slightly paunchy, entering the inner sanctum office and calling in the three bare-chested gentlemen one at a time, spending five or ten minutes with each one considering their highly experienced qualifications .

I was then called in and, after the interviewer looked over my application which I forgot to mention had already been submitted to a secretary in the room, he asked what area I was interested in. I, of course, stated the record department.

After additional questioning, he told me to walk across the street to the third floor office of the Annex manager Mr. Leslie Black. Meanwhile, he would call that individual telling him to expect me.

I entered a small office with two men occupying it, both attired in gray suits, one wearing glasses. He is Mr. Black while the other man is Mr. Paul Eames. While Black, after graciously shaking hands is looking over the application which had been miraculously and invisibly transmitted, Eames inquires about Maine and recounts memories of fishing trips to Kennebunkport.

Black then offers me a position in the record department and tells me to report for two days of employee training classes the following Wednesday morning early at 8 a.m.

I report back to the personnel manager who expresses hope that I will be staying with them for a while. He then calls somebody else to chew them out for verbally abusing employees on their watch and for refusing their lunch breaks.

More memories next time.

Listening to Overtures

As a rule, I find listening to an entire album of Overtures more tiring than one two- or three-hour opera however longer than the Overtures together.

In live symphony orchestra concerts, the programs usually consist of an Overture followed by a Concerto; the first half lasting roughly 45 minutes before a 20 to 30 minute intermission for musicians and audience.

Then the orchestra returns for the major work, usually a well-known Symphony often by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and possibly Sibelius or one by Mahler that lasts just under an hour.

Recently I listened to two albums, each containing four Overtures.

The first was a Musical Heritage Society cassette with the late Claudio Abbado (1933-2014) conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the 4 Overtures that Beethoven composed for his opera, Fidelio. They consist of Leonore #1, Leonore #2, Leonore #3 and the Fidelio Overture, it being the one that begins the opera.

The others are supposed to be spread out between the acts. Most modern productions don’t even bother with the three Leonores because of the extra excessive length of a given evening.

However, all four Overtures, if individually spread out over four days, are worthwhile active listening with much powerful drama and beauty and Abbado and his Vienna players conveyed that powerful drama and beauty. The recordings come from the mid-1980s. At the time Abbado was Music Director of the Vienna State Opera.

A Forum stereo LP from the late ‘50s features Jean Martinon (1910-1976) conducting France’s Lamoureux Orchestra, of which he was Music Director from 1951 to 1957, in four Overtures of Hector Berlioz- The Corsair, the Roman Carnival, King Lear, and Beatrice and Benedict.

Each of these four, as with those of Beethoven, are individually rewarding listening, Berlioz especially gifted at blending spirited rhythms and perky details with quieter passages of tremendous beauty for emotional contrast. Again, all four the same evening is overload.

For me, Martinon is one of my top ten or 12 favorite conductors who was especially colorful with French composers ranging from Berlioz to Debussy and Ravel, etcs. but also interpreted the Germans and Russians well. I have a very exciting Tchaikovsky Pathetique Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic and Dvorak Slavonic Dances with the London Symphony. And his conducting of these Overtures was very very satisfying.

In 1963, Martinon succeeded Fritz Reiner as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony for five years until 1968. Unfortunately, anyone succeeding Reiner was going to be criticized because Reiner with his kind of brilliance was next to impossible to replace, as Martinon, despite his own talents, found out. A story for another day.

P.S: Martinon guest conducted the Boston Symphony a number of times and in January, 1966, traveled with the Orchestra to Portland’s Merrill Auditorium where he was photographed with the President of Bowdoin College. It would have been for me a once in a lifetime experience if some adult could have driven me the short 70 miles from East Vassalboro to Portland, but I was 14, already stuck in boarding school and much too poor to afford tickets. Also, blizzard conditions prevailed the evening of the concert. One of those moments of true musical greatness here in Maine, the equivalent of Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony appearing six years earlier in Burlington, Vermont.

(Read Part 3 here.)

by Peter Cates

To continue from last week – after landing a job at Jordan Marsh’s record department in its Annex, I initially shared an apartment with a woman friend in Somerville, a working class street within easy walking distance of Cambridge’s Central and Harvard Squares. My share of the rent was $70 a month with utilities included and I would give her the cash for the landlord. Arriving in mid-July, I remember it being a ferociously hot summer but the two story building of four apartments was on a very shady street.

The other three units were occupied by Greek-American family members. The matriarch had the other apartment on the first floor while her two sons and their families were upstairs.

The family owned a trash collecting business with two trucks in operation. I remember one brother having a son accompanying him while the other spoke of preferring to be alone in the cab during those long runs.

During one muggy evening, one of the brothers gave me a quick inside glimpse of his mother’s apartment in which her air conditioner was kept at very Alaskan temperatures.

On quiet evenings, I heard Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde playing from the second story apartment across the street and soon made the acquaintance of that neighbor. He owned 10 different recordings of that work alone and not more than 90 or 100 other records, preferring to keep his life simple – a most intriguing principle which I have never followed when it comes to records.

He also had a good sense of humor and owned what he considered a party record for friends to listen to with laughter. It was an LP transfer of a 1942 Berlin radio broadcast of excerpts from Bizet’s Carmen sung in very exaggerated German instead of the original French. One thought of how Hermann Goering would have sounded singing the Toreador Song.

The woman I shared the apartment with was originally from Amherst, had attended U-Mass, worked as a nurse’s assistant at Massachusetts General and had a boyfriend living in Providence, Rhode Island who’d alternate weekends with her in visiting. At that time, my record player had crapped out so they graciously gave me permission to use their stereo system when they were out for the evening.

Working in the JM record department, I encountered an extensively heavenly selection of records that small Maine stores never matched and was buying two or three albums a week on my weekly salary of $70.

I remember after my first pay day purchasing the Bruckner Fourth and Seventh Symphonies, a total of three LPs at $4.88 each and not feeling the least guilt at such self-centered extravagance. The performances were conducted by the gifted Dutch Maestro Bernard Haitink (1929-2021) with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra on the Philips label which was then arguably considered the finest for its imported pressings from Holland – their earlier American pressings were considered horribly noisy by the at-times lunatic sound nuts (I could care less about recorded sound and found those domestic pressings fine. I also benefited when sound aficionados would sell me their own classical copies dirt cheap.).

Quite often on my days off, I would explore the surrounding neighborhoods.

More next week!