The Chapman Report (1962)

[quote] Cukor was not fond of Claire Bloom

Why? They were both clever.

Was it a difference between Sephardic and Askenazy?

I guess she was starting her affair with the corruscatingly awful, ugly Philip Roth at this time.

Glynis Johns played a nymphomaniac on the beach.

I bet that poster of Glynis through Ty Hardin's legs brought a lot of housewives into the theater.

Ty Hardin's scenes were all about unalloyed sex.

In the book Ty's character Eddie does fuck Glynis' character - Teresa, I think - and it turns out he finishes in less than a minute and suffers a premature ejaculation......

I like Corey Allen as Wash Dillon! He was Buzz in Rebel Without A Cause - the guy who was killed in the chickie run....

[quote]and it turns out he finishes in less than a minute and suffers a premature ejaculation......

You mean it's supposed to last longer?!

It was a regular Ty Hardin Film Festival on TCM today --

Merrill's Marauders

PT 109

The Battle of the Bulge (no--not THAT bulge, silly!)

Palm Springs Weekend

Wall of Noise

The Chapman Report

Because when I think of "Classics" the first name that springs to mind is Ty Hardin.

[quote] Was it a difference between Sephardic and Askenazy?

How does Warners Contract star Efrem Zimbalist Jr. fit into that equation in this film?

I like how Henry Daniell played the villain opposite Efrem Zimbalist Jr in this movie; Daniell was the villain in Cukor's 'Camille' back in 1937 and had the silent role receiving Audrey Hepburn in Cukor's 'My Fair Lady in '64,

Great movie. Early 60s hint at slowly relaxing sexual uptightness. Must have been a shock for people.

I love early 60s LA movies - you can sense the Revolution beginning to start. And LA in its early days I always a treat visually.

r6=DJT

[quote] Anybody have any recommendation of similar movies from the early 60s?

Late '50s, but "Peyton Place" is on right now.

Claire Bloom is off-set.

I like the buttock line in the OP's picture.

R8: Efrem Zimbalist Jr is how you know this is tripe. Also doing a Kinsey movie in 1962 was a little late.

[R8]: Actually, Henry Daniell, who appeared in several of Cukor’s films, would have had a bigger role in “My Fair Lady,” but he suddenly died of a heart attack during shooting. He can still be seen as the British Ambassador, accompanying the Queen of Transylvania at the Embassy ball.

This explains his sudden disappearance later in the ball sequence. Curious, that not even a minimal attempt was made to refer to his absence. He’s just gone.

I really like Shelley Winters in this movie. Her reactions when she is answering the questions are perfect for her character.

I like all of the clothes, too, except for the dress Jane Fonda wears that has a bow over her pussy.

Trivia: A March 1991 Star magazine article sensationally claimed that Jane Fonda and Shelley Winters had an affair during the filming of this movie.

Shelly always exaggerated to make it sound like she fucked everyone. I’m not surprised.

Around that time, Vadim was sending Jane out to bring women home for threesomes. She was into the ladies. . . but Shelley Winters? Can't see it.

Young Jane was awful in this pic, she was so stiff she barely moved. She was much better in her next movie, Period of Adjustment.

R20 Agree. But she looked gorgeous!

[quote] Jane was awful in this pic, she was so stiff she barely moved

She was worse in this stinker. She was miscast to begin with.

And then something awful happened on the location shoot and they had remove a lot of the footage.

Orry-Kelly dressed all the good girls (Fonda, Johns) in white and the bad girls (Winters, Bloom) in black. What a career this guy had. He gave Cary Grant a job and a roof over his head when they were starting out in NYC but when they both made it to Hollywood, Grant acted like he hardly knew him, the snobby little bitch.

Orry-Kelly's career fell apart when the studio system fell apart.

You can't blame Grant for that because Kelly did not dress Grant.

Grant was one of Orry-Kelly's pallbearers. Still, he died from drink and without anyone. He hadn't work for Warners since the 40s, he did plenty of work for different producers and studios.

O-K was in love with Cary. They were together on a soundstage once and a taxi or something pulled up with the words "Queens Cab" written on the door, and Cary said, in front of everyone, "Your ride is here." O-K was embarrassed and cut the bitch off.

This is a must watch. The opening credits are great! And Cukor in charge of more of the Women! The Claire Bloom scene with the delivery boy makes it an instant classic. There are many laughs to be had!

Glynis Johns does not play a nympho, but Claire Bloom does.

There are four stories intertwined -- Bloom as a tragic nymphomaniac, Fonda as a frigid newlywed, and Winters as an adulterer. Glynis' story is the only one that is purposely comedic, as she plays a ditzy married woman who wants to experiment with a young beach stud.

I like the O-K documentary...

the trailer

Fonda was really good a couple of years later in the French movie "Joy House" (1964), with Alain Delon. Interesting role and one of my favorite of her many excellent performances.

Zimbelists's voice seems sped up or he's making a lame attempt at an accent.

Watch for Cloris Leachman in The Chapman Report -- she has a brief role as a secretary. She looks fabulous.

R28 and Glynis' role is the only one that is NOT funny.

Glynis WAS funny. When she's lying on the beach reading poetry while ogling Ty Hardin it was very humorous and well done.

Okay......I'm glad you thought so.

I wonder if George Cukor paid any of the pretty men in this raunchy movie to attend and adorn his Sunday house parties?

God he was gorgeous. Dumb as a rock but gorgeous.

Cukor gave his discovery Chad Everett a small role as a young deliveryman who is seduced by Claire Bloom.

I wonder if George Cukor handpicked Hart Bochner and Matt Lattanzi to strip off in his last movie?

If you can say anything about Cukor’s late phase treatment of young trade, you can at least say it was earned!

Yes, R41, I say that George was the most successful homosexual director in La La Land.

And I place Joshua Logan and Minelli in the second rank.

There may be other homosexual directors but they don't rank at all.

Mitchell Leisen? Edmund Goulding?

[quote] Mitchell Leisen? Edmund Goulding?

Leisen was a joke. He cared more for coiffure than characterisation.

--(including DL faves Ty Hardin and Ray Danton)

I wasn't familiar with Ray Danton. Holy FUCK. He was gorgeous.

Shelley Winters is really great in this one.

R43. Irving Rapper should be included.

Rapper outlived all of them (he died at 101) but had a very uneven output----you might say he was Warners' Cukor. He was close to Bette Davis and directed some of her best early films but they fell out in the 40s.

I was just one year old when The Chapman Report was released, but I did see it years ago. There were some really big names involved in several departments, including pictorial design, costumes, and music in addition to direction. George Cukor was the fall guy for what eventually hit the screen. Although the film was pretty much a disaster narratively, there were a few sly Cukor touches. I recall that right before going into Ty Hardin’s beach shack, Glynis Johns stops to look at a pump jack going up and down.

[quote] George Cukor was the fall guy for what eventually hit the screen

You seem to be suggesting that someone needs to be blamed for something.

R50. I am. The butchered film that hit the screen was a mess.

That was a period of time where the Code, Legion of Decency, etc. tended to neuter daring films if the self-censorship didn't ruin them first. They would start out with "daring" content and end up boring or confused. Casting someone as dull as Zimbalist or as non-acting as Ty Hardin didn't help. It's difficult to find films of that era that actually resemble it---usually they seem stuck in the early 50s or ludicrous in their attempts to be "hip". The idea of a film with Claire Bloom, Ty Hardin Jane Fonda, Efrem Zimbalist, Shelly Winters, Cloris Leachman and Jack Cassidy sounds seems bizarre, esp. with esteemed but somewhat over the hill people like Cukor and Orry-Kelly involved.

R52. Yep. Very nicely put.

Claire Bloom talks about Cukor and this film in the documentary On Cukor based on the Gavin Lambert book. One anecdote is when Jane Fonda came in dressed like a slut to try for the Claire Bloom part.

Yes, R52, though other early 60s films did a better job of resembling the era despite what the Code and the Legion of Decency may have censored. I'm surprised that the following films weren't condemned, though some of them have been obscure enough to fly under the radar: Lolita, Walk on the Wild Side, Advise & Consent, The Manchurian Candidate, All Fall Down,The L-Shaped Room, Victim, A Taste of Honey, The Leather Boys, A View from the Bridge, Peeping Tom, La Dolce Vita, Never on Sunday, My Baby is Black!, Psycho, The Balcony.

Scratch Never on Sunday. That was condemned.

Corey Allen is also in the film. Doesn't he get any love from Datalounge?

R55: Some on your list were foreign--they could get away with more. Manchurian Candidate is really a little outside the realm of others. Even Psycho. Simplified versions of psychoanalytic ideas were pretty common.

Cukor was right. I met Claire Bloom in the early 90s, and she was a stuck-up cooze.

[quote] I met Claire Bloom in the early 90s

She was a new bride to a difficult man. She didn't have time to give to moochers in the street.

Bloom had three very difficult, very intelligent husbands and spent a lot of time complaining about them after the divorces.

My dad loved this movie. Especially the scene where Glynis is hosting some sort of party and recital. He loved to mimic one of her lines, “…and Osiris said to me…oh, in my fashion…”. For some reason, it would crack him up. He took my mother to see it when they were dating IIRC.

I wonder how the non-local Glynis Johns got the role.

I wonder if it was because too many local performers didn't want to play a nymphomaniac.

Considering Orry-Kelly designed the costumes for Auntie Mame in 1958 and Some Like It Hot in 1959 and then designed Gypsy and Irma La Douce, his last design credit, after The Chapman Report, I'd say he finished up his resume very nicely and did pretty well for himself in a 30+ year career that began in 1930. His name may not be as famous as Edith Head's but he was far more talented and respected by his colleagues and peers. And he did win 3 Oscars. He was 65 when he designed his last film and died only 1 year later.

A very similar film in its early 60s schlockiness is 1963's THE CARETAKERS, about women in an insane asylum and starring so many DL Faves including Joan Crawford (as head nurse Lucretia!), Polly Bergen, Diane McBain, Janis Paige, Constance Ford and.....Van Williams as a studly intern.

Does anyone know where the ON CUKOR documentary, mentioned at r54, can be viewed? I looked for it on youtube but didn't see it there.

TIA.

If you have PBS Passport, it may become available in the future. It's part of American Masters. It also may get rerun periodically.

Link here, R66...

Hmmmm, thanks, r68 but it's in Spanish. Is there a button to press to make it play in English??

Johns didn't play a nympho. That was Bloom as someone pointed out. Johns was doing sex research and pulls away from Ty Hardin when he puts the moves on her.

Unfortunately not R69.

Dorothy Malone was the choice to play nymphos in those days. may be she was unavailable to tired of it.

OP Doctors' Wives (1971) is then 70s equivalent to The Chapman Report. It has a nympho (Dyan Cannon) and Kristina Holland who is doing sex research like Glynis Johns and Cara Williams as comic relief. It shows how far culture moved in 10 years.

The Cukor doc doesn't appear to be on PBS Passport. It doesn't come up at all in their search engine. There's a lot of programming that they advertise on that site that isn't actually available for viewing unfortunately.

Cukor and Johns reunited a decade later on Cavett.

I was hoping that OP was going to reveal that the original edit had been found and restored, but, alas, he did not say that.

I have On Cukor on DVD. Another story Claire Bloom tells is how Cukor asked if she would take off her bra for the role. She said yes and she would also take off her knickers for George Cukor!

R75

1. Ghastly brown carpet.

2. Annoying nobody on the left interrupting the import guests.

3. Cavett's appeal escapes me.

Cukor was a very smart man. Being fired from Gone with the Wind could have ended his career but he survived.

The annoying nobody in the Cavett interview is Alan King.

[quote] Cukor… survived.

Yes, I hear he was the most successful homosexual director in Hollywood.

He was no Irving Rapper.

Irving Rapper was no William Wyler.

Was Irving Rapper a homosexual?

Rapper directed the hysterically funny The Christine Jorgensen Story (1970)

See above R83: He was the Warner Bros version of Cukor. he and Cukor probably were happier in the studio era, by the late 50s, Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk were making the bankable "women's pictures".

But is it as trenchant as Shock Corridor?

I wonder who the actress was who George Cukor hated, mentioned by Dick Cavett in that interview at r75 but not revealed?

And when Cavett and Cukor were reeling off the names of the actresses in The Chapman Report, Alan King sad: "Well, 3 outa 4 ain't bad." Did he mean Shelley or Claire?

He'd already directed Shelley in A Double Life, r88.

[quote] Did he mean Shelley or Claire?

The OP tells us that ' Cukor was not fond of Claire Bloom' and R59 says Bloom was a 'stuck-up cooze'. I wonder if she thought herself a superior intellectual Shakespearean snob slumming it in La La Land? But she did appear in some trash.

It can't have been easy married to that Steiger. I read her memoir but it doesn't go into much detail about her hellish marriages.

"And the biggest surprise is Claire Bloom: as the nympho, she's thin, beautiful, exhibitionistic, and quite brilliant"-Pauline Kael

Cukor and Bloom liked and respected each other. His full quote about her is: "Claire is not a nice Nellie. She has no inhibition, and she is not as cold as some people say. Claire is a creature born for the screen." In another interview he said, "She played her scenes without interruption and with great range. Her skill is dazzling."

Bloom said of him: "I was in the hands of a great director. I would do anything for him." She has said her favorite directors were Cukor and Tony Richardson.

^

I guess Richardson may have directed Bloom on stage as well.

In the Cukor documentary, Claire describes her character as...louche.

R64, he was never accused of stealing designs and taking credit for costumes that he didn’t design, unlike Edith Head.

Louche as in not tight?

No, Liza dear, that would be loosh.

[quote] he was never accused of stealing designs

Head worked on ten times more movies than Kelly.

Uh, r98, Head's name appeared on ten times more movies than Kelly because she was head of Wardrobe at Paramount and contractually had to be credited with most every A list film the studio produced. You probably believe Edith designed those Givenchy dresses in Sabrina, too.

Head stole credit for everything, even after she left Paramount. Orry-Kelly fell out with Jack Warner (but remained close to his wife), so he had to freelance from the mid-40s onward. He had his ups and downs, partly because he was an alcoholic.

By the post-WWII years all of the major studios were fed up with the power that those brilliant male costume designers held with their leading ladies and most were replaced by women designers who tended to be more practical, less expensive and more controllable. I think there was some homophobia to blame. Men continued to design films, of course, but they were mostly no longer in studio residence nor on long-term contracts.

Adrian, Travis Banton, Orr-Kelly, Howard Greer, Bernard Newman (of the RKO Astaire/Rogers musicals) were gone and replaced by the likes of Edith Head, Irene and Helen Rose. Jean Louis managed to stay at Columbia for awhile and Walter Plunkett was brought back to MGM for the occasional big picture like Singin' in the Rain.

I remember Claire as Lily's mother-in-law from hell on As The World Turns.

Jean Louis lasted through the 50s at Columbia---Columbia came into its own as a real studio in the 50s, so he was lucky. Edith Head eventually was out at Paramount and had to work at Universal. She did a lot of freelancing---she designed Endora's outfits for Bewitched.

Irene left MGM to start her own operation in 1950.

To her credit, Head was able to make defiantly Plain Jane Barbara Stanwyck into a glamour girl.

Stanwyck may not have been traditionally beautiful, but she was mighty sexy. She was so good an actress she could make you believe she was anything she wanted you to believe that she was. But yes, Edith Head did find and fit great costumes for her; apparently Stanwyck's mid-section was too long or something for her frame, so her clothes had to be designed in a special way. Perhaps someone else here has the specific details.

She had a long torso with a low set butt. Edith simply raised the waistband up front and lowered it in the rear. It created a slinky silhouette with everything that she wore. And I’ll agree with r105 that Barbara was mad sexy. I called her defiantly Plain Jane because she disliked glamming it up. But when she did, she was quite lovely. Look at how great she looks in [italic]The Lady Eve and My Reputation,[/italic] amongst her other forties films.

R65 The Caretakers (1963) is a female version of Cuckoo's Nest with 2 nurse Ratched's (Ford and Crawford) a mute patient who finally speaks, electro-shock therapy and an impromptu party thrown by the inmates.

Isn't there also some great scene in The Caretakers where loony Polly Bergen escapes to a movie theatre and has a big breakdown in front of the audience while the movie plays on the big screen in the background?

I wish Cukor had directed [italic]the Group[/italic] instead of Lumet (whose work I usually like). It seems such a good setup for fun bitchiness and adultery, but it was a dreary movie.

[quote] I wish Cukor had directed

all of Gone With Wind.

Yes R108 - that scene opens the movie......all I could think of when I saw it at age 10 was "I've seen Polly Bergen's bra!"

I never watched her on To Tell The Truth after that without thinking of that scene.

[quote] Glynis Johns, Claire Bloom, Jane Fonda, Shelley Winters

Who had the best role? and the biggest role? top billing?

Billing order: Shelley, Jane, Claire, Glynis

I'm sure Glynis Johns got the role because others were too scared for it. She had a very patchy career.

Glynis is the most delightful and fun in the film, playing a rich dilettante whose husband adores her, encourages her and subsidizes (without seeing exactly how she's doing it) her flight of fancy, which in this particular case is taking up art, fixating on a hot stud and trying to get him to pose nude for her in private. But does she really know what she wants, Sister Suffragette?

I'm no fan of Glynis and her father.

But she played a sexpot in 'Gigolo and Gigolette' in this Somerset Maugham movie.

Can't believe this thread has gone so long without mentioning Glynnis used to be married to Anthony Forwood, who later became Dirk Bograde's life partner! We need a Dirk Bograde homewrecker troll!

[quote] Glynnis … Bograde … Bograde

Glynis, Bogarde, Bogarde.

I'm sure that entanglement has been well white-washed in Bogarde's numerous memoirs and poor 99 year old Glynis is stuck in a high-security nursing home in California.

R118 Bograde's been dead for over two decades (good on Glynnis?) I don't fault him being evasive in those frau-marketed memoirs, he lived as openly as one could during a time when it was illegal to be gay. He didn't even beard up!

I keep typing Bograde when I mean Bogarde. I hate my computer.

Hard to believe Joan Crawford took third billing to Robert Stack and Polly Bergen in The Caretakers. She didn't even get a box around her name like Connie Bennett in Madame X or a And Miss before it like she did in The Best of Everything..

Sadly, Constance Bennett didn't end up getting the box she wanted for the "Madame X" opening credits or poster. When Bennett died (before the movie was released), Sue Mengers (who worked at Bennett's agency) told the producer Ross Hunter, "I guess Constance finally got her box."

Polly Bergen's having Freddie Fields, one of the founders of CMA, as her husband had its perks.

Glynis John's mailing adderss..... drop a line!

I can't believe she's still alive...98.

^

Her father appeared is SO many movies and specialised in playing little men of no consequence.

Only two of his roles were good roles

R60 Are you calling me a moocher?

R12 Glynis wearing one of those weird outfits by Cheong Sam.

Finally saw this. My God everyone is acting up a storm. Biggest laugh is that Shelley has an affair with a theatre director! Poor Jane having to play a girl who is said to be femme de glace.

Now Glynis is gone, but Claire is still here, about to turn 93.