Gloria Gets Groped

Manhandled
Arthur Stringer and Russell Holman
London: Readers Library, [n.d]

Manhandled
Arthur Stringer and Russell Holman
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1924 

Manhandled gives good example as to why it is that Arthur Stringer is so frowned upon by CanLit academics. It sprang not from the lush farmland that surrounds Chatham and London, Ontario, his duelling hometowns, but the offices of Famous Players-Lasky in downtown Manhattan. General Sales Manager Sidney R. Kent came up with the idea, Stringer was hired to add flesh, and then everything was passed on to screenwriter Frank Tuttle.

Our Ontarian was given $1000 for his efforts, along with the right to turn the tale into something of substance to sell to the glossies. The first the world saw of Manhandled appeared as a 26,000-word short story in the March 22 and 29 issues of The Saturday Evening Post. This novel is that short story, expanded by Russell Holman, a writer who had a talent for turning American silents into entertaining text.

Manhandled is a Gloria Swanson vehicle, written long before the word had ever been used in that sense. It tells the story of Tess McGuire, the orphaned daughter of a comedic vaudeville team, beginning with her childhood in Marysville, a picturesque, perfect New England town found only in popular fiction. Though raised by a cautious, conservative spinster aunt – think latter-day Marilla Cuthbert – Tess grows to become a beautiful, adventurous young woman who looks to live a life in the visual or dramatic arts. That pursuit takes her to New York, where she rents a room in the very same house as high school sweetheart Jim.

Now, don't you go spreading gossip; the most that happens between the two is a fleeting kiss. Jimmy aches to make Tess his wife, while she keeps putting him off :

"I wouldn't be satisfied with what you can give me – yet. I may be selfish, but it's better that I should tell you how I feel about it. It'll save us both a lot of pain."

Harsh.

Tess wants to make it on Broadway, but doesn't really try. After her one and only attempt at getting an agent, she accepts a job selling "soiled" lingerie in the bargain basement of Thorndyke's. Tess may be a subterranean shopgirl, but such is her beauty that she's soon drinking hootch with such well-known figures as artist Robert Brandt, Wall Street banker Luther Swett, bestselling author Carl Garretson and, of course, department store heir Chip Thorndyke.

As Jim, the rube boyfriend, works nights on a carburetor that might one day make him rich, Tess is wined, dined, danced and driven on innumerable automobile trips by men with wandering eyes and busy hands. Her only acting gig comes by accident, the result of imitating an exiled Russian aristocrat at a drunken party. A week later, passing herself off as countess "Madam Patovska", she's playing hostess, pouring tea at Manhattan's most exclusive dress shop.

Tess is forced to defend herself to Jim:

"Will you tell me what the successes in this town are founded on? As I begin to see it, they're founded on bluff. It's the best window-dresser that gets by. Ten chances to one your boss is getting by on the very same game. I know mine is. The mayor probably is. The lawyers and bankers and swells and business men certainly are. So, why shouldn't I do my little share of it?"

Garretson, "the jitney George Moore", is more understanding. "The forest is too thick for you to see the trees", he tells Tess. "But you're on your way through. And sellers in a brisk market don't stop to wash mud from their tulips."

Tess doesn't get it. She will... and we know she will. Sidney R. Kent's simple idea was to bring an oft-told story, that of a country girl at risk of being corrupted by the big city, to a new medium. His greatest contribution was a title that was sure to sell. CanLit academics will point out that it was a brisk market.

Trivia: Early in the novel, Tess goes to see a Gloria Swanson film and is manhandled:

Tess would've enjoyed the picture, a Gloria Swanson society-drama, and shared Claire's raputurous remarks about the star's elaborate wardrobe, had Walter Hovey kept his obtrusive knees and his wandering hands more to himself.

Object: A small hardcover in thin brown boards, the Readers Library edition is printed on newsprint. Though touted a "Film Edition", the only element having to do with the Swanson vehicle is the dust jacket. The Grosset and Dunlap edition, on the other hand, features a generous eight plates of promotional shots.

Access: The Grosset & Dunlap and Readers Library editions were joined by a Hutchinson hardcover in 1925. Copies of all three are available online from booksellers in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland and Belgium. At £3.20, the cheapest is a Good copy, sans jacket, of the Hutchinson edition. The most expensive - US$85 - is a Readers Library.

Nine of our university libraries have the Grosset & Dunlop edition, the University of Guelph has the Hutchinson, but no Canadian library has a copy of the Readers Library. Our public libraries, Library and Archives Canada included, have nothing at all.

Related post:

Gloria Swanson's Subway Scene

Graphic Film, Graphic Novel

eXistenZ
David Cronenberg; illustrated by Sean Scoffield
Toronto: Key Porter, 1999

For nearly two decades, The Dead Zone stood as my favourite Cronenburg film – then along came Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, and A Dangerous Method. The Toronto filmmaker has been going from strength to strength this millennium, encouraging me to catch up on everything I'd missed.

Last week it was eXistenZ, Cronenberg's fin de siècle nightmare about gamers, the gaming industry and Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish. One of the director's body horror films, the title refers to a new game system contained in a disease-prone pod that is in fact "an animal grown from fertilized amphibian eggs stuffed with synthetic DNA." You play by inserting a 12-foot UmbyCord of "twisted, translucent, blue and red veiny vessels" into your spine through a permanent Metaflesh bioport.

Steve Jobs would've called this a "shit design".

Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Allegra Geller, the designer behind eXistenZ. A "game-pod goddess", she's just begun leading her fawning followers through a test when things appear to go very, very wrong. First, an assassin tries to kill her with a gun made of flesh and bone (she takes a tooth in the shoulder), then she's saddled with timid Ted Pikul (Jude Law), who is not only an ineffective bodyguard but an UmbyCord virgin.

I knew something of what to expect from eXistenZ through this odd book, which is as far as I'm aware the only graphic novel made from a Canadian film. Purchased back in April 1999, it did a disservice in  discouraging me from taking a trip to the cinema. Where on screen eXistenZ is disorienting in its depth, on thin paper it's just confusing.

Illustrator Scott Scoffield takes the film's murky look and renders it black, at times obscuring vital detail. His panels look like stills that have been manipulated with a paint-simulation filter. Who knows, maybe they were. The dialogue is all here, but the acting is absent. Faces float, washed-out and emotionless in the darkness.

There is no drama.

Don't get me wrong – as a film, eXistenZ is not a triumph – but it is worth seeing.

Warning: Not for the squeamish.

Better yet, see Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which – interestingly – was adapted from John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel of the same name.

Warning: There will be violence.

Did that need saying?

Object: A slim paperback – 111 pp – containing the graphic novel, an uncredited interview with Cronenberg, an uncredited essay on his films and a Glossary (uncredited).

Access: My copy, signed by Messrs Cronenburg and Scoffield, was purchased new for $24.95 back in the spring of 1999 at Toronto's TheatreBooks. "Very scarce thus", claims an online bookseller (who offers two copies). I'm not so sure. I remember plucking mine from a teetering stack of signed copies. In fact, half of the fourteen currently listed online are signed by both men; prices range from US$40 to US$98 (condition is not a factor). Unsigned, "as new" copies begin at US$4.09.

A Son's Lies My Father Told Me

Lies My Father Told Me

Norman Allan

Toronto: Signet, 1975

Back in May, I described novelizations of Canadian films as the rarest of things; I can think of only two, Whispering City and Lies My Father Told Me. This one is particularly interesting in that it was written by Norman Allan, son of novelist, playwright and screenwriter Ted Allan. We have here a son's version of his father's work.

Allan père did very well with this semi-autobiographical tale. What began as a short magazine piece, was adapted for radio, television, the cinema and, finally, the stage. Allan fis draws nothing from the original story – not so much as a sentence is similar – rather he follows his father's screenplay. Dedication is such that when the younger Allan does depart, as happens twice, one wonders whether he's not included a scene that was left on the cutting room floor. This is not to belittle his effort; the writing is tight and more than competent. The unabtrusive debut of a man who had never before published a work of fiction, it features some fairly strong imagery. Here David, the protagonist, races to feed his grandfather's horse:

I hurry along the balcony, three stories above the cobbled courtyard: three stories and a romance above Ferdeleh's stable there. A dozen dwellings, tenements of poverty, boxed and stacked: thirteen dwellings, counting Ferdeleh's, share the hemmed-in courtyard, their awkward wooden stairways sculpturing the skeletons of grotesque fairy castles. The gingerbread's all taken away, leaving only a matchstick grandeur...

I received Lies My Father Told Me as a gift back in 1976. In those dinosaur days – before Beta, VHS, DVDs and Netflix – novelizations such as these were pretty much the only way to revisit films. There were repatory theatres, of course, but I don't remember Lies My Father Told Me being offered. Television was as it is now: a crap shoot.

Jonathan Coe once described novelizations as "that bastard, misshapen offspring of the cinema and the written word". He's probably right – I agree with him on much else. But Lies My Father Told Me is the only novelization I've ever read... and I think it's pretty good.

Object: A very slim, mass market paperback with eight pages of stills from the film. Three pages of adverts provide much needed bulk. All movie-related, they range from an "exclusive movie edition" of The Three Musketeers to this biography of a hot star who had long ago gone cold:

The most interesting, I think, is the full-page push above for TV Movies.

"America's second largest indoor sport". How ribald.

Access: Six copies are currently listed online, five of which go for between one and six dollars. Only four of our university libraries hold the book – not one is located in Montreal. Patrons of public libraries are, predictably, limited to that serving the good citizens of Toronto. Library and Archives Canada fails yet again.

Related post: An Author Turns Thespian

Horace Brown: Saturday Matinee

The first book to appear under his own name, Horace Brown's Whispering City is the rarest of things: a novelization of a Canadian feature film. The movie itself has shriveled to a footnote today, but in 1947, the year of its release, it was a very big deal. Shot twice – once in French, once in English – for a few months it looked to be the first fruit of a vibrant post-war Canadian film industry. Of course, all died on the vine. I expect the reason had much to do with money, though I blame Jack Valenti.

Whispering City is a pretty good little movie, a fine example film noir. Set in Quebec City, predating Hitchcock's I Confess by some seven years, it tells the story of pretty Mary Roberts, an intrepid lady reporter who gets caught up in a decades-old murder. Corruption, madness, suicide... it's all good fun, though the ending is so rushed that you'd almost think director Fyodor Otsep was counting each frame before he ran out of film.

Globe and Mail film critic Roly Young was amongst the greatest champions of Whispering City, giving the movie four stars (just half a star less than La Forteresse, the French-language version). It was, he wrote, "first-rate motion picture fare, and a pleasant augury for the future of Canadian-made films."

Over six decades later, it's easy enough to judge for ourselves; the entire film has been posted on YouTube:

Just how closely Horace Brown sticks to the screenplay, how adept an adaptor he was, I cannot say. I've not read his Whispering City, and know of only two extant copies: one held by the University of Calgary's Special Collections, the other belonging to bowdler of Fly-by-night (who kindly provided the image above).

Whispering City was the only original title produced Brown's own Global Publishing Company, a short-lived venture that produced a handful of movie tie-in editions (like Great Expectations and Henry V) and the two-issue Original Detective Stories.

Horace Brown died in 1996 at the grand old age of 88. The Globe and Mail provided no obituary, which doesn't seem at all right when one considers his twelve years of service as a Toronto city alderman. In this role, he provided a great deal of copy for the newspaper, including this front page story from 14 March 1972:

I don't see that the Globe and Mail or anyone else paid much attention to Brown's novels. I'm inclined to believe that more has been written this past week here and at Fly-by-night – and, by remarkable coincidence, at Mystery File – than has appeared in the last sixty-five years.

Is it time more attention was paid? Don't think so, but I will raise my glass to a hardworking man, a writer who left behind a number of CanLit curiosities.

Related posts:

Quebec City Noir

Horace Brown: From Penthouse to Pavement

Horace Brown: Fritzi in Flight or a Coincidence