The Ice Cream Blonde

Todd’s Laughter,
Todd Slaughter

The Ice Cream Blonde -
The Whirlwind Life And
Mysterious Death of Screwball
Comedienne Thelma Todd
by Michelle Morgan
Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 9781613730386

Just a short review of a wonderful book given to me by a good friend for Christmas. Subtitled The Whirlwind Life And Mysterious Death Of Screwball Comedienne Thelma Todd, Michelle Morgan’s tome The Ice Cream Blond paints a compelling picture of the actresses life, doing exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak, in as breezy and entertaining way as possible.

I remember seeing Todd as a co-star in various Laurel And Hardy shorts as a kid (back when they were regularly shown on television throughout the 1970s) but I didn’t really discover her until I took notice of her as a pretty wonderful co-star opposite Groucho Marx in two of the five, absolutely brilliant films starring The Four Marx Brothers (as they were known before Zeppo left the fold) which they did while still under contract to Paramount... which as far as I’m concerned were their greatest films... more so, even, than their first couple of films for Irvin Thalberg at MGM. Those two films being their third and fourth features, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. Thelma is pretty brilliant in these two, especially in the former film as a gangster’s moll... she certainly fills the void left by the former and, soon back again, foil Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers’ movies.

I’d heard there was possibly some sinister side to her very early death over the years but, I thought the time was right to finally investigate it. This book lays it all out on the line, beginning with what is thought of to be either accidental death, suicide or, perhaps as likely when you ponder certain post mortem findings... murder. So the book starts at the point when the housekeeper finds her 29 year old dead body, filled with carbon monoxide and with blood on her face, in a car (also with blood in it) in a garage beneath her apartment, by the cafe she co-owned and ran. She then proceeds to tell her story from early life, where many things I didn’t know about the actress were revealed to me for the first time.

Indeed, it seemed that Thelma was no stranger to trauma, having been the sole witness, when she was just four, to her unsupervised seven year old brother being accidentally mangled to death in a machine at her local creamery. It then tells of her going into tomboy mode to please her father in the absence of his son and how she won beauty contests she wasn’t really interested in going in for that much and training to become a school teacher, before accidentally being ‘discovered’ by a husband and wife who wanted her to be in their new show. 

We then follow her as she goes from being one of the first pupil’s in Paramount’s acting school to being one of their most successful graduates... and how she got into films and how much of a beloved star she became while under contract to Hal Roach. I hadn’t realised that he’d set her up in a series of shorts partnered firstly with ZaSu Pitts and then, when Pitts didn’t get the money she wanted to continue after a period of time, in similar films partnered with Patsy Kelly. Indeed, these physical slapstick films were said to be as popular as the ones she made with comedy duo Laurel and Hardy at the time*... I had no idea (although, I will now seek them out now, for sure).

Another interesting thing about her when she was just starting out is her part in Howard Hughes’ famous movie Hell’s Angels, which, due to the very long editing and reshoot process going on for years, eventually ended up with her role falling on the cutting room floor, alas, with co-star Jean Harlow reaping the benefits from that one.

So yeah, lots more besides this and lots of stuff I didn’t know, including what an upbeat, super intelligent and kind hearted person she was. It also talks about her possible gangster connections... or rather connections she didn’t want in her life... as well as a year (the one in which she died) of death threats for money and various other things which were a huge worry to her, involving herself ‘locking down’ for a small period of her life. There’s not really any new fresh, compelling evidence to suggest that her death wasn’t accidental or a suicide but, given the comments by the police and various things said over the years by people who lived through this at the time since the case was closed, it seems a fairly likely possibility that she was murdered for refusing to let the mob start up a gambling racket in her well frequented and very successful cafe. Indeed, it’s strongly implied that director Roland West, who she was having a second, long term affair with and who co-owned the cafe with here, might have either been complicit in her demise or, possibly just hastily covered up for it (with some very contradictory testimonial he delivered in court).

It’s a short book and, if it seems a little bit like a quick read, it’s as much to do with the highly entertaining and enlightening way in which Michelle Morgan has put together and presented all the relevant facts, as much as it is to do with the brevity of Thelma’s existence, to be sure. So, as I said, a short review but, if you are interested in this iconic actress (although much less well known these days, it seems to me) then I would thoroughly recommend The Ice Cream Blonde - The Whirlwind Life And Mysterious Death Of Screwball Comedienne Thelma Todd as a good starting point for both you and your movie related book shelf. A breezy tale about a bright light snuffed out far too young. Give it a go.

*Indeed, they apparently made a cameo appearance in one of her shorts and were at her funeral.

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story

Hedy’s Hoppers

Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story
USA 2017
Directed by Alexandra Dean

Just a brief note of a review to give some praise to this film, which had a short theatrical release last year in the UK. Written and directed by Alexandra Dean, Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is a kind of love letter of a documentary to the once famous Hollywood star and is a culmination, it seems to me, of various people trying to redress the balance of a life once lived where a person's beauty and public personae was a blindfold to the true genius of the individual in question. It also reveals how the US government, it seems, cheated that star out of both reward and recognition for something which was secretly put to good use and which, when one looks at the benefits of just one of her achievements, has been a boon to mankind since the lady in question first put her mind to it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a little.

This documentary starts at her beginning, shortly after Hedy’s birth as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 and highlights the things which helped shape her personality... such as her inventiveness being due to her admiration for her father, who meant a great deal to her. Also, it mentions her experimentation with the effects of her beauty on people and her frequent visits to a local photographer to take various shots of her... many of them ‘arty’ in nature (and by arty, perhaps I also mean revealing). Then the determined pitch to be in movies in her own country which, of course, built up to her infamous nudity and orgasm scenes in Ekstase (1933).

The film also documents her various marriages including her first, to a prince, which was so stifling that she eventually slipped a sleeping draft into one of the maid’s drinks, swiped her clothes and rode off into the night on her bike to avoid discovery as she exited that marriage and then tried to get into motion pictures... at first turning down Louis B. Mayer of MGM’s offer before then hopping onto his ship going back to Hollywood (along with a load of cheaply signed starlets going with him) and ensuring she got herself noticed enough by him that she could almost name any deal she wanted. The film also documents her decline in later years, as the hardworking Hollywood ethos of drugs to keep you awake and then make you sleep, such as what was being done to many of the workers to keep them going (famously, even child actors like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney), took their toll on her personality and her status as a single mother in the 1940s. Not an easy life to live.

And, of course, the film also makes much of her brilliant invention, co-created with composer George Antheil, where she came up with the idea of frequency hopping to stabilise the course of guided torpedos and stop them from being jammed. The military turned the patent down but evidence has since come to light that they were using these ideas on their stuff all the time and, when it was later followed up to get the patent back from the Navy, the word came through that it belonged to them and they could do what they liked with it because, technically, Lamarr was an ‘alien’. This shocking attitude towards somebody who was, by this point, a lady and patriot of America. Someone who had sold unbelievable millions of dollars in war bonds for the American government due to her appearances (something which a lot of movie stars were doing at the time).

The film is presented to us by various people giving commentaries... a few of them famous movie personalities themselves such as Diane Kruger and Mel Brooks. However, the majority of the interview clips are from relations of the lady, such as her son who the film focuses on quite a bit and, surprisingly for a film of this type, from the lady herself as a reporter, who is also in the film a lot, has unearthed a lost, taped interview he conducted with Hedy many decades before and which is used as a complement to the voice-over narrative on the film. So you do hear a lot of her, ‘in her own words’, so to speak, looking back over her life.

The film is pretty interesting and just about varied enough in its execution and enthusiasm not to get dull and to hold the interest throughout. Much is obviously made of her unique invention of ‘frequency hopping’, which is used as the basis for mobile phone technology, bluetooth, satellite navigation etc and all that stuff is really interesting. All that being said, though, we don’t get to hear about many of her other inventions throughout the documentary and I really wanted to know more... although I think the cooling cube which she thought of as a failure due to information she was unaware of about the difference in water between various states, was a pretty cool idea. I mean, she was so often coming up with stuff that her friend Howard Hughes set her up with a miniature version of his own laboratory when she thought up the concept of swept back wings to help make his planes go faster, after doing a bit of research on fish and birds (which is deftly illustrated in this film)... so it would be really nice to see what else she was dreaming up.

Jeremy Bullock and Keegan DeWitt’s score is a little like the music of Philip Glass in its approach and that’s not a bad thing... but everybody seems to be trying to sound like Glass or sometimes Nyman in their documentary movies these days and it seems a shame that this is the only kind of score we are getting for these kinds of things at the moment. That being said, you can’t fault it and I would have quickly plonked down the money for a CD of this thing, had one been available.

Well, I said this was a short review and I wasn’t lying. Bombshell - The Hedy Lamarr Story is extremely entertaining and informative, at least to the point where it whets your appetite and makes you want to go and read one of the books currently available about the lady. On the surface it would seem that this is not the most likely subject for a documentary movie but, once you step back and think about the import of Ms. Lamarr’s contribution and her legacy to the world we live in, it does make you stop and think how long it would have taken for somebody else to come up with the idea. Definitely worth a watch as this lady’s story deserves to be better known. 

Diamonds Are Forever

Of Ice And Men

Diamonds Are Forever
1971 UK
Directed by Guy Hamilton
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

Okay... so despite the previous film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, being the all time, drop dead, greatest Bond movie ever made... it did poorly at the box office and through one reason or another, and there are a few conflicting reports as to why, neither the director/editor Peter Hunt, nor the previous film’s Bond (George Lazenby) returned to the franchise again... although Lazenby did briefly recreate his Bond role for the 1983 TV special The Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E (the U.N.C.L.E series already had ties to Ian Fleming and Bond, of course, as highlighted in my review of Goldfinger here).

The next film, Diamonds Are Forever, sees Guy Hamilton, the director of Goldfinger, return to the series and, as I’ve said before, it’s my least favourite of the EON produced Connery films in the series, although I have to say I enjoyed it rather more with this latest viewing than with any of my previous times. Having said that, though, I believe I really liked it when I was about 6 years old and saw it in a double bill at the cinema with another Bond movie. For some reason the ending always stuck in my mind, where gay killers Wyntt and Kidd, as played by Bruce Glover and Putter Smith, return at the end to kill Bond and instead, find themselves in a heap of trouble (Glover is the father of Crispin Glover, of course, and you can really see the family resemblance).

This film has a few nice moments including a start that follows on directly from the previous movie... but fails big time at maintaining that continuity by having the main protagonist and antagonist played by different actors... Sean Connery returning to the role of Bond for one more film and Charles Gray, who played Henderson in You Only Live Twice, playing Blofeld and, in the process, managing to look nothing like Blofeld... so I don’t know how that was supposed to work.

Although it’s my least favourite EON Connery Bond movie, he does seem rather more enthusiastic in the role once more (unlike his sluggish performance in his previous Bond film, You Only Live Twice. In fact, right from the hard hitting revenge mission of this film’s roving pre-credits sequence, Bond seems to have been written just a little bit more vicious and uncompromising than he had been in the previous films... including a sexist, more misogynistic  undertone to the character that some audiences will be less tolerant of. However, that does all work in favour of the Bond personality (while perhaps getting a little more away from the books than he should have) and this kind of hard, damaged edge to the character helps you believe in him a little more as a man of action, someone who really could kill someone and not give a damn about it, than some of his previous films, and certainly more so than a couple of his later “actor incarnations” would be able to do.

I seem to remember the money ran out big time in the middle of production of this movie and stories such as the ending having been more elaborate but then cheapened down to, what seems to me to be, a somewhat muddled finale on an oil rig and the fact that Broccoli got a huge load of interiors loaned to him by his “old pal” Howard Hughes (already a recluse at the time) tend to take on somewhat legendary proportions among followers of Bond on film. The shoot can’t have been that fun either as there are some definite “fixes” in the edit and also, during the car chase scenes, you will see crowds of people all cordoned off on the streets to watch the action... not good.

However, you do have a superb cast including Jill St. John as the appropriately named Tiffany Case and Bruce Cabot, Hollywood veteran of such classic films as The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds Of Zaroff), the original King Kong and its sequel, Son Of Kong. It also originally had a little scene featuring Sammy Davis Jr and I have no idea why the producers felt it right to cut that scene out. Surely his name on the marquee would have got more people to feed the box office? The scene still survives and is included as an extra in pretty much every DVD and BluRay edition of the film that’s been out, as far as I know. Famous UK based American actors Ed Bishop and Shane Rimmer, who seem to have become regulars in the series in a small way, are also on hand for people who like to play “spot the return actors in minor roles”.

All in all it’s not a terrible movie and the John Barry score to this one is an absolute gem. For years I remembered it as his weakest score for the series, based on my experiences with first the vinyl LP record of the score (which was used big time, along with the LP of Shafts Big Score, needle dropped onto the soundtrack of the Turkish superhero team up movie, Captain America and Santo vs. Spider-Man) and then from the original CD release. However, contrary to what those original score releases would have you believe, it is a fantastic musical achievement and further evidence of that can be found on the expanded re-release edition of a few years back. This is now definitely one of my favourite albums in the series (you can programme out some of the muzak from the earlier incarnation if you are so inclined) with the Wyntt and Kidd leitmotif in particular, standing out as a solid Barry classic.

If you are a long term fan of the Bond series then you should have a little fun with this one and there is enough in it, including a wonderful portrayal of Howard Hughes, renamed Willard Whyte, by actor Jimmy Dean (no, not that one!), to keep you amused and having a good time. You can even play spot the director in a few scenes. However, if Bond is not your thing and you haven’t seen one before, I really wouldn’t recommend you start off on this one... it just doesn’t hold up as well as the other EON produced Connery vehicles, I’m afraid.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E