King Solomon's Mines (1950)

A while back I did a couple of posts, Swoon-worthy Actors and Phonebook Actresses. Two stars that I neglected to put on either list out of sheer stupidity were Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. I've always loved Granger ever since I saw Young Bess, years ago. I even did a tribute to his legs a while back. How could I forget him? And Kerr is such a solid actress. I love her in comedy (the two she made with Cary Grant are slight , but entertaining) and drama (From Here to Eternity, Night of the Iguana) which is a rarity. I adore her in Vacation from Marriage and Affair to Remember where she gets to do a bit of both. So to make up for this oversight, I'm posting on yet another fifties movie, King Solomon's Mines, which stars Granger and Kerr.

This is a straight-forward action picture with a bit of romance. The story follows an English woman (Kerr) who hires hunter, Alan Quartermain(Granger) to find her treasure hunting husband who has gone AWOL in Africa. I watched this with my husband and the boy and they both loved it, too. At one point my husband went upstairs to check on the roast and came back ten minutes later. It took me a couple of minutes to summarize all the plot points he'd missed. With such a busy script this could have easily been a confused, over-blown mess. Yet, the basic journey motif keeps it all hanging together. Do characters drop in and out? Why, yes. Character development? Hardly any, unless you count Deborah Kerr cutting her hair. There are countless scenes of Granger rescuing Kerr from danger to be followed by an awkward moment when they seem like they might kiss. It's not so much a romance as a series of awkward moments.



























I don't really mind these flaws though. This is a piece of spectacle and it excels at that. It is a big budget, highly proficient film made about an Africa that simply doesn't exist anymore, and probably never did anyway. The movie opens with Quatermain hunting elephants with a bunch of spoiled rich people. If there were any pro-Elephant hunting people left in the world, this movie would change their minds. The access to animals on the scale shown in this movie is pretty much never going to happen again. There is a long sequence of a stampede that had the intended effect of bowling me over. The native people in the film are presented in a way which was fairly unoffensive even today. Native actors Kimursi and Siriaque are especially memorable. Their tribes are shown with at least a minimal attempt at accuracy. I'm not going to go so far as to say they weren't exploited for the film , because I don't know but none of the usual savage stereotypes that plagued 1930s films of this genre are present. The worst you can say is that the film focuses too much on the white people. It plays like a technicolor, live action National Geographic photo essay. It's not exactly anthropology and it's not exactly high art, but it has an edutainment value.

I've often seen this film listed as among the inspirations for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The emphasis is on travelogue, not treasure hunting. When they are in the mines and there is a booby trap with at least one big, round obviously fake bolder. I could also see Quartermaine as a forerunner to Indiana Jones. He has a trademark hat and he wears khaki pants. He hates dragging women along but that is Victorian chauvenism. Indy doesn't like to bring women along because he such a commitment-phobe that it might seem like going steady with a gal if he talks to her more than twice. On second thought, maybe those are both the exact same reason!

One final note, for those playing along at home, Stewart Granger's legs do make an appearance in the film, but just barely. Thanks to all those jungle thorns his pants eventually get completely torn to shreds leaving just strips that occasionally offer a peek at those Granger Gams. Hooray! Sorry I couldn't make screen caps. You'll just have to trust me on this one, people. Speaking of legs, Deborah Kerr gets to wear gauchos in this movie. Kerr's gauchos are not quite in the same class as Susan Hayward's in Garden of Evil, but they'll do.

I'm Henry the VIIIth, I am

Once while driving across Iowa during a summer storm, I looked out my window and saw the corn, as high as an SUV's eye, swirling in an ominous cyclonic pattern. My radio which was tuned to the AM weather band, cut out. The air was thick and had a pea green cast and I was certain that I was going to be picked up any moment and hurled to Oz or my death. Suddenly, my radio came back on loudly playing Herman's Hermits "Henry the VIIIth I am." I'm going to die, I thought and the last thing I hear is going to be this ridiculous song. No sooner did this register in my fear paralized brain than my Isuzu Trooper past a line of trees, a shelter belt around a graveyard, and the cyclonic wind stopped. A wall of rain hit the car and the radio returned to static. I drove blindly, my wipers barely keeping up with the rain somehow knowing that I'd escaped the tornado and pondering the significance of a radio signal trapped in weather pattern. Perhaps, I'd merely dreamed the whole thing, like Dorothy.

I bring this up because I recently heard that Alexander Korda got the idea for making his film The Private Life of Henry the VIIIth (1933) when a cab driver began whistling "Henry the VIIIth I am" well known in music halls before Herman's Hermits took it to the rest of the planet, including Iowa. I wonder, what was the weather was like outside that London cab? Raining like mad, I'd bet anything.

There is another, contradictory tale, about Korda that says that he got the idea for the film while standing under the famous Holbein portrait of the monarch and realizing that he looked a lot like Charles Laughton. I doubt this version of the tale, since Life magazine published a photo of Korda, and Laughton co-star Robert Donat standing underneath that same picture in 1948. Either Life set out to recreate this moment of inspiration or people are remembering a picture they saw and attaching more significance to it than it warrants.

I recently rewatched both of Charles Laughton's performances as Henry the VIII in Private Life and Young Bess (1953) and I'm positive that I assigned a lot more significance to the later performance than it warrants the first half dozen times I watched it. If I believed in guilt I would list Young Bess as definitely among my guilty pleasures having loved the movie for years for it's absurd dialog, Stewart Granger's legs and Charles Laughton's huffing and puffing Henry. His first Henry is tender, childlike and whimsical when he's not lopping off heads, his second is more a collection of tics and catch phrases than a flesh and blood character. I'm sorry to say this, because I love it anyway. It's not just that the movie is so bad it's good, it's that sometimes it's so good, it's good. I love the way that Laughton always stands as if he's straddling and imaginary globe and how Jean Simmons imitates this stance at every opportunity. I love that Bess and Tom (Stewart Granger) always discuss ships and they make talk of mizzen masts and gunwales sound downright naughty. I love the sentimental portrayal of the relationship between boy King Edward and Bess which has more of a basis in the demands of injecting phony "family values" into 1950s movies than with historical reality. (Not that anything in either of the movies is much more than malarkey in that respect. It's not so much what they get wrong, which is quite a lot, it's the over-simplification and over-dramatization of what they get right. Why is that in every movie about Henry the VIIIth he is always out hunting when Elizabeth was born? I've never been able to figure out where that comes from, other than costume drama tradition. )

Lots of actors have played the infamous king, from Richard Burton in Anne of a Thousand Days to Jonathan Rhys Myers in the recent television series The Tudors and most have brought something new to the character, but Charles Laughton pretty much made the template. Far and away my favorite Hank 8 flick is The Private life of Henry VIII (1933). I always think of it as a comedy, though it's usually billed as drama (I guess all those ladies loosing their heads isn't as funny as I think.) The biggest delight is the relationship between Henry and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves (Laughton's wife, Elsa Lanchester). The pair have great comic timing with one another and despite their divorce Anne ends up being the only wife to remain on friendly terms with her notorious ex. Much of the drama is provided by Henry's fifth wife Katherine Howard (Binnie Barnes) and her lover Thomas Culpeper (Robert Donat). Barnes portrayal is an interesting one, managing to strike a balance between seeming sympathetic and overly ambitious at the cost of her life and her lovers. Donat is great as usual and one gets the feeling that the kind is more hurt by his old friend's betrayal than he is by loosing another wife. The movie ends on an up note with an elderly king henpecked into hiding his turkey legs from sharp-eyed Katherine Parr (Everly Gregg). Merle Oberon has a surprisingly small part as Anne Boleyn, whose story is perhaps too long and complex for the length of the film.

Eye Candy of the Day: A Tribute to Stewart Granger's legs

Vivian Leigh checks out Granger's legs in Caesar and Cleopatra.

Some actors have memorable voices, soul-piercing eyes or unforgettable dimples. Some never miss an opportunity to take off their shirt, roll up their sleeves, unbutton their collar or some other shameless trick to show off their torso.

Stewart Granger looked really good without pants. It's not every actor who can appear in tights on not look silly. Olivier could manage it. He had the gravitas and nice legs. For my money, no one really can touch Stewart Granger for excellence sans pantalons. From his first pants-less role as Apollodorus in Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) to the David Lee Roth tights in Scaramouch (1952) to the thigh high boots he wore in Young Bess (1953) and Prisoner of Zenda (1952) his legs were out there on display, walking away with all the glory.