The Ideal Hawksian Woman: His Girl Friday

"He treats me like a woman."

"He does, does he? How did I treat you, like a water buffalo?"

Some twenty-eight years ago, the American Film Institute started cranking out a series of "best of" lists of American films from the century that was then coming to a close, beginning in 1998 with its compendium of top movies. They called it "100 Years . . . 100 Movies." A jury of a thousand people in the "creative industries," mainly film, selected the landmark motion pictures from a few hundred nominees. Other categories followed over the next ten years, including "100 Stars," "100 Laughs," "100 Songs," "100 Musicals," etc. It was basically a big publicity stunt, a protracted "Hooray for Hollywood" commercial, which, I suppose, was a good thing. It got people talking about classic American movies, after all. 

Naturally, though, when there's a ranking of something subjective, a lot of people are going to disagree with a lot of the results--and of course, a lot of people did. Plus, some of the individuals selected to serve on the jury were questionable choices, to say the least; President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were on the jury for "100 Movies"--come on!

The list that probably bugged me the most (I stopped paying attention after the first three or four were announced) was "100 Years . . . 100 Laughs," which purportedly represented the 100 best comedies in the history of American cinema. What makes a good comedy is, perhaps, more subjective than is the case with most other genres, due to the wide range of styles (good and bad) and story permutations (good and bad) that can be considered comedic, based on the tastes and sensibilities of any given viewer. It's almost ludicrous, for instance, that a movie as sophisticated and urbane as The Thin Man could be compared to one as intentionally sophomoric and crass as the satirical Blazing Saddles; or that a film as dryly humorous and existentialist as The Graduate could be pitted against the comic anarchy of the near-nihilistic Duck Soup. Maybe there should be subgenres within the genre of comedy. Or better yet, maybe there should be no pat classifications of films at all. 

Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Seven Year Itch (1955).

One of the things I found most perturbing about the AFI comedy list was the choice for #1: Some Like it Hot. Yes, it's a funny movie. But the funniest? It has an engaging story that's well-paced, Jack Lemmon's performance is typically memorable, and Tony Curtis' Cary Grant imitation is amusing. But it really doesn't deliver enough big laughs to warrant a "best ever" ranking, which made me wonder how and why such a film could be chosen by a jury of so many presumably diverse people for the top spot. I've since come to the conclusion that two factors more than likely gave it the extra boost that ultimately pushed it to the peak position: its screenwriter-director and one of its stars. First, Billy Wilder, who was in his nineties and the elder statesman of screenwriters and directors, was benefitting from a rediscovery/reassessment among film scholars, which would culminate the following year with journalist/filmmaker Cameron Crowe's book Conversations with Wilder--irony of ironies, America's most cynical writer-director had become beloved. Second, the forever trendily tragic Marilyn Monroe was showcased in it. 

My Choice? I don't claim to have enough cinematic knowledge or erudition to say it's the best, but my favorite comedy was directed by a more straightforward storyteller than Wilder and starred as its female lead an actress of wider range than Monroe's, with more sophisticated sex appeal. And instead of an actor who imitated Cary Grant, it had the real deal. My choice came in at a respectable but, IMHO, unjustly insufficient #19 on AFI's list. 

His Girl Friday, released in 1940, was written by Charles Lederer (with a big assist from uncredited cowriter Howard Hawks), who adapted the screenplay from Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play (and 1931 film), The Front Page, about a couple of hard-edged newspapermen, Walter Burns and Hildebrand "Hildy" Johnson, who were parting ways after years of journalistic partnership and combative friendship. It was directed by Hawks, whose idea it was to change the Hildy Johnson character from a male to a female (Hildegard), and to make her Burns' ex-wife--revisions that turned an inspired script into cinematic brilliance. 

Hailed as an auteur by cutting edge French film critics in the early 1950s, the stoic Hawks may have been the quintessential American filmmaker. A product of the Hollywood system and a veteran of cinema whose career began back in silent pictures, Hawks believed that the ability to tell a story well was what made a director good. And he didn't use that word, "good," lightly--to him, it described a person who did their job skillfully and adroitly, attributes that nearly all of his leading characters had in common throughout his career. It was also an apt description of Hawks, who was himself the consummate, dependable professional. 

Hawks' contemporary in the directorial field, John Ford, like Shakespeare, was acutely aware of how tenuous the boundary separating comedy and tragedy is, and Hawks seems to be telegraphing that paradoxical relationship in His Girl Friday, in which the two extremes intermingle ominously. One moment we'll laugh out loud, but in the next we're reminded of what's happening in the story: a man named Earl Williams (portrayed by John Qualen), who may or may not have committed a murder due to temporary insanity, is scheduled to be hanged in the morning, thanks to the political opportunism of the city's corrupt mayor (Clarence Kolb) and the inept but equally corrupt sheriff (Gene Lockhart), both of whom are running for re-election. Everyone around Williams--the warden, a self-absorbed psychiatrist, the sheriff, the mayor, and the "gentlemen of the press"--are coldly indifferent to his plight, carrying on as they would if it were any other day, for any other job. In fact, there's quite a bit of cruelty in HGF, from the callous gallows humor of the members of the Fourth Estate to the casual insensitivity of the government officials to the disrespectful, disposable way Walter (Grant) treats nearly everyone. That may to some degree be a result of Hawks' penchant for cool, detached professionalism, but it could also be a nod to that fine line between comedy and tragedy that we live with nearly every day but do our best not to think about. 

Walter, Bruce, and Hildy.

Hildy (Rosalind Russell), Walter's ex-wife and a topnotch "newspaperman," is leaving him and The Morning Post (the newspaper he runs) so that she can remarry and retire to a pastoral life upstate in Albany with her betrothed, a milquetoast insurance salesman named Bruce Baldwin (deftly played by Ralph Bellamy, who essentially reprises his role in Leo McCarey's scintillating 1937 screwball comedy The Awful Truth, which also starred Grant). Walter ostensibly needs Hildy to do an interview with Williams before the controversial hanging as she and Bruce are due to catch the northbound train, but he has an ulterior motive of winning her back--professionally and possibly romantically--by baiting her with this big story, which her inherent love of journalism won't allow her to refuse to write. But just in case, as time is of the essence, Walter plays on Bruce's sympathies, manipulating him into persuading Hildy to stay long enough to do the interview and write the story ("Hildy, we could take the 6 o'clock train if it'd save a man's life!"). 

Only Cary Grant could play a cunning, white collar scoundrel in a position of power and somehow not only manage to be incredibly funny but also maintain a level of likeability, and he does just that in HGF. Part of the reason we're willing to forgive him for being such a "stinker" (aside from his sheer charisma--it is Cary Grant) is because the woman he needs to have in his orbit can give as good as she gets from him. Over his 35-year career in movies, Grant shared the screen with some very talented female costars, among them Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Ingrid Bergman, and Doris Day, but none ignited anything like the firecracker onscreen chemistry that Rosalind Russell created with him in HGF. In the tradition of strong Howard Hawks leading ladies, Russell's quick-witted, sharp-tongued Hildy Johnson is not only capable of going toe-to-toe with the self-interested and charmingly brutish Walter Burns, she's also the best writer in a press room filled with the top beat writers (all of them men) in the city. She's good; her counterparts at the rival newspapers know it and they respect her for it. She's "one of the boys" in the best possible sense, in an era when such a thing was all but impossible, yet she maintains an appealingly sensitive and sensuous femininity. 

Hildy with fellow reporters: one of the boys.

Williams: "I'm not Guilty. It's just--just the world!"

But Hildy also possesses a bit of Walter's manipulative nature. After bribing the prison warden so she can get an exclusive interview with Williams in his cell, she craftily steers Williams' responses in a direction that will serve the type of story she has already decided she's going to write. While her machinations are designed to free Williams, her ultimate goal (and Burns') is to unseat the corrupt mayor and sheriff. While Hildy has a more humane (read: feminine) side, she and Walter are nevertheless two of a kind; they belong together. Poor nice guy Bruce doesn't stand a chance. On top of all that, she's physically tough-as-nails enough to chase down and tackle (in 1940s high heels) the fleeing warden, to get a scoop from him after Williams inexplicably escaped from police custody. It's almost unfathomable, but Russell was something like the sixth choice to play Hildy--a role she seems to have been born to play. 

The Sound and the Fury: “Rocket 88" at 75

Jackie Brenston / Ike Turner handbill, April 1951. 

The pivotal rhythm & blues hit "Rocket 88" was recorded and released in March of 1951--75 years ago.* Many music writers and historians consider it to be the first rock 'n' roll record, though whether it was or not is entirely subjective. The form had been gestating for several years, perhaps decades, and there's really no way to pinpoint a "first." With forerunners dating back at least to the mid-1940s--Sister Rosetta Tharpe's "Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944), Louis Jordan's "Caldonia" (1945), Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right" (1946), Roy Brown's "Good Rockin' Tonight" (1947) and Wynonie Harris' more upbeat cover of same (1948), Jimmy Preston's "Rock the Joint" (1949), Fats Domino's "The Fat Man" (recorded in 1949 and released in 1950), and a few others--the field is wide open for potentially legitimate claims to the title of The First Rock 'n' Roll Record. 

*According to author and critic Peter Guralnick, the disputed recording date was March 7 and the record was released three weeks later. 

Oldsmobile "Rocket" 88 print ad, circa 1951.

Named after a then-popular model of Oldsmobile that's now widely regarded as the original "muscle car," "Rocket 88," performed by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (actually Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm--more on that later), is basically a revved-up rhythm & blues / jump blues number on high octane. The lyrics are sexually suggestive, a practice that would become fairly common in the just-over-the-horizon rock 'n' roll genre, but it was nothing new to the world of popular music (e.g., Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, et al.), let alone the blues tradition of employing creative euphemisms. The record was certainly an early influence on rock 'n' roll. And when listened to chronologically alongside other early 1950s #1 songs on Billboard's R&B chart, it stands out sonically and viscerally. The effect can almost be compared to the way the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" sounds in the context of its early '60s Billboard Hot 100 #1 predecessors. It was definitely a game changer. At 75, it still motors along with a fresh, rambunctious, furious energy. 

Here's what the song's co-writer, Ike Turner, had to say about it in a later interview: 

"I don't think that 'Rocket 88' is rock 'n' roll. I think that 'Rocket 88' is R&B, but I think 'Rocket 88' is the cause of rock 'n' roll existing . . .  [producer] Sam Phillips got [radio DJ] Dewey Phillips to play 'Rocket 88' on his program--and this is like the first black record to be played on a white radio station--and, man, all the white kids broke out to the record shops to buy it. So that's when Sam Phillips got the idea, 'Well, man, if I get me a white boy to sound like a black boy, then I got me a gold mine,' which is the truth. So, that's when he got Elvis and he got Jerry Lee Lewis and a bunch of other guys and so they named it rock 'n' roll rather than R&B and so this is the reason I think rock 'n' roll exists--not that 'Rocket 88' was the first one, but that was what caused the first one." 

However you categorize it, this was a historically significant, highly influential record. Little Richard borrowed from it for his 1958 hit "Good Golly, Miss Molly," for one, while the distorted guitar sound anticipated the fuzzbox, which became popular when the recording was rediscovered in the 1960s (think the Beatles' "Think for Yourself"). Nick Tosches wrote that, though "Rocket 88" could not be described as the first rock 'n' roll record "any more than there is any first modern novel--the fact remains that the record in question was possessed of a sound and a fury the shear, utter newness of which set it apart from what had come before." 

The label credit denotes that "Rocket 88" (stylized as Rocket "88") was performed by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, but in reality, while Brenston sang the vocal and played tenor saxophone, the band was Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, with Ike on piano and the famous distorted guitar played by Willie Kizart.* The raw, careening tenor sax solos were blown by 17-year-old Raymond Hill. Willie "Bad Boy" Sims was behind the drum kit. Brenston and Turner co-wrote the song, the melody of which, Brenston said, was based on that of "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins (1947). Varying accounts have the song being rehearsed at the Riverside Hotel in Clarksdale, Mississippi, written on the way from Mississippi to the recording session in Memphis (Memphis Recording Service), or crafted while in the studio. Sam Phillips, who soon after founded the famous Sun Records with royalties earned from "Rocket 88" (Brenston sold his half of the rights to him), was the producer; he licensed the song, along with the B-side, "Come Back Where You Belong," to the recently established Chess Records in Chicago for commercial release. Turner blamed Phillips for botching the label credits in the process of delivering the master recording to Chess. 

*As the story goes, the guitar amplifier was damaged when the band was changing a flat tire on Highway 61 en route from Mississippi to Memphis to record the song. After arriving at the studio, wadded newspapers were stuffed inside the amp's housing in an effort to keep the broken woofer cone in place. The unintentional result was a distorted guitar sound, which Phillips liked and thus left on the recording. 

The mid-1950s incarnation of Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm. Jackie Brenston is in the back row, far left; Raymond Hill is to the right of him. Turner, wearing a white jacket, is in the center.

Following the Success of "Rocket 88"--it spent three weeks atop the Billboard R&B chart, plus two at the top of their Most Played Juke Box R&B Records chart--there was a clash of egos between Turner and Brenston, resulting in Brenston leaving the band to go solo, then joining Lowell Fulson's group. He returned to the Kings of Rhythm a couple of years later, with Turner allegedly barring him from singing "Rocket 88." By the 1970s, Brenston had left the music business. Ike became a session musician, a production assistant for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio (as well as the Bihari brothers at Modern/RPM Records), and a freelance talent scout, discovering, among others, Howlin' Wolf, Little Junior Parker, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Little Milton. In 1956, he met aspiring singer Ann Bullock, who by the early 1960s he had made the lead singer and star of his band, under the stage name Tina. Ike and Tina were married in 1962 and proceeded to write another chapter of R&B / rock 'n' roll history.

The 1954 Essex reissue of Bill Haley's version of "Rocket 88," originally released on Holiday Records in 1951.

An original Chess pressing of "Rocket 88" on 7-inch 45 or 10-inch 78 is something of a holy grail among record collectors. Bill Haley & His Comets (then called Bill Haley & the Saddlemen) covered the song, country swing / rockabilly style, in June of 1951 on Holiday--that record is also much-sought-after by collectors. 

© Jon Oye, 2026 

Records and print ad are from my personal collection. 

Brenston/Turner "Rocket 88" handbill photo source. 

Ike Turner and His Kings of Rhythm photo source. 

1965-66: Bob Dylan and the Birth of Rock Sans Roll

You don't have it? That is perverse, don't tell anybody you don't own f*****g Blonde on Blonde!

--Barry Judd, High Fidelity

A linguistic conceit that I started to notice in my youth was the term "golden age," which was casually and frequently employed by adults, particularly in the media, to describe what they perceived to have been a better time in the not-too-distant past. Aside from politics, you don't hear it as much anymore.* In the late 1960s, for example, the "golden age of baseball" meant the 1920s of Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby; by the 1970s, it had become the 1930s of Lou Gehrig and Dizzy Dean. Hollywood's golden age was considered the 1930s--especially 1939, the year of The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and the then-excessively beloved epic, Gone with the Wind. The golden age of radio was the 1930s and pre-TV 1940s. The golden age of television referred to that medium's embryonic years--the late '40s and early '50s--when the likes of Uncle Miltie, Sid Caesar, Howdy Doody, and Lucy ruled the ever-growing number of small screens in homes throughout America; later, it alluded to TV across the entire decade of the 1950s. 

*An apparent exception is in the world of comic book collecting, about which I admittedly know next to nothing.

The origins of the phrase date back to ancient Greece and the works of the 8th century B.C. poet Hesiod, who envisioned the history of humanity up to that point as being encompassed in five ages, the first of which was the Golden Age: a time of peace, happiness, prosperity, and harmony with nature and the gods. Historians later utilized the concept to delineate eras or epochs throughout human history when certain civilizations or nations enjoyed a level of cultural, scientific, or economic prominence or enlightenment that is seldom realized. Like the Renaissance. However, Ada Palmer, a Renaissance scholar at the University of Chicago, claims that such golden ages have never really existed, that they were only myths propagated by various powers that be through the years, often for political reasons. 

The Greek poet Hesiod, from a 3rd century mosaic by Monnus.

Anyway, that late 20th century perception of "golden age" that I recall from my younger days also applied to popular music. Bear with me here. 

In the 1970s, when a wave of 1950s nostalgia hit the public and struck a chord with the Silent Generation--those born from roughly the late 1920s to the mid-1940s--the "golden age of rock 'n' roll" referred to the mid-to-late '50s. Suddenly, performers who had become passé in the "Swingin' Sixties," like Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Jerry Lee Lewis--the accepted founders of rock 'n' roll--were en vogue once again. Beginning sometime later, though, as baby boomers reached middle age, that 1950s golden age of rock 'n' roll was marginalized and eventually nearly forgotten in favor of the era that spawned what is now called "classic rock," which apparently currently represents the genre's golden age.* As Oscar Levant said, "Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember." 

*I've never known Gen-Xers to use terminology like "golden age," but have heard more than a few members of that self-consciously cynical cohort wax nostalgic about the '90s. 

1950s nostalgia on 1970s TV: Love and the Television Set (top photo), an unsold pilot that takes place in the early 1950s (TV's "golden age"), aired on the ABC anthology show Love, American Style in 1972. It was reset in the late 1950s (rock 'n' roll's "golden age") as Happy Days (bottom photo), which premiered on ABC in 1974 and became one of the most successful sitcoms of the decade.

Similarly marginalized in more recent years is the pop-rock music of the mid-1960s, a brief but visionary epoch seemingly stifled by a general enthusiasm for what immediately followed it: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Monterey Pop Festival, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, the rise of FM radio and prog rock, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cream, the Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, et al.--the dawn of classic rock. Since the 1980s, give or take, the late 1960s through the 1970s has represented, thanks to the commercial engines that tend to drive our perception of popular culture, the de facto golden age of rock. A lot of great music came out of that decade-or-so. Yet I can think of no more innovative, creative, and interesting time in the history of the genre since Elvis, Scotty, and Bill got together with Sam Phillips than the ~fifteen-month stretch that predated the perceived classic rock era: roughly from the summer of 1965 into the fall of 1966. Before that fleeting but wildly transformative span of time, there was rock 'n' roll. Afterwards, it was rock. 

I love the pop, R&B, and rock 'n' roll of the late '50s-early '60s, but the radical conversion that young people's music underwent mid-decade was the creative equivalent of going from suborbital flight to space travel, and it appears to have been denied its place in pop culture history. It was then that popular music, fueled by the social, political, and cultural turmoil that was brewing at the time (in some cases with an assist from mind-altering chemicals) started being about something more than just romantic love. 

The Beatles at the New Musical Express Annual Poll-Winners' All-Star Concert at the Empire Pool in Wembley, London on May 1, 1966. It would be their final scheduled live performance in Great Britain. 

Consider the following. Bob Dylan released the rock benchmark LP Highway 61 Revisited (whose centerpiece was the revolutionary single, "Like a Rolling Stone") in August of 1965. The Beatles' Help! came out in the same month. The Yardbirds' Having a Rave Up hit the streets in November. Rubber Soul, a Beatles turning point, was out on December 3rd, as was the Who's debut LP, My Generation, followed later that month by the Byrds' second highly influential folk-rock long-player, Turn! Turn! Turn! Simon and Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence and the hard-rocking, blues-driven Them Again both appeared in January of 1966. The Rolling Stones' first all-self-composed LP, Aftermath, came out in April and the Beach Boys' transcendent masterpiece Pet Sounds arrived in May. Dylan's double-LP pièce de résistance, Blonde on Blonde, dropped in June.* The Yardbirds' "Roger the Engineer" (US title: Over Under Sideways Down) and John Mayall's Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton both emerged in July, as did the Byrds' third consecutive great album, the proto-psychedelic Fifth Dimension. Then came the Beatles' game-changing Revolver (its UK incarnation is, in my opinion, their best) in early August--not to mention their May 1966 single, "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" (the B-side of which in particular explored new sonic territory). And the Kinks' Face to Face hit the streets in late October, with Buffalo Springfield's self-titled first LP following closely on its heels. Not only were these extraordinary records (and timeless ones--most still sound fresh and vital today), but nearly all of them were also steps forward creatively for their respective artists, in an era that was off the charts as far as breaking new musical ground. 

*For some reason, the U.S. release date of Blonde on Blonde was long thought to have been May 16, 1966 (coincidentally--or not--the day Pet Sounds was released), but evidence shows that it was out no earlier than late June.

The Rolling Stones pose for the UK cover of Aftermath in early 1966. Photo by Guy Webster.

The Black music scene was arguably more vibrant than it had ever been, outside of the jazz world. James Brown was still proving he was The Hardest Working Man in Show Business, touring relentlessly and releasing three LPs between November 1965 and March 1966. Berry Gordy's Motown hit factory was possibly at its peak, with Stevie Wonder (Uptight, May '66) and Marvin Gaye (Moods of Marvin Gaye, also May '66) moving forward creatively, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles releasing the hit laden Going to a Go-Go (November '65), and the Supremes ("I Hear a Symphony," "You Can't Hurry Love") and the Temptations ("Beauty is Only Skin Deep," "(I Know) I'm Losing You") at or near their zeniths in popularity. Gloria Jones, whose 1960s recordings would fuel the Northern Soul movement in England in the early 1970s, released her first album, Come Go with Me, in 1966. Artists at the Atlantic and Stax-Volt labels, like Otis Redding (Otis Blue, September '65 and The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, October '66) and Wilson Pickett (The Exciting Wilson Pickett, August '66) et al., were enjoying heydays (Aretha Franklin was still about a year away from stardom), helping establish soul music as a commercial as well as an artistic presence to be reckoned with. 

The first album by Northern Soul pioneer Gloria Jones was issued in 1966.

Return of the Prodigal Band: Beggars Banquet

 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

—Matthew 5:13

Nineteen sixty-seven had not been kind to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones were all arrested on drug charges between February and May, and their year-end LP, Their Satanic Majesties Request—an uncharacteristically trendy foray into psychedelia (hey, everybody was doing it)—was roundly lambasted in the press as an anemic attempt at imitating the Beatles’ game-changing Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released that summer. Critic Jon Landau, writing for Rolling Stone magazine, called Majesties “an insecure album in which [the Stones] try too hard to prove that they too are innovators, and that they too can say something new. [. . .] The new ideas are presented in such an undeveloped state that they do not achieve a valid identity of their own.” (Today, Majesties doesn't sound all that bad—it was probably just a matter of poor timing that sentenced it to its undeserved but lingering reputation of being the poster child for rock and roll missteps.)

Prior to the drug busts and Satanic Majesties came Between the Buttons, in January—an album that isn’t without its merits (both in its UK and US iterations), but which suffers somewhat from an overall feel of vacillation and irresolution. It’s as though the band self-consciously tried to absorb as many contemporary influences as possible,* but rather than properly digesting and repurposing those sounds in their own Stones-like image, they only slightly reprocessed them, resulting in an album that comes off as a scattershot semi-entity, some aspects of which sound even more dated today than Majesties.

*Especially the Kinks. Oddly, though, other than the (psychedelicized) Bo Diddley-influenced “Please Go Home,” there’s not much trace of the blues or R&B—hitherto the Stones' raisons d’être. 

As had been the case in 1967, the Stones didn't completely avoid trouble in 1968, a year that is remembered primarily for its violence, assassinations, and political and racial unrest. Their August single, “Street Fighting Man,” was purportedly inspired by an anti-war rally at London's US embassy, in which Jagger had participated, as well as protests in the U.S. that had turned violent, though Keith Richards claimed a couple of years later, “it really is ambiguous as a song.” The 45 was released in the States within a week of the clash between police and protesters outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, fearing the song might incite further violence, several Chicago radio stations refused to play it. Fueling the flames, the picture sleeve featured a photo of police apparently kicking a fallen demonstrator at a political rally; the sleeve was quickly withdrawn and is now a collector's item. 

It wouldn’t be the last time that year that the Stones would have to bend to The Establishment’s perception of propriety. The cover art for their next album, Beggars Banquet, was initially slated to be a photo of a grimy public restroom, complete with toilet, and its graffiti-covered walls. At the behest of the record company, and despite a dispute from the Stones, the released cover would instead end up being a simple white mock banquet invitation.*

*The cover as it was originally intended was finally released on a reissue of the LP in the 1980s, as well as CD releases.

The proposed original cover for Beggars Banquet.

In the spring the Stones had convened at Olympic Studios in London with Jimmy Miller—the producer of their latest single and bona fide rock classic, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”—in tow to record Beggars Banquet, an album that would herald a return to the blues-rock form from which they had sprung in the early '60s, but with a grittier, more contemporary, world-weary edge. For many, including yours truly, it was with this record that the Stones found their real musical identity and became the force of nature that has ever since come to mind when the name The Rolling Stones is uttered. As Banquet recording engineer Glyn Johns put it, the album marked the Stones’ “coming of age . . . I think that the material was far better than anything they’d ever done before.” If the Beatles were reborn with the release of Sgt. Pepper, the Stones were also with the release of Beggars Banquet. It transformed them from a great singles band (and, IMHO, a merely above average cover band) to a great album band, setting their own course and beholden to no one.

It’s no coincidence that this transformation occurred just as Jimmy Miller entered the Stones’ orbit. Starting with Banquet, he would produce five of their finest albums, four of which—Banquet, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers (not entirely produced by Miller, but close enough), and the gold standard for double LPs, Exile on Main St.—are generally counted among the greatest rock albums ever made. They are the four highest ranking Stones LPs on Rolling Stone Magazine’s 2012 list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. As Phil Brown, an engineer at Olympic Studios said, “Jimmy Miller was this incredible kind of energy and drive and force. He made the session feel like you wanted to be there and make music. But he wasn’t a hands-on producer. There was more of an overall control, a bit of a vibe” [sic].

Keith Richards, Jimmy Miller, and Mick Jagger. Photo: Robert Altman - Getty Images

The fact that the ouster from the group of the talented but troubled multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones occurred soon after this burst of rock and roll excellence began probably was just a coincidence. Nevertheless, the arrival of the gifted 20-year-old guitarist from John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, Mick Taylor—Jones’ replacement—elevated the overall quality of the Stones’ collective performance to a whole new level, and helped transform them into a great live band (and, IMHO, an excellent cover band, particularly when performing Chuck Berry numbers) in 1969, by which time they were fully firing on all cylinders. Beggars Banquet would be the last Stones album released during Jones’ lifetime.

Banquet’s leadoff track, “Sympathy for the Devil,” the recording of which was documented in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film, One Plus One (AKA Sympathy for the Devil), was emblematic of the tumultuous times in which the album was created. It originally included Mick Jagger's line, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed Kennedy?’,” but when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while the sessions were taking place—from June 4th through June 10th—the lyric was changed to “Who killed the Kennedys?”. The fierce performance (the energetic samba rhythm coming about under producer Miller’s influence) lays the groundwork for the album, yet it gives no hint as to what lies ahead for first time listeners.  

Pax Pacifica: Donovan’s Reef

This post is part of the John Ford Blogathon, hosted by Krell Laboratories and Bemused and Nonplussed. Oh, and there are spoilers.

John Ford turned fifty-five in 1949, and if his contribution of that year to the all-time roster of cinema classics, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, is any indication, retirement seems to have been on his mind. It’s hard to imagine him not seeing something of himself in Captain Nathan Brittles, the august and honorable but curmudgeonly and slightly antiquated commandant of Fort Starke, whom Ford gives an exalted sendoff, courtesy of Brittles’ extended U.S. Cavalry family.

In 1953’s The Sun Shines Bright, often cited by Ford as one of his personal favorites among his own films, he puts noble, patriarchal old Judge Billy Priest out to pasture as a parade of admirers—Priest’s extended family—passes his home in his honor. A parade of a different type passes the defeated Mayor Frank Skeffington in Ford’s The Last Hurrah in 1958. Unlike Brittles or Priest, Skeffington does have an immediate family, a son. Yet, besides a nephew, his cadre of political cronies—brothers in arms through many campaigns, as it were—comprise his real family . . . not unlike Ford, whose Field Photo Farm he used as a gathering place for former members of the Field Photographic Division of the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), who had served under Ford’s command during World War II. 

The overarching mood in each of these films is elegiac, melancholy.  

Five years after Hurrah, at the age of sixty-nine, Ford was considered by just about everybody but the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd to be a spent force, a former purveyor of beloved, if sentimental, historical fare and Westerns, despite his well-received, reflective elegy to the Old West and scathing exposé on western myth of the previous year, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. By this time Ford—once one of Hollywood’s elite directors, with six Academy Awards to his credit—needed the star power of his perennial leading man and alter ego John Wayne (whose career Ford had set on its upward course with 1939’s groundbreaking Stagecoach) to guarantee box office success for, and studio interest in, a film project. Yet he seems to have come to terms with his own perceived antiquity in the generally upbeat Donovan’s Reef.

Often dismissed as a brawling romp (which it is, up to a point), Donovan’s Reef, scripted by James Edward Grant and Ford veteran Frank S. Nugent, unfolds much like Ford’s The Wings of Eagles, with liberal doses of broad, free-for-all slapstick, transitioning into a serene, if not sober, reverie. Ford’s image of the dustbin of history, the purgatory of social impotence into which old soldiers are relegated, however laudatory their sendoffs (think of Spig Wead in Wings and Marty Maher in The Long Gray Line), has morphed into permanent residency in a tropical paradise, albeit a flawed one (as will be discussed below)—a Valhalla of sorts, according to film scholar Peter Wollen. The mood is lighthearted, especially for later Ford. The mortal enemies of Liberty Valance, John Wayne and Lee Marvin, have become friendly combatants who are bound by a shared birthday (significantly, December 7^th) and having fought side by side in the Pacific in the Second World War. 

Ford and Wayne on location for Donovan's Reef.

The film opens with “Boats” Gilhooley (Marvin) diving off a merchant ship after realizing he’s been shanghaied, and swimming to the nearby island of Haleakaloha, French Polynesia, which, we come to realize, is his annual destination on December 7th, where he carries out the time-honored tradition of a birthday brawl with his old Navy buddy, “Guns” Donovan (Wayne). Later it is revealed that, following World War II, Donovan and his (and Gilhooley’s) former commanding officer, “Doc” Dedham (Jack Warden), made their homes on Haleakaloha, which they had defended against the Japanese, guerilla style, during the late war. Doc’s wife passed away while he was overseas and, though he had a young daughter back home in Boston, opted to stay in the island chain, where his physician’s skills were desperately needed by the natives. Donovan built a saloon—the Donovan’s Reef of the title—and Doc married Manulani, the granddaughter of the last hereditary prince of the islands. He had three children with her; she died giving birth to the third. His daughter by his first wife, Amelia (Elizabeth Allen), now an adult, stands to inherit enough stock from her great aunt to give her a controlling interest in the family shipping business if she can prove her father—to whom the shares were bequeathed—to be of less than acceptable moral character, “by Boston standards.” Donovan and Gilhooley get wind of her coming to Haleakaloha to meet her father.

As in all of Maine native Ford’s works, Boston is a breeding ground for all manner of screwballs, and it is presumed by those close to Doc that Amelia is a racist. Thus, a plot is hatched—unbeknownst to the doctor, who is currently on the outer islands ministering to the sick—by Donovan, Gilhooley, the local Catholic priest, Father Cluzeot (Marcel Dalio), and the governor of the island, Marquis Andre de Lage (Cesar Romero) to lead Amelia to believe that Doc’s children by Manulani belong to Donovan until Doc returns and can tell her in his own way that they are his. The kids and their belongings are removed from his house and are taken, in an almost funereal procession/parade, to Donovan’s living quarters above his saloon.

Next to the Governor, who is not much more than a scheming Lothario and a comic, benign descendant of Raymond Massey’s martinet of an island governor in Ford’s The Hurricane, Amelia is the nearest thing to a villain in Donovan’s Reef. But before all is said and done we, and the plotters, eventually realize that our/their presumption of racism on her part was unfounded. She and her eccentric, haughty assemblage of relatives are certainly no match for the controlling, bigoted WASP brain trust of the “New England City” of The Last Hurrah.

De Lage (Cesar Romero) attempts to charm Amelia 

(Elizabeth Allen) onto his list of conquests.

Nevertheless, other forms of racism do exist within this island community, a quasi-paradise at best: remnants of French imperialism, racism toward “half-castes,” de Lage’s Amherst-educated Chinese assistant’s prejudice toward his own “barbarian” countrymen. Ford also reminds us, through Amelia’s substituting “Donovan” with the first Irish name that comes into her head—a motif that would show up the following year in Cheyenne Autumn—that Irish-Americans were discriminated against for many years. There is jealousy: Miss Lafleur (Dorothy Lamour, another callback to The Hurricane), sees Amelia as a threat, and treats her with disdain. There is nepotism: the pampered, pompous Governor de Lage is cousin to the French minister of foreign affairs. It is a microcosm of society, warts and all.

Yet “pax” (a running gag between Donovan and Amelia*) can be achieved there. At a time when the world was in the deepest throes of the Cold War and religious unrest was beginning to rear its head in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, there is coexistence between various races and religions in Ford’s paradise. Catholicism lives peaceably alongside traditional Polynesian beliefs and rituals. One of the markers in the church graveyard bears a Star of David. Native leis decorate the cross that marks Princess Manulani's grave on Christmas Day. Multiple races, cultures, and nationalities inhabit the islands, and all are allowed to live as they choose. While the white, Western minority is unmistakably the ruling class, according to the then-accepted post-WWII model, it rules with a soft touch, with benevolence and tolerance. 

* Pax Americana is a term that was used by then-sitting President John F. Kennedy. Amelia mentions the Kennedy family late in the film.

That You May See the Meaning of Within: Deconstructing Revolver

At the end of “Lady Lazarus,” an episode from the fifth season of the superb cable TV period drama Mad Men, set in the 1960s world of Madison Avenue, ad man Don Draper is urged by his wife to listen to a specific track on the new Beatles album she’s just purchased. After she leaves their chic Manhattan apartment to attend her evening acting class, Don places the LP on the hi-fi turntable, drops the tone arm onto the last track, and lies back in his Danish lounge chair as the distinctively unconventional sounds of “Tomorrow Never Knows” fill the room. Before making it halfway through the song, he abruptly jerks the stylus across the grooves and off of the record and walks silently out of the room, apparently having had enough.

Small wonder, as this positively avant-garde recording must have sounded bizarrely foreign to the ears of anyone over the age of 30 in 1966, let alone 40, the age of the Draper character at the time (his wife, Megan, was in her twenties). Nevertheless, after a few moments of silence, the Mad Men credits roll and the song picks up where it left off on the soundtrack. The already rapidly changing world of the 1960s will move forward at an even faster pace than before, with or without the Don Drapers who inhabit it.

“Tomorrow Never Knows” is the most adventurous and experimental composition on an album filled with envelope-pushing music that has proven over time—more so than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, as will be discussed—to be the creative apex of the Beatles’ career: Revolver. It took a while for the virtues of this inspired work to come into worldwide focus, mainly due to the fact that the U.S. issue, as was the case with all of the group’s albums up to that point, had been truncated prior to its release (three of its John Lennon-penned songs were preemptively lifted for placement on the patched-together “Yesterday”. . . and Today), thus preventing Stateside fans and critics alike from hearing the LP as it was intended, in many cases until the band’s catalogue was initially released to CD in 1987.

Following the magnificent, atmospheric Rubber Soul, Revolver—by turns edgy, poignant, lovely, whimsical, gritty, challenging, and always dynamic—completed the most overwhelming one-two punch of any musical artist of the rock era. Both have stood the test of time, sounding as fresh and inspired nearly 50 years later as when they were first released. Revolver, while maintaining the universal listenability* that had become a Beatles trademark, raised the stakes artistically for all of rock music like no album before or since.

*For the most part; as the Beatles ventured into uncharted musical territory, they were a little apprehensive that some fans might not follow.

The three composing Beatles were firing on all cylinders. Lennon’s contributions were more richly compelling and cumulatively potent than on any other album. Paul McCartney broke new ground with deeply poignant lyrics (particularly with “Eleanor Rigby”) and more elaborate melodies than on any of his previous compositions, transcending his already well developed pop music sensibilities. George Harrison reached a new level and a personal best, not only contributing three numbers to a Beatles album for the first time, but even the one chosen to lead off the LP (the acerbic, funky “Taxman”)—despite the heavy competition for disc space from Lennon & McCartney at their peak.

The iconic cover art for Revolver was created by Beatle buddy Klaus Voormann.

Millions of words have probably been written about the Beatles over the years, possibly hundreds of thousands about Revolver, so I’m not going to even attempt to critique this masterpiece. Since I’ve practically grown up with it, I’m too close to it, and therefore incapable of doing it justice. Not only has Beatles authority Robert Rodriguez done just that, he has also placed the landmark album within the perspectives of both its own time and ours, while collecting all that is known of what went down in the actual recording sessions, in Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n’ Roll.