I'm going out and getting another prescription

You would think that if there was anywhere in the modern world I stood some chance of feeling like I belonged, it would be in a packed repertory cinema showing a Marx Brothers movie. And so, for the most part, I do.
But my enjoyment of A Night at the Opera is always compromised by the knowledge that in just a moment Allan Jones and Kitty Carlisle are going to start singing Alone - and that it will get a big laugh from these people who really should know better.

. Like all laughter at old movies it is not genuine but faked, and for the same reason - on the honest assumption that it is the correct thing to do. It seems to be an article of faith among Marx Brothers fans that everything in the films other than the actual comedy sequences are impositions, to be mocked or endured. I suppose they think this attitude is in some way true to the iconoclastic spirit of the boys themselves, wrecking the opera and tearing the coat tails of snobs.
If so, they are very wrong. I think the Marx Brothers would have been appalled at such rudeness towards showbusiness professionals.
But it is not just the usual philistinism that rankles in this special case: it is that this performance of this song is so very beautiful. You have to be an utter barbarian not to be charmed by it - unless, I suppose, you refuse to see and hear it at all.

The Marxes never again, and never before, had a heroine quite as classy as Kitty Carlisle's Rosa. She is beautiful, quietly amused by the Brothers' destructive wit and horseplay without ever quite endorsing it or joining in, and her dignity is such that even they dare not attempt puncturing it. Groucho is clearly besotted with her, Harpo rests his head on her bosom for comfort after a beating. Even Chico is courteous in her presence (whatever he may be thinking).
Something of a theatrical legend, she only ever moonlighted at the movies, but it is as Rosa that we will remember her: provided we have the eyes to see her and the ears to hear.
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(reposted from Movietone News)

The Ring Thing (continued)

There's simply no doubt in my mind whatsoever that you are all desperate for more posts about Cyril Ring - the actor whose name is instantly recalled whenever folks gather to discuss the character of Harvey Yates in The Cocoanuts. (See here and here.)

So here's the latest from my fellow Cyril obsessive, Mary O'Benar:

Per yours and Lolita's postulations that Cyril soldiered on because he cared deeply about his craft, I've found one item which may support that: in 1921, Cyril's among a handful of younger actors who create an after-hours review to entertain the theatrical community. Seems to be a rather innovative project, and it's under the aegis of several heavy-hitting guilds/clubs; Lambs, Friars.

That puts Cyril in the big leagues, and functioning with respect and support. If so, then to stick to acting decades after hitting bottom becomes quite tragic.
Cyril's face-time from all those films can't add up to more than 3 hours altogether, maybe less. From this distance, it does seem terribly futile as the work of a lifetime, but, in the end, impossible to know how Cyril saw it.
Cyril's last film part was in 1951, and that's the same year he came into a good inheritance. I did find that he was manager of a very good Hollywood restaurant in the late 1950s - huge bar, established regular hangout for famous movie folk - but I've no idea if he'd been doing that when still working in movies.

If it turns out he was the archetypal 'waiter between acting jobs' for 30 years, that truly would be tragic!

What did you do, Cyril?

Further to my post here about Marx mystery man Cyril Ring (sneaky Harvey Yates in Cocoanuts), I've received a fascinating communiqué from Mary O'Benar, who lives in Florida and has been pondering the Ring Enigma for some time.

Extracts from her letter follow...

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I've been looking for Cyril Ring for several years and still haven't got much more info than you do. I did run into one other person online, expert on Julian Eltinge, a friend of his sisters, and we agreed, speculatively, that there's got to be a scandal involved with Cyril. But neither of us can find it.
He doesn't just fail to build a thriving career. It's not a decline but sudden, in late 1921, something happened and boom! he's a non-person. Charlotte Greenwood not only divorces him in '22, but she seriously expunges him from her life.
I think he was well-accepted, comfortable in his sisters' Long Island high-end showbiz social world, but he just vanishes from NY, thereafter works about once a year in his brother-in-law's films but no others. After 7 years of that, then comes Cocoanuts. Then the one bit with WC Fields [The Barber Shop (1933); CR has speaking role as the bandit Fields accidentally apprehends - MC], then bit parts forever.
Cocoanuts was filmed on Long Island while the Marxes were also working Broadway. Half dozen people involved were close friends of his brother-in-law Thomas Meighan. Many of the films Cyril did have friendship/family connections, so that's pretty obviously how he continued after 'the scandal'.
What possibly could have been so scandalous to Broadway people in 1921 that we can't find a word on it? Those were some incredibly amoral times. The press had more mercy then, but his immediate family included 3 big stars, so what was so taboo that it would have been unpublishable and thoroughly buried, but tolerable enough that friends and family kept him in work, at least minimally, the rest of his life?
I've been researching Meighan's family and social circles for quite awhile now, all by internet due to 'enjoying poor health', the Cyril mystery really bugs me. I keep thinking if I were in New York and could get into archives of whatever papers were the nastiest then, surely something would surface. But instead, I've just been gathering his films, he's on TV a lot. I just counted up and I've passed 100 Cyril movies, TIVO, Netflix, etc-- gotten so I can pick him out in a crowd scene by instinct! He's not at all a poor actor, actually he usually blends in pretty skillfully. I don't think his decline was from a lack of talent...
Whether he was a bastard or an unsung hero, he certainly was a patient man.

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If by any chance anyone out there has any more information on shadowy Cyril, Mary and I would be overjoyed to hear it...

In the meantime, The Marx Brothers Council of Britain is delighted to award Mary its Heroic Achievement Award for deliberately amassing a collection of over 100 Cyril Ring movies.

Whatever happened to Cyril Ring?

A film trivia question. What actor appears alongside The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello, as well as featuring in all of the following films:
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Laura, Mr Skeffington, The Seventh Victim, I Married a Witch, Holiday Inn, This Gun For Hire, Saboteur, Sullivan's Travels, Two-Faced Woman, Meet John Doe, The Lady Eve, North West Mounted Police, The Great Dictator, The Roaring Twenties and a little something called Citizen Kane?

The answer is Cyril Ring. Poor Cyril Ring.

It seems to me he makes a perfectly good job of villainous Harvey Yates in The Cocoanuts. But for some reason he got the most terrible reviews, and his career didn't so much decline as nosedive almost immediately afterwards.

Okay; many stars don't make it, perhaps the majority of Hollywood careers are brief. Stars are rare, numerically speaking at least. But the sad thing about Cyril Ring is that he didn't disappear. He kept working in the movies until the early fifties, making many, many films a year throughout that time, for virtually all the major (and minor) studios.
But always in the tiniest roles, demeaning walk-ons, a glorified extra, perhaps a line or two at most, always there, somewhere; turning up for the cheque, doing next to nothing. A face in the crowd, but a haunting one. Once you tune your eyes to spot his distinctive visage, with its pencil moustache and slicked-back hair - a look he never changed - you'll see him all the time; silent, reproachful, living testament to Hollywood's heartlessness.
After The Cocoanuts he made over three hundred and fifty films. He received screen credit in maybe three or four.
One where he didn't was Monkey Business (1931). What must it have felt like for him on that set? A major supporting actor in the first Marx Brothers movie and then, just two years later, a nobody in their third.
Poor Cyril Ring. You'll always be a star to me.
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