Ellis St. Joseph, again -- this time, more serious stuff

If you're looking at this Playhouse 90 production still with Ernie Kovacs and Sheree North  and thinking "How does this qualify as serious?" -- well, I don't blame you. This post's subtitle says "more serious" which means the movies and TV shows this time are less wacky and comedic than some of last week's offerings, which included "Batman" and "Land of the Giants."

This is the next-to-last post in a short series on the work of author/screenwriter Ellis St. Joseph, whose name you may not know, but whose work you may well have encountered. St. Joseph wrote, co-wrote, or adapted films starting in 1939 and went on to do a lot of work in television. In an earlier post to this blog, I wrote a bit about his contributions to radio as well. St. Jsoeph's short story "A Passage to Bali" became the basis of two different old-time radio suspense programs. I was able to use the IMDb listing to find out that Studio One did a TV presentation of the story in 1950

St. Joseph's work first came to my attention because  another of his stories, "Leviathan," which appeared originally in Redbook magazine in 1939, was reprinted in an early-60s Alfred Hitchcock suspense-story collection. Next week's post, the last in the series, will be about "Leviathan."

The television presentation "Topaze," from which the image at the top of this post comes, was by a French writer, but St. Joseph did the necessary adaptation to make the tale of a schoolteacher, whom a corporate magnate attempts to corrupt,  

Found this at IMDb:  

Synopsis by Hal Erickson:  That zany video genius Ernie Kovacs plays it (sort of) straight in this Playhouse 90 adaptation of Marcel Pagnal's satirical stage play "Topaze." A man constitutionally incapable of being dishonest, Monsieur Topaze (Kovacs) loses his teaching position at a small provincial French private school when he refuses to give a passing grade to an undeserving pupil.On the advice of Suzy (Sheree North), the attractive aunt of another pupil, Topaze accepts a new job with Castel-Bernac (Ste[hen Wooten), a creooked politician who happens to be Suzy's "protector" and who takes Topaze on in the secure belief that someone so indomitably honest would never suspect that anything unscrupulous was going on within the political machine. But things happen which not only profoundly alter Topaze, but everyone around him. Carl Reiner co-stars in this production, which originally aired live.

Moving on to other television work by Ellis St. Joseph...

The screenwriter had experience working with Warner Brothers -- he got a producer's credit for the studio's televised drama series "Warner Brothers Presents" -- so he knew how to work a story into something audiences would enjoy and which would fit into a format interrupted by commercials. In addition to producing "Warner Brothers Presents," St. Joseph wrote two scripts for the program: "Deep Freeze" and "Siege."

 

If you saw last week's post on St. Joseph's work, you may remember that he wrote a screenplay about aliens on Earth. That one was a bit goofy, but "Deep Freeze" has a plot with a little more cdrama in it; there's a alien, but this one needs to be kept in very cold conditions to survive. 

Someone has added atmospheric music to a four-minute faded clip from a kinescope from the episode:

The second St. Joseph episode for "Warner Brothers Presents" is entirely about humans, good ones and bad ones. Yes, that's Elizabeth Montgomery being held hostage in "Siege."

 Oh, dear. Well, while we are on unfortunate television word choices in early television:

Ellis St. Joseph did a fair amount for work for Climax! He adapted the story "The Secret Love of Johnny Spain," a cynical look at promotion in the music business. This one reminds me  of the dark film "Ace in the Hole." For two other episodes in the drama series, St. Joseph wrote the story or script.  I wish I could fine "A Taste for Crime," as it has Marsha Hunt in it. I can't find "The Man Who Lost His Head" either, but I did find a still from it with Peter Lorre, who co-stars with Cedric Hardwicke. The story synopsis: "A young sailor collapses on the estate of a wealthy Englishman in the Orient and, upon reviving, is offered a strange bargain in exchange for his life."

Climax! was sponsored by the Chrysler, which also paid for a program on CBS called Chrysler Theatre. Someone on YouTube has put together a medley of the various intros to that program. 

 

 

 

 The full title of the series was "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre," and a lot of Hollywood notables got their start there, including directors Sidney Pollack and Sam Peckinpah did Chrysler Theatre.

 

For the Chrysler series, Ellis St. Joseph did one episode, a two-parter called "Memorandum for a Spy."  The plot: "An a alcoholic CIA agent is courted by the Russians who want him to find defectors, and the Americans who want him to find spies. His girlfriend just wants him to pull himself together."  Victor Buono, who of course played Batman villain King Tut, played a military general in this show. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, let's go back a little...  Long before his television career, Ellis St. Joseph got his start at RKO, with the 1939 legal drama/Western "Reno."

A blogger who calls himself Rupert Pupkin --  who's a character from the film "The King of Comedy" -- has some good information on "Reno" in his post about the film's star, Richard Dix. You can see that HERE.

St. Joseph, who would move on to work for Warner Brothers, was still at RKO when he did an adaptation for the film "Joan of Paris," in which an anti-Nazi Frenchwoman is the new Joan of Arc.

The IMDb site  has film stills, the cast list for the 1942 film "Joan of Paris." Just a day or two ago, I found a VHS copy on eBay, and will add clips to this post if the tape plays okay. 

Another film from Ellis St. Joseph's time in 1940s Hollywood had Ida Lupino as the female lead and was called "In Our Time."

My favorite thing about "In Our Time" is not St. Joseph's work but the fact that Alla Nazimova appears in it.  Though she's not as young in a mid-40s film as she was when this portrait was taken, the movie poster still called her simply Nazimova. She's mostly forgotten today, but at one time, she was one of those one-name celebrities. 

Lupino and Henreid have a meet-cute moment:

Back to the City of Light for some 1946 costume drama fun, with "A Scandal in Paris" .

 

 

Now we've caught up St. Joseph's film career in the 1940s and we are returning to the early 1950s and the era of the televised weekly series of both comic and dramatic programs. 

Ellis St. Joseph wrote a family drama called "One for the Road" which appeared in two different TV versions  -- one starred Charles Coburn, and was part of the "U.S. Steel Hour."

And the other, with a different cast, was part of the series NBC Matinee Theatre hosted by John Conte.

I found a couple of clips from interviews with host John Conte, talking about how the program started and what it was like to produce a new drama presentation every week:

 If you want to know what IMDb says about "One for the Road," click HERE.

For Lux Playhouse, Ellis St. Joseph wrote the episode "Small Wonder," with Polly Bergen getting the top billing. The supporting role by Norwegian actress Anna-Lisa, (another one-name celebrity) made it possible for me to find a bit about the Lux Playhouse presentation at a site giving a filmography for Anna-Lisa. Anna-Lisa, it turns out, was once a guest star for the Western "Sugarfoot," for which St. Joseph wrote scripts.

Lux Playhouse alternated on Friday nights with the Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, for which Ellis did a teleplay about a man who fences and has an unsupportive girlfriend. The teleplay was called "Splendid with Swords" and all I could find out about it was this little bit of information on IMDb.

Shows featuring big-name stars were not cheap and so the sponsors sold things everyone bought, including beer, soap, and automobiles. Chrysler  was not the only car company which sponsored television drama series. For Ford Television Theatre, Ellis St. Joseph penned the episode    "Girl in Flight", which starred Joan Leslie. I couldn't find a still for it, so I'm putting up an image of Lesiie from an earlier role, in the film "This Is the Army."

Here's a little video bonus for you. While I couldn't find the Ford Theatre episode "Girl in Flight" from the 1950s, I did come across an early Ford Theatre episode, which I think might have been their first. It stars young Ruth Gordon in a play she wrote, titled "Years Ago." This clip fron a kinescope gives you a sense of what the Ford Theatre program was like when it first began. And anyway, Ruth is charming in a good autobiographical play about a young woman who wants to leave home to be an actress:

The Campbell's Soup people sponsored lots of programs during radio's Golden Age, and as television began to take radio's place, the soup company came along with the times, with its Campbell Summer Soundstage.

As you've seen in this post, Ellis St. Joseph did a lot of work for film and television which was of better quality than "Batman" and "Land of the Giants."  In addition to the presentations given above, there were others; St. Joseph contributed to shows named for Barbara Stanwyck and Lloyd Bridges, and he did some episodes for a TV series spun off from the film "King's Row."

Which of the scripts noted in this post were the best? Well, depends of what we mean by "best." In terms of writing, the St. Joseph story "A Passage to Bali" can't be beat. His adaptation of the screenplay for "Joan of Paris" surely helped build morale in the U.S. and in Europe while the war was far from over. And to the items at the top of the list, I'd add Ellis Joseph's last film project, for which he co-wrote the script:  "The Christine Jorgenson Story." The film was released in 1970, at a time when treating a transgender person as a human being was a very rare thing.

 

 

Thanks to a thoughtful person on YouTube, you can watch "The Christine Jorgenson Story" online. This video has a quick ntro pic plus a brief newsreel clip from press conference before we see the United Artists logo at the start of the film.

As you can see from the examples above, time-traveling back to the time when even short stories in popular magazines didn't get archived, Ted Turner couldn't save every film before the flammable stock disintegrated or burst into flames, and few television shows were kinescoped, the work of well-established writers could fade away. Add to that the "collectible" angle; just the way peasant food becomes upscale ethnic food in pricey restaurants, movies that used to cost moviegoers two for a quarter at the local cinema, with a newsreel and a cartoon tossed in, now go for thirty bucks per DVD and ten or twelve bucks to rent on a streaming service. Great for those who retired with a hefty pension and who have plenty of time for rare nostalgic films as a hobby, not so good for rest of us. And if all that wasn't quite a lot, my antivirus program AVG gave me two "Threat Secured" message because invitations to view old movies online are now often bait set out by cyber criminals. Sigh. 

Despite all of this,  when I find even a simple episode number for an old television show, I resist the feeling that I am trying to gather the wind-blown grains from a momentary popular culture sand-painting. I prefer to think that I'm like a member of the crew at "Time Team," with a coin or a pottery shard or the pin from a Roman brooch on the palm of my hand. By itself, it's not much. But each person who recovers something cool can add it to the total collection.