One Man’s Strange Fascination with Hugo Haas: Part 4

In case you found this page by accident, this is number four of a four-part article on the American films of director Hugo Haas. To go to the previous chapters, click on the link at the very bottom of this page.

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“Why don’t we try to go back to the honest movies, with real honest human emotions?”
-Paradise Alley (1962)

The Carol Morris Films

With the departure of Cleo Moore, Hugo Haas found another Trilby for the final stage of his career in former Miss Universe, Carol Morris. As Haas was now in his late 50s, he wisely writes younger male romantic leads for his twentysomething star, and gives himself more seasoned, fatherly supporting roles to his ingénue lead. 

Born to Be Loved (1959) and Paradise Alley (released in 1962) are two delightfully old-fashioned films that, like Edge of Hell, have an innocent quality that instead suggests they could have been made in the 1940s. Once one considers the changing tastes in cinema at the time, it is miraculous that these anachronisms were made at all. Both films are mosaics, in which Haas the writer-director is less interested in conflict, than how his ensembles of characters behave. 

In Born to Be Loved, Carol Morris is Dorothy, a bespectacled plain Jane seamstress who befriends the music teacher, Professor Martin (Haas), her neighbour in an apartment building. This film is really a simple little fable about how miracles occur in everyday life, and the degrees to which people show their kindness and gratitude. The key phrase of this narrative is the line: “God is too busy to keep the world going, so He needs people to perform his miracles.” The pivotal moment in the story occurs when Dorothy and the professor attend their different religious services together (his synagogue, and her Easter service), and have an innocent competition over whose prayers will be answered. 

Her wish (offhandedly mentioned earlier) to be whistled at by the boys on the street comes true, and her self-esteem is boosted when Martin’s pupil Eddie (Dick Kallman) sends her flowers. She is elated by these incidents, but is later heartbroken when she learns that Martin had orchestrated both of these events. Still, she forgives him for his actions, knowing his good intentions.

The Professor is working on an opus entitled “Fata Morgana” (or, “Mirage”), but needs a grand piano to compose it properly. When Dorothy visits the widow Irene Hoffman (Vera Vague), and they hear a sound of strings from her late husband’s grand piano, Dorothy offhandedly remarks that it was a message from Mr. Hoffman. But later when Mrs. Hoffman asks aloud if her husband is sending her a sign, and the piano strings hum again, she concedes that her late husband is asking her to “set the music free”, unlocking the piano for someone else to use. Thus, Dorothy arranges to have the piano lifted by a hoist into Martin’s upstairs studio. The professor comes home just in time to see the piano descending into the window, at the precise moment when it appears that it is being sent from the heavens. 

In this bowery-level Pygmalion, Martin breaks Dorothy out of her shell, to realize the beautiful woman he knows is living inside. (After all, cinematic convention proves that women with glasses are really foxes: Bailey on WKRP, anyone?) Other minor miracles occur when Eddie is heartbroken because he lost out on his audition and quarrelled with his girlfriend, thus opening the door to a relationship between Dorothy and him. Subsequently, when Irene hears the professor playing the piano, she invites him to dinner to look at her late husband’s compositions. 

The film unfolds very leisurely, to show how unexpected moments of goodness occur, all indirectly due to the professor’s “beautiful lies”. While the denouement becomes rather obvious, it is a lovely time spent watching the narrative get there. Born to Be Loved at first feels rather slight, but it improves on each viewing, with its delightfully old-fashioned sense of humanity. It may be the “sleeper” of Haas’ career.

Paradise Alley sat on the shelf for years before it finally crawled out to release in 1962. Perhaps it was shot earlier than Born to Be Loved, (as evidenced in the credits “Introducing Don Sullivan”, as that actor appeared in other films circa 1958), but fittingly it was released last,  because it feels like a cinematic swan song. 

In this engaging piece of Capra-corn, writer-director Hugo Haas plays a once-great filmmaker, Mr. Agnus, who moves into a neighbourhood where everyone is arguing, and decides to bring peace to the borough by making a movie with its residents as the stars. Also released under the appropriate title, Stars in the Backyard, Paradise Alley benefits from a cast of veterans in supporting roles. Billy Gilbert is Mr. Wilson, constantly at odds with the shrewish Mrs. Nicholson (Margaret Hamilton, who by now could’ve played this role in her sleep); film noir queen Marie Windsor is great fun as the starstruck glamour girl Linda Belita; William Schallert as a casting director; and most amusingly, Chester Conklin plays “Chester Conklin’s cousin”, Mr. Gregory, a former cameraman from the days of D.W. Griffith! Gregory has an old inoperable movie camera in his flat, which inspires Agnus to do the film. Light years before Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Agnus and company make the movie without any film in the camera! 

Only some wise guys on the corner ever question why there are never any cords or microphones on the set. Everyone else is blinded by the fact that they are going to be stars. There is also a Capulet-Montague romance with Carol Morris (particularly delightful as Wilson’s starstruck daughter Susie) and Steve Nicholson (Don Sullivan), the son of her dad’s number one enemy! 

Mr. Wilson frets over his melodramatic sequence to be “filmed” with his old enemy Mrs. Nicholson. Agnus tells him after all, it’s only a movie, and the parts we play differ from those in real life. Agnus makes the movie as an excuse to pacify the neighbourhood, but also to bring out the humanity that he knows is beneath everyone’s quarrelsome exteriors: the role of kindness is what he wants them to play in real life as in “reel life”. 

The viewer wisely waits for the shoe to fall, wondering when his neighbours will discover that there is no film in the camera, thus misunderstanding his good intentions. However, in Haas, things seldom transpire as obviously as one would assume. Paradise Alley becomes even more memorable by an amazing narrative shift in its final quarter, when Agnus has a chance meeting with studio heads, thus affecting the outcome of this fantasy project. 

Many films have been made about the magic of movies, and Paradise Alley can be added to a short list (which includes Cinema Paradiso) of works that explore the allure of movies for the lives of its everyday viewers. As with Haas’ earlier cynical film about the movie industry (The Other Woman), he again plays a once-famous director, but this is a refreshingly positive look at making movies. Considering Haas’ increased difficulty in making films like this, Paradise Alley would appear as a science-fiction fantasy. But this fable suggests that Hugo Haas still approached filmmaking with a genuine love of the medium, and the sense of creative collaboration that it requires. 

While movies were becoming increasingly cynical, it is fitting that the film career of Hugo Haas ends on a whimsical note that recalls the days of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. (“Hey I’ve got some curtains in the barn, let’s do a show!”) In an interview on the B Movie Cast, Don Sullivan laments: “Poor Hugo made a sweet little classic movie at the same time that monster films and rock and roll stuff was in its heyday, so there was nobody interested in that film.”

Epilogue

Although he was exiled from his homeland before World War II, the star of Hugo Haas never really dimmed in his native country. According to reports, his Czech films still draw an audience when they play on television. His Hollywood filmmaking career, however, is all but forgotten, and if one were to believe historians, justly so. Because Hugo Haas’ work has been out of the public eye for so many years (save for scattered television play dates), a lot of misconceptions, and unfairly negative reputations, about these films has been allowed to grow.

Alas, by the time Paradise Alley crept into theatres, Hugo Haas had gone back to Europe, and occasionally appeared on television. His wish to return to Czechoslovakia was thwarted with the 1968 Soviet invasion. On film, Haas played exiles, and strangers in strange lands, not dissimilar from his own experiences. After his Hollywood career, life and art blurred once again as Hugo Haas was again a man without a country. He passed away from complications with asthma in 1968. Cleo Moore, the actress most synonymous with his films, had married real estate mogul Herbert Heftler in 1961, after the two had met on the set of an industrial film (her final movie credit). She died in 1973 from a heart attack at the young age of 48.

In this age of information, it is astonishing how much Hugo Haas continues to be out of the public eye. If one allows oneself to look beyond the poor production values, there is a genuine personality and richness to be found in his art. Then as now, with so many movies being anonymously cranked out on the assembly line, Hugo Haas succeeded in being an auteur in the most subterranean antechamber of the Hollywood studio system. Imperfect though they may be, the American films of Hugo Haas are worthy of re-discovery.

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Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #23.