{"id":30895,"date":"2019-04-05T09:07:17","date_gmt":"2019-04-05T13:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=30895"},"modified":"2019-04-05T09:07:32","modified_gmt":"2019-04-05T13:07:32","slug":"the-bootleg-files-main-street-to-broadway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/05\/the-bootleg-files-main-street-to-broadway\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: Main Street to Broadway"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 679:<\/strong> \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d (1953 all-star film).<\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> We cannot confirm the last public exhibition of this film.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> Only as a bootleg. <\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS:<\/strong> Never made available for U.S. commercial home entertainment release.<\/p>\n

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: <\/strong>Not for a long time.<\/p>\n

One of the most curious flops of the 1950s was an all-star feature called \u201cMain Street to Broadway.\u201d Originally intended as a fundraising vehicle for a nonprofit devoted to the promotion of live theater, the film went through an excessively ambitious pre-production cycle but emerged as a predictable and strangely unsatisfactory effort that fell considerably short of its lofty mission.
\n<\/p>\n

The intended beneficiary of this endeavor was the Council of the Living Theatre, an organization that sought to expand audience interest in live theatrical productions around the United States. In an unusual fundraising strategy, an all-star film was planned with the goals of funneling 25 percent of the box office receipts directly to the Council of the Living Theatre. An independent company called Cinema Productions Inc. was created to handle this initiative, and film producer Lester Cowan (best known for \u201cMy Little Chickadee\u201d and \u201cThe Story of G.I. Joe\u201d) and director Tay Garnett (the man behind \u201cBataan,\u201d \u201cThe Postman Always Rings Twice\u201d and \u201cA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court\u201d) were brought in to helm the project.<\/p>\n

Planning on this film began in 1952 and the entertainment trade journals were filled with stories of an upcoming Technicolor work featuring the creative input of such luminaries as Katherine Cornell, Henry Fonda, Olivia de Haviland, Ethel Merman, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, George Balanchine and Benny Goodman. None of these individuals were anywhere to be seen when \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d finally opened in 1953, and the grand Technicolor production that was promised was switched to black-and-white presentation, albeit with a fairly substantial budget ($1.3 million) for an independent film and the presence of ace cinematographer James Wong Howe behind the camera. <\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not to say \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d skimped on star wattage. Quite the contrary, the film brought in an impressive array of celebrities, although most were strictly on-screen in distracting cameos and some barely registered a few seconds before the camera. Oddly, the center of attention was provided to a pair of unknown actors who got their proverbial big breaks in the film, but never managed to leverage their roles into star-quality careers.<\/p>\n

\u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d opens with the First Lady of the American Theater, Helen Hayes, speaking directly to the camera to introduce the film. The crux of the story involves a seriously mismatched pair: aspiring playwright Tony Monaco (Tom Morton, speaking with a heavy Noo Yawk accent) and drama student Mary Craig (Mary Murphy). Tony is nervous because Mary is in a reading of his new play with Hollywood star Cornel Wilde \u2013 if the reading goes well, Wilde will take the work to Broadway. But after the reading, Mary tells Wilde that she thinks the play is terrible and he decides not to pursue its production. As you can imagine, Tony is not happy with Mary. But because this is a movie, he quickly falls in love with her and follows her back to her hometown in Indiana, where her parents gladly allow him to move in and work on a new play. That work is supposed to be an innocuous rural drama created for the bawdy Broadway icon Tallulah Bankhead (she claims to be seeking a change of pace from her usual homicidal roles), but Tony instead bangs out something called \u201cCalico and Lust\u201d that involves criminal machinations and a fatal revenge denouement. After a seemingly endless number of twists and turns \u2013 I could soak up all available Internet bandwidth trying to inventory them all \u2013 Tony\u2019s show winds up on Broadway and fails on its opening night, but he doesn\u2019t mind because Mary is in love with him.<\/p>\n

The story of \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d was written by the distinguished playwright Robert E. Sherwood, but it is difficult to imagine that the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes could have come with something as clich\u00e9-choked as this work. Rather than offer something resembling an honest view of the Broadway scene, Sherwood cobbled together every hoary device from well-worn backstage dramas along with sticky tributes to small-town life that are too corny to consider. Sherwood donated his $50,000 writer\u2019s fee to the Council of the Living Theatre, perhaps as an act of penance. <\/p>\n

Today, anyone watching \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d would be interested in the spot-the-star element of the film. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II join theater director Joshua Logan in watching Mary Martin rehearse a new song; theatrical couple Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer have a good-natured argument over sandwich preparation; Shirley Booth signs autographs outside of a theater; Ethel Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and Louis Calhern come to the rescue of Tony when they hear a radio news report that he despondently threw the scripts to his play into the East River; Vivian Blaine, Elsa Maxwell and Brooks Atkinson walk about the theater lobby on Tony\u2019s opening night; and baseball manager Leo Durocher fields a phone call from Tallulah Bankhead. Estelle Winwood, Stuart Erwin, Sam Jaffe and caricaturist Al Hirschfeld are also visible in uncredited bit parts.<\/p>\n

A few stars are cast as characters with some involvement to the central story: Agnes Moorehead is Tony\u2019s waspish agent, Gertrude Berg is his too-generous neighbor, Rosemary DeCamp and Clinton Sundberg are Mary\u2019s parents, and Jack Gilford is a ticket booth cashier. Gilford\u2019s involvement in the film is notable: he was cited in the Red Channels booklet and blacklisted from appearing in Hollywood films and on television, so his appearance here helped to push back against McCarthy-era politics. <\/p>\n

Perhaps the best performance in \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d came from a star who is virtually forgotten today: humorist Herb Shriner co-starred as a pleasant small-town Indiana hardware store owner who rivals Tony for Mary\u2019s attention. Shriner was a low-key personality whose stories of offbeat Hoosier life were popular on radio and television, and he gained a national audience as the host of the game show \u201cTwo for the Money.\u201d This was Shriner\u2019s only film appearance and he exuded a likable charm that counterbalanced the story\u2019s cosmopolitan New York vibe.<\/p>\n

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picked up the distribution rights to \u201cMain Street to Broadway,\u201d with the hope that the stellar cast could sell the film. That didn\u2019t happen. Reviews were negative, particularly Bosley Crowther in The New York Times who dismissed it as \u201ca long and styleless picture.\u201d The film grossed a limp $444,000 \u2013 remember, it cost $1.3 million to make \u2013 and wound up as one of the costliest failures of 1953.<\/p>\n

\u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d failed to launch leading man Tom Morton into the A-list and he disappeared from the entertainment world within a few years. Leading lady Mary Murphy had a bit more luck, following up this film as Marlon Brando\u2019s leading lady in \u201cThe Wild One,\u201d but she never quite hit her mark and her career continued in smaller roles and increasingly minor films. \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d turned up in Great Britain in 1957 with roughly 20 minutes cut from the running time, but British audiences were not interested.<\/p>\n

To date, \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d has yet to receive a commercial home entertainment release. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer only had the theatrical rights, and it appears the film\u2019s ownership is in a state of legal limbo. Bootleg DVDs can be located, but this is one oblivion-stuck work that is not in need of being rescued. <\/p>\n

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.<\/em><\/p>\n

Listen to \u201cThe Online Movie Show with Phil Hall<\/a>\u201d on SoundCloud, now in its third season.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 679: \u201cMain Street to Broadway\u201d (1953 all-star film). LAST SEEN: We cannot confirm the last public exhibition of this film. AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: Only as a bootleg. REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Never made available for U.S. commercial home entertainment release. CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not for a long time. One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":30896,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1513],"tags":[2222,1753,1542,2218,2221,2220,2219],"class_list":["post-30895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bootleg-files","tag-broadway","tag-helen-hayes","tag-independent-film","tag-main-street-to-broadway","tag-mary-martin","tag-tallulah-bankhead","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30895"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30898,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30895\/revisions\/30898"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}