Stranger in a Strange Land

I’ve ridden on the Ferris Wheel in Vienna featured in Carol Reed’s The Third Man.  I’ve visited the Trevi fountain in Rome that is so memorably eroticized in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.  But despite being to New York City several times, I’ve still never been to the top of the Empire State Building.

I don’t know what the lines were like to reach the landmark’s scenic heights 75 years ago, but poor Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) took the express route when King Kong (Schoedsack/Cooper, 1933) saw fit to use the world’s tallest building (at the time) as the site of his last stand.  It’s a tremendous climax to a film that may show its age around the edges, but has not dated a bit in its rich, creative vision and sense of dread and fantastic awe.

There have been, of course, remakes since then, but for some reason, the subsequent versions have meddled with what I’ve always felt was the horrific center of the story.  They’ve tried to make Kong more “human”, assigning more external emotion to his story when the point has never been, to these eyes, his unrequited “love”, but his own primal sense of mystery and, by extension, his larger alienation in a world hostile to him.

Both Jessica Lange’s vapid heroine and Naomi Watt’s spirited one attempt to draw a real connection with Kong, one that’s trusting and protective.  But in seeing it as a relationship to nurture, the subsequent versions reduce his frightening grandeur, making him less mythic and more mere monkey.  But Fay Wray can’t get free of him fast enough, and there’s never a sign of remorse or loss at his death in her eyes.  Because the world, including her, sees him simply as a monster, in all its imposing ferociousness.  There is nothing sentimental in how Schoedsack & Cooper portray his plight or his demise.

But that doesn’t mean his final fall isn’t any less poignant, because through the incredible craftsmanship of visual effects pioneer Willis O'Brien, we the audience are able to see what Carl Denham & co. can’t—that Kong is a tragic figure as well as an epic one.  Denham’s last line “It was Beauty killed the Beast” frames the story in cultural parameters he can’t resist, as huckster and showman.  But it’s also laced with contempt and pity, not reverence, for while Kong was ruler of his world, he was only of value in ours as a captive for the curious.  Kong is Denham's meal ticket, but nothing more than a dumb animal, easily conquered and reduced to a sound bite or facile metaphor.  A freakish anecdote laying dead on the NYC boulevard.

But we know differently.  And it is this insight, this privilege at a larger view of Kong and his story, which makes the film so sad, and so glorious.  Because Kong's level of expressiveness was only possible through a triumph of technology, and all the behavioral quirks that he shows, all the attention to detail that the stop-motion photography brings to remarkable life, are testament to cinema’s power to terrify, transfix, and enchant.  And in that world of the imagination, Kong does remain king.

Kong has yet to get his own US stamp, but the Empire State Building one was part of the Celebrate the Century issue for the 1930's (Scott # 3185b).  The wonderful score for Kong was written by Max Steiner (Scott # 3339), while the Special Effects stamp and Disney's Beauty and the Beast stamp are Scott #s 3772i and 4027 respectively.  The Chinese Year of the Monkey stamp was Scott # 3895l while Canada's Fay Wray stamp came out in 2005.

My Top 10 films from 1933

1. Man's Castle (Borzage)

2. Footlight Parade (Bacon)

3. King Kong (Cooper/Schoedsack)

4. Snow White (Fleischer; Betty Boop short)

5. Las Hurdes (Bunuel)

6. Gold Diggers of 1933 (LeRoy)

7. Zero de Conduite (Vigo)

8. Duck Soup (McCarey)

9. Queen Christina (Mamoulian)

10.  Dinner at Eight (Cukor)

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In the Beginning...

I've discussed a little about how I buy first-day-of-issue caches to supplement the customized postcards I create--particularly when they apply to film stamps that were issued before I began collecting.  This means that I've done my fair share of research poring through old stamp catalogs to see what kind of stamps (US and otherwise) are out there. 

The earliest stamp I ever found that specifically referred to the art of cinema was this 1944 US release, commemorating the 50th anniversary of motion pictures.  Presumably, they use the creation of the first film (Fred Ott's Sneeze) in 1894 as a benchmark, though the first public cinema, a Kinetoscope parlor in New York City, also opened that year.  Because it's such an important philatelic issue given my "topical" interest, I've picked up more caches for that issue that I would've ordinarily.

You'll notice that some of these were postmarked in LA and some in NY.  While there is now a central office that handles First Day of Issue postmarks for any newly released stamp, it still appears that back then, some post offices would take it upon themselves to have a special postmark because of the demand and popularity of these kinds of collectibles. 

All these caches were mass-produced, so none of them is unique and I've seen other examples of the exact same illustration at subsequent conventions.  The more rare examples would actually be the bottom two, since they incorporate a later issue (The Films of 1939) to supplement the original--something which I'll be doing more of with samples in my collection in the future.

Even decades later, this 1944 stamp (Scott #926) remained very unusual and cinema-themed releases were few and far-between, outside of the occasional movie star.  So because the pickings were really slim for many years, it actually seemed conceivable that I could collect every cinema-related stamp made worldwide.

Then, the market exploded with souvenir sheets (usually from third world countries) specifically targeting collectors with appetites for celebrities and movie stars, and this ambition of mine became prohibitively expensive.  So while my collecting habits were two pronged for a while, I no longer worry about any new cinema stamps that are outside the US.  There are too many and the souvenir sheets are designed to be pricey. 

But what I do have, I'll begin to post here, too, even though the cards and postmarks are my primary emphasis.

The Beau Geste and Stagecoach stamps are Scott #s 2447 & 2448 respectively.

Stamp of Disapproval

Sometimes, things don’t always go as planned when it comes to getting the postmarks back from the USPS—whether through a mistake on their end or lack of planning on mine.

For the James Dean issue back in 1996, it never occurred to me that I needed to ask for a special postmark.  I didn’t for the Marilyn issue the year before and they all came out uniform, clean, and sharp-looking.  But lo-and-behold, when I got them back, a majority of them looked like the one above: no special design and no indication that it’s even a First-Day-of-Issue.  As generic and undistinctive a postmark as you can imagine.

Curiously, a few of them were given a different postmark, as you can see below.  This design looks great.  Unfortunately, none of the ones with the stamp on the front of the postcard with the image were given this nice postmark.

So clearly, since both postmarks were applied to my shipment, it was the choice of the person in the Postmaster’s office to use the crappy stamp for most of my cards, perhaps thinking it didn’t matter.

Now, every single time I send in a collection to be stamped, I include the following message on a post-it on every single rubber-banded bundle of cards:

Please Apply Illustrated First-Day-of-Issue Postmark on EACH card.  Thank You.

Of course, with many of these James Dean cards, the damage is done, so they sit together in a box, of negligible interest or value, testament to a lesson learned.

Westpex

Westpex is the annual postage stamp convention that I attend every spring—-the biggest on the West Coast and held near the San Francisco International Airport (it used to be in downtown SF back when I first started going). It’s always interesting going because my brand of covers and collecting doesn’t have much credibility among the old schoolers in attendance. In fact, even though I’m in my late 30s, I still skew in the youngest 10th percentile among the attendees. While there are efforts to outreach to youth, it still remains essentially an old person’s hobby (and, from the looks of the attendees, predominantly male as well).


It’s pretty rare to find a postcard FDC like the ones I create at these things, but sometimes I do find something else interesting that has a cinematic connection. This Marilyn Monroe cache and cover is a good example. The idea of using older stamps that have some kind of thematic relationship to the subject never really occurred to me until I ran across this item years ago. Now, the reason you see so many other, older stamps tied to the First-Day-of-Issue postmarks I collect is because I was inspired by this piece.

Monroe was, of course, the first Legends of Hollywood stamp release (Scott #2967). The numerous Monroe postcards I created for that issue is a story for another day, but nothing I did was as inventive as this Kennedy collaboration, using both JFK (Scott #1246) and Robert (Scott #1770) to sandwich the tragic starlet, though I'd like to think the card with her and Ronald Reagan (Scott #3897) has its own charm.

Parting the Red Sea

Growing up, Charlton Heston was a perpetual fixture in our household (where he was affectionately known as “Chuck”). This was largely because of the annual Easter broadcasts of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur. It was the movie star my mom talked about the most, and years before I saw the film, I knew how El Cid ended because of my dad’s vivid description.

It was later that I discovered the various apocalyptic films of his later career, from the atrocious Earthquake to the priceless Soylent Green and The Omega Man, which found their own perverse redemption in his totemic campiness. Always square-jawed and overly-committed to whatever catastrophe he was facing, from ant armies in The Naked Prey to circus train derailments in The Greatest Show on Earth (a misnomer if you ever heard one), he might be great fun, but I never considered him a good actor.

But he could be. Probably the greatest surprise of Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet was that, among a cast of legendary British thespians, the best performance was Chuck’s as the Player King, full of authority and gravity, his commanding voice so beautifully suited for the Bard when I had become accustomed to hearing him quote sword-and-sandal scripture-lite. I’ve owned the beautiful soundtrack for Antony & Cleopatra for years but have never seen it, though one day I hope to.


Though Orson Welles' brilliant Touch of Evil remains his best film, a personal favorite is Planet of the Apes (Schaffner, 1968), a film that could easily lose itself in the premise and prosthetics if not for Chuck, who grounds the film as Everyman, a sci-fi Adam who sells the confusion and absurdity of his predicament with the type of commitment the film needs. I won’t necessarily argue that it’s a great performance, but it’s calibrated exactly to the picture’s benefit, and be it his artist’s instincts or just the result of astute casting, that final moment on the beach is iconic for a simple reason. It works. RIP, Chuck.

Chuck may get his own stamp one day, which is why I’ve saved the front of the postcard for him. But the makeup was much celebrated at the time (it won a special Academy Award since the category didn't even exist yet) and it seemed a perfect opportunity to add as many Statue of Liberties as I could muster: Scott #2599 , 3451, and especially 1599, which itself appears to be peeking its head out from some futuristic horizon.

Apt Pupil

Today is the 50th Anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which stands as perhaps my favorite American movie of the sound era. It’s hard to tell when it took this particular position for me, but as time has passed, Hitch’s other films, as amazing as they are, recede in importance to these eyes, while Vertigo still stays so immediate and real and palpable.

Don’t get me wrong—I’ll very happily sit down to consume North by Northwest or Strangers on a Train or Rear Window again and again. But there’s something about Vertigo that is uniquely compelling. Perhaps it’s the fact that it largely eschews his trademark gallows humor, which makes his other films undeniably entertaining, but which I suspect also acted as a defense mechanism so we don’t get too close to his sensibilities. But Vertigo cuts to the bone, and is as raw and open an exposé of Hitch’s pathologies as one can find in his body of work, without allowing levity to distract or dilute its impact.

Perhaps I love it so much because it acts as a perverse metaphor for the task of film director—a man crafts a woman to his exact specifications of performance: how to walk, dress, behave, with every small little detail meticulously, even obsessively, stage-managed. It's all about power and control and is a highly revelatory insight into Hitch’s own self-awareness of how all-consuming a director's preoccupations can be—especially for someone who embeds so many details and subtexts as carefully as he does.

But the truth is, it isn’t the story of one man manipulating a woman to his specifications—it’s the story of two. And that’s another thing I like about the film, because the “mystery” of Madeline is revealed far earlier than would be typical for most films. Some take issue with Judy’s flashback letting the cat out of the bag so early. But it’s a smart decision, because Hitch’s MacGuffin in Vertigo is the murder plot altogether. It’s completely incidental to what really matters in the film, for the story is Scottie’s obsession and how it dooms him. But unlike most of Hitch’s films, there is no resolution, no tying up of loose ends, no comeuppance for the killer. Just the figure of Scottie at the top of the church tower, devastated and alone.

I think I also have grown to love the film more since I moved to the Bay Area. For San Francisco, to me, is a city of history and romance, memory and heartbreak, and it’s hard not to drive through it without encountering some of the stops in Scottie’s journey through the film. Here's a good website that offers an overview of the assorted locations for Vertigo--both in SF and further south. And two of the most iconic images of San Francisco are featured both in the film and on the FDC I created for the issue of the Jimmy Stewart stamp—the Golden Gate bridge and the Palace of Fine Arts.

This particular postcard doesn’t have as many postmarks as some of the other Vertigo ones I have, but I chose this for the blog because I like how the two bridge spans reflect each other. Sometimes, I accumulate duplicate one-sheet postcards on a film after some older related stamp issues (like the Hitchcock or Bernard Herrmann stamps) have already been released, and while I could’ve included them on the front instead to join Stewart, I liked how these two stamps complement the setting and architecture prominent on the poster.

The Golden Gate bridge stamp was part of the Celebrate the Century series of the 1930s (Scott #3185l) and the Palace of Fine Arts was part of an American Architecture release back in 1981 (Scott #1930). .
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(for more thoughts and stamps on Vertigo, check out my follow-up entry).  
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2007 Yearly Wrap

I thought I'd try to start each new year with an annual sampling of the stamps and first-day-of-issue postmarks I added to my collection from the year before.

 

James Stewart, Scott #4197

Disney: The Art of Magic issue, including Dumbo, Scott # 4194

The USPS did something unusual with the Star Wars sheet it issued.  It also set up on online poll for people to vote for their favorite of the stamps, which would then subsequently get an entire sheet to itself.  The Yoda stamp won, so the stamp at the top of the card is the reissue from the full Yoda sheet, and the stamp at the bottom of the card from the original Star Wars sheet.  Scott #s 4205 and 4143n, respectively.

 

Marvel Comics sheet, including Captain America and Iron Man, Scott #s 4159e and -h respectively.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Scott # 4165.  Also pictured are Audrey Hepburn (# 3786), Henry Mancini (# 3839), and a Tiffany lamp (# 3749)