NOSTALGIA FLICK FLOPS

REMEMBER the first Dallas’?. No, not the 1978 pilot that launched the smash international TV hit. Not Southfork, the Ewings, J.R., all that. 1 mean the Dallas with Gary Cooper, Raymond Massey, Ruth Roman, Hacienda del Norte -that Dallas. I’ll bet that unless you’re a dedicated fan of predawn movies or a real Gary Cooper buff, you probably never even realized such a film existed.

Like other films made about Dallas during the Fifties and Sixties, the original Dallas did nothing for its stars or for Big D. Nobody imitated it, nobody named a beer after its hero/villain, nobody lusted after the lifestyle it portrayed. What people did do was forget it, the same way they forgot State Fair (1962) and All The Fine Young Cannibals (1960), two other meager Hollywood attempts to capture Dallas on the silver screen.

Today, in the wake of the recent television show’s spectacular success, it’s fun to recall how Hollywood’s earlier versions depicted Dallas before Southfork seized the world’s imagination.

Released in 1950 by Warner Brothers, Dallas was a splashy Technicolor Western in an era when the Western was enjoying some of its finest moments: 1950 had produced The Gunfighter and Broken Arrow; in 1952 Gary Cooper made High Noon and redeemed his sagging career; in 1953 there was Shane. Dallas was a far cry from such notable films; it closely resembled films about other Texas towns: San Antonio, El Paso and Fort Worth. All were conventional shoot-em-ups that sought to capitalize on the names of well-known Texas cities.

According to Hollywood, Dallas was a real Western town. As a matter of fact, for a brief period in the late 1860s and early 1870s, Dallas fit the Western stereotype fairly well. Belle Starr was a famous citizen, cattle were sometimes driven through the city streets and at least 16 gambling halls stood ready to take a cowpoke’s earnings. But by 1873 the railroad and the Sangers had come to Dallas, signaling the end of the Western phase and the beginning of mercantile expansion.

Set squarely in the Wild West era, the movie makes some effort to portray Dallas as a future center of commerce and culture rather than a perpetual cowtown. The cast drops frequent references to cotton and all that rich Trinity bottom land, and one leading citizen says portentously: “Dallas will raise people, not cows.”

But you can’t fool the Western fan with pompous dialogue; the Dallas set is clearly standard-issue Dry Gulch City. The hills outside Warner Brothers’ Dallas are not quite alive to the sound of cotton growing; those hills exist in the timeless Southern California never-never land that formed the backdrop for thousands of Western movies. Brown, high, rolling and studded with trees, those hills are the kind that Dallas real estate moguls must dream about as they patrol the flat expanse of the Trinity River bottoms.

Recognizing these obvious distortions of town and landscape, prepare yourself for another unbelievable touch: In Hollywood’s creative geography, the South Texas of Mexican grandees exists a few miles outside Dallas (probably in the same vicinity where Southfork later sprang up). It’s called Hacienda del Norte -an adobe city replete with buildings and a graciously appointed main house. It resembles the set of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. There are fountains in the courtyard, strolling mariachi singers and an eligible senorita played by Ruth Roman.

The Hispanic citizens of Hacienda del Norte provide plenty of atmosphere, but are not otherwise central to the movie’s plot. They represent a weak but polite aristocratic culture being preyed upon by cattle rustlers. In this respect they are no different from the Anglo citizens of Dallas, a town ravaged by lawlessness.

This is the post-bellum era, and it’s Reconstruction time in Dixie. Of course, the villains are Yankee carpetbaggers who are stripping the South of its wealth and – being equal opportunity crooks -pillage Hispanics and Anglos alike. They steal cattle, foreclose mortgages and take over people’s houses.

Into this anarchic arena of theft, murder and fraud that was Reconstruction Texas, ride two men: a sissified U.S. marshal from Boston (Leif Erickson) who deplores “brigandry” but can’t shoot worth a hoot, and an unreconstructed rebel officer turned gunfighter, Blayde Hollister (Gary Cooper). In a plot so complicated it baffled most reviewers, the two exchange roles: Cooper does all the real work while the Dude (Erickson) is left with most of the corny lines. Erickson’s fiancee, Ruth Roman, falls in love with Coop, but that too is resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.

Two cherished historical legends underpin the movie: the myth that intolerable Northern oppression followed the close of the Civil War and the notion that the West – in this case Dallas -offered a new place to redeem the lost economic opportunities of a region in decline. Coop’s character enacts both legends: He purges Dallas of corrupt Reconstruction scoundrels and moves beyond the despair and vengeance that resulted from his lost family heritage in Georgia.

At the movie’s end, the Dude discloses that Coop has been pardoned for his postwar “crimes.” As the music swells, the Dude utters these immortal lines: “Here, free man, sink your roots in Dallas, grow your cotton, raise your kids.”

And what will become of the Dude? “Somebody’s got to tote that cotton, and I’ve got me a railroad to build.” About all that’s left for future generations, it seems, is to found Neiman-Marcus and establish the Cowboys franchise.

Moving from the kicker days of the old Dallas to the Dallas of the present -a modern metropolis of skyscrapers, freeways and the state fair -we set the scene for another bad Dallas flick, State Fair, starring Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, Tom Ewell, Bobby Darin, Pamela Tiffin, Alice Faye and a pig named Zsa Zsa. Stale Fair was first filmed in 1933 (with Will Rogers, Lew Ayres and Janet Gaynor), then again in 1945 (this time as a Rodgers and Ham-merstein musical with Dana Andrews, Jeanne Crain and Dick Haymes). The third State Fair was a tired retread with a new location: Texas instead of Iowa.

The decision to film in Dallas did not go unnoticed in Iowa. The governor of Iowa challenged Texas to a pig contest. Held on Oct. 9, 1962, at the Pan-American Livestock Exhibition at the Texas State Fair, the contest was limited to Iowa and Texas swine. Although Zsa Zsa, the giant champion boar and winner of the Blue Boy Award in the movie, was on hand for the festivities, the contest proved to be about as dull as the film, with neither state pig bringing home the bacon. It ended in a tie.

Iowans unhappy about the new location probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the sentiments in the movie, either. The Texas State Fair, wouldn’t you know it, is the “biggest state fair in the whole U.S.A.” Or in the mechanical words of Big Tex, the giant cowboy replica in baggy denims, boots and Stetson, “This is the greatest state fair in the world.” By the end of the movie, only the most chauvinist Texan is not relieved to hear Tom Ewell observe: “The biggest this, the biggest that. Texas has the biggest everything. ’Bout all we prove is that Texas has the biggest liars.”

Despite five new Rodgers and Hammer-stein lyrics added to the original 1945 score and the presence of teen-age heartthrobs Boone and Darin, the less said about State Fair as a musical the better. One thing is clear, State Fair is not Oklahoma!

One thing it is, is predictable. A farm family, the Frakes (father, mother, teenage son and teen-age daughter), pack up the pig, the mincemeat and the kid’s hot sports car and go to Dallas to the state fair. Mom wins the mincemeat contest; Dad wins the big prize at the livestock show; the daughter (Pamela Tiffin) wins Bobby Darin. Darin plays a slick TV announcer who gives up a major network career opportunity for farm life with the simple country girl with the bouffant hairdo. Tiffin looks, as one reviewer noted, like a “direct descendant of Little Miss Muffet.”

Only the kid (Pat Boone) loses, and he doesn’t really. He prevents an urban bully from winning the auto race, which is a moral victory since Boone’s best friend nabs first place. Boone also loses Ann-Margret, a dancer who wears tight shorts and talks tough (“You farm boys kill me”). Although Ann-Margret feels the tug of the good earth, the big time is in her veins and she gives Boone the brushoff. Just as well. He has a standby back at the farm; the day after his sorrowful return to the country, he’s zooming about the landscape in his red sports car with his girlfriend beside him. Farming in this movie is a lot of fun: Mainly it involves driving around in fast cars and winning awards.

Culturally, there are a couple of interesting points about Stale Fair. One is the ambivalence it conveys about Big D: Dallas is a wonderful city because it hosts the greatest state fair in the United States, but it’s also dangerous. Girls can get taken in by fast talkers; boys can get taken in by racy city women from exotic places like New Jersey. “You’ve got to be careful at the state fair,” Mom tells her daughter. Having noted this, there is one scene that would bother anybody who went to the state fair during the late Fifties and early Sixties. Pamela Tiffin waits alone for her boyfriend in the dark empty fairgrounds, long after everybody has gone home. Even in 1962, years before crime came to America, nobody did that. Back then, kids from the sticks knew the state fair was regarded as a dangerous place. You stayed in groups, and you definitely didn’t hang around by yourself after the tun was over. But here we have Pamela Tiffin waiting around for Bobby Darin to join her just as if she were on a Hollywood set.

Of the minor cultural touches in State Fair, one is memorable: While in Dallas, the Frakes stay in a trailer court. This is before trailer houses became mobile homes and is as authentic a detail as one could want. It fits with the family home in the country, an authentic farm house with a bare front yard, white fretwork on the windows and above the front porch and simple furnishings inside. Had the movie touched base more often with the actual lives and habits of a middle-class farm family, it might have told us something about Dallas and the real magic of the state fair to people who, in the late Fifties, hadn’t yet sold their land to developers, bought Learjets or experienced a world that would dwarf the fair forever.

Surely the worst of the Dallas movies is All The Fine Young Cannibals. I saw it again recently, and it’s just as bad as when I saw it at the Majestic in 1960. Some things don’t deteriorate; this movie couldn’t unless the film stock disintegrated. First off, it isn’t about cannibals; that’s an artsy title intended to lend significance to a banal story about restless youth. Restless youth comes in two forms: dirt poor and filthy rich. The plot, both intricate and ridiculous, is a soap-opera pretext for the rich and poor to intermingle.

Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood represent the poor set. He’s the son of an overbearing fundamentalist preacher; she’s the oldest daughter in a large poor-white family. In love, they spend a night together, and she gets pregnant. (Remember, this is 20 years before Endless Love, and teen-age pregnancy is a very big deal.) Since Wagner has several neuroses that stem from his father’s tyranny, marriage is not an option, so she catches a train heading east. On the train she meets George Hamilton, a Yale preppie. He takes her under his wing and marries her, and they move into a marvelous town house in New Haven.

Hamilton, now a farceur who plays campy Dracula and Zorro roles (then a studio lead being groomed as the next Tyrone Power), plays the rich kid. He hails from Dallas, which is definitely Nowheresville compared to New Haven. He tells Mama: “There isn’t very much to do in Dallas, Mama, except poke around the countryside and fraternize with the underprivileged natives.” His sister (Susan Kohner), bitchy and bored, runs away from the fashionable finishing school where Mama has stashed her, to join her brother’s society crowd at Yale.

In the meantime, Wagner, who happens to play a trumpet better than Satchmo, spends his time hanging out with his black friends on Deep Ellum Street in Dallas. Pearl Bailey, a blues singer, takes him to her maternal bosom and packs him along to New York to help launch his career as America’s leading angry young musician.

From New Haven and Dallas, the young cannibals converge on the Big Apple where endless angst is the order of the day. A mishmash of existential suffering, jazz-age music and big city debauchery is brought to a predictable conclusion when a sadder but wiser Wood returns to her roots, to the tar-paper shack. It hasn’t changed a bit; the first thing she does is give that linoleum floor a good scrubbing on her hands and knees. Hamilton finds her there, they embrace and he offers her a renewal of the shag-carpet life. Old money helps water many parched roots.

Back in New York City, the spoiled sister cozies up to Wagner, who all this time has been suffering from -are you ready? – fear of the dark. Seems the poor guy can’t sleep with the lights out.

Soap-opera elements aside, this movie is to be treasured most for its fantastic distortions of time and place. It makes Warner Brothers’ Dallas look like a documentary: The rural setting suggests the Depression South, while clothing styles and intellectual baggage are clearly late Fifties, post-Rebel Without a Cause. Wagner lives in a small East Texas town called Pine Alley. It has board sidewalks and dirt streets; wagons are a common form of transportation. But he dresses like a clean-cut American youth of the late Fifties and is indistinguishable from Pat Boone in State Fair. Wood’s habitat -in the countryside near Pine Alley -is even more in-credible. The set is straight out of Tobacco Road; she has to scrub the family laundry in a tub in the front yard -barefoot.

The picture of Deep Ellum, though, is the truly astounding dimension of this film’s sociology. A black section in East Dallas created after the Civil War as a freedmenstown, Deep Ellum existed until the building of Central Expressway. It was an island of black culture; Blind Lemon Jefferson and Huddie Ledbetter sang the blues there. The movie’s Deep Ellum captures something of the surface perhaps, but violates any sense of the integrity of the black folk experience. Instead of black singers -except Pearl Bailey, of course – we are given the ludicrous premise of Wagner’s being a great trumpeter beloved by all his black friends. The movie employs every cliche ever created concerning music, blacks and soul.

The night of his father’s death, Wagner rides a mule-powered wagon to his favorite Deep Ellum dive: a house with a bar, several rooms upstairs for prostitutes, and a host of black people drinking gin and doing the dirty bop. They beg Wagner to play his horn, and he works out his grief over Daddy’s death in a talking blues/jazz number. They fuss over him like he’s Charlie the Bird Parker.

Near the movie’s end, Wagner returns to Deep Ellum to play for Pearl Bailey’s funeral. The scene is so predictable you’d be stunned if it didn’t happen. The Negroes weep, clap hands and sing, and go into that syncopated New Orleans shuffle all movie Negroes perform at the drop of a shroud. If Warner Brothers’ Dallas was a Western town, this one’s a Dixie special.

If you still cringe every time you hearmention of Southfork or see a “Who ShotJ.R.?” bumper sticker, count your blessings-one of these Dallas fiascos couldhave made prime time.