TinselTales: The Model and the Method Actor

If I'm being honest, I don't know for certain if the actor in question was really into The Method, but it makes for a catchy title and he did play one in a movie we dearly love here in the Underworld. This is one of countless startling incidents that have taken place over the years in Hollywood, where the drama off-screen often competes with, even exceeds, the drama on-screen!

Born January 6th, 1934 in New York, New York, Tom Gilson grew up to be a 6'4" aspiring actor. The first gig he landed was a bit in the Robert Wagner flick Prince Valiant (1954), but it didn't lead to further screen work. Back in NYC, he took part in the play Saint Joan, which starred Siobhan McKenna. In 1957, his Brylcreamed hair and pretty-boy face landed him a role on The Phil Silvers Show as Elvin Pelvin (which capitalized on the recent drafting of singing sensation Elvis Presley.)

1958 brought a pair of movies with further parts for him to portray. Young and Wild, though cheaper and more exploitative, gave him more to do. (Considering what was to come, this still featuring a shotgun being loaded, is a bit unnerving now.)

Check out all the incredible mannequins, I mean thespians, honing his or her craft for this shot...

His other film that year was 20th Century Fox's Rally Round the Flag, Boys!, which placed him as the love interest to Tuesday Weld.

Soon after, he signed with Warner Brothers as a contract player, which meant basically one thing; he'd be working all the time! The young men and women of this period were put to use in many films and many TV series. He was seen in The Threat (1960) as a henchman, but also popped up in other movies like This Rebel Breed (1960) and on shows like Bourbon Street Beat, Bat Masterson and Cheyenne, to name a few.

You'll never guess who the gal in the middle is, playing a character named "Wiggles!"

It was 1960's The Crowded Sky which would be his most fateful film. The crowded movie was brimming over with characters and plot lines and his was about a young Method actor who's flying to the coast to test for a role. In tow is his agent, Patsy Kelly, who has precious little patience for his self-generated agonies. (By the way, the young lady in that Rebel Breed lobby card one pic back is none other than a young Dyan Cannon!)

Meanwhile, we have Saundra Edwards, born March 12th, 1938 in Los Angeles, California. The dark beauty was of German-American and Cherokee descent. Married at 16 to her business manager, she was already mother to a baby girl when she landed the March 1957 Playmate of the Month spot in Playboy magazine! She was 19 at the time.

This being the earlier days of the fabled mag, she was mostly seen partially nude or semi-obscured, though there wasn't too much left to the imagination nonetheless.

The pictorial had her portraying a ballerina removing various layers of the costume seen on the cover. She would give birth to a son in 1959 at age 21.

The right people must have been observing the pics in between reading the articles because she was soon granted a Warner Brothers contract and was put to work with bits in movies like The Naked and the Dead and Auntie Mame (both 1958.) Like her fellow performers, she also wound up on most of the studio's series like Cheyenne, Maverick, Bronco and so on. Because of her half-Native American heritage, she was often cast as Indian maidens or other exotic creatures.

We find her here being embraced by Alan Hale Jr. in Up Periscope (1959), unbilled as "Grass Hut Girl."

But in 1961, she was cast as a stewardess in The Crowded Sky. Seen here with fellow flyer Anne Francis, they are collecting a ticket from Jean Willes. In between Francis and Willes, one can spot Gilson looking out a window.

When it's time to collect the tickets from Kelly and Gilson, Francis' hand is in just the right position to spoil us seeing the interested gaze that he is shooting the lovely flight attendant. The movie concerns what happens when a small navy jet and a large passenger plane collide in midair, but those weren't the only things colliding and creating sparks. Edwards and Gilson fell for one another. They had also worked on the same episode of Cheyenne in 1960.

As I noted earlier, Gilson plays a Method actor. He's totally unsure how to proceed with a part he's up for - a coward. He can't identify with it and has nothing to draw from.

He goes through a series of James Dean-ish contortions trying to determine how he will be able to properly express cowardice (while Kelly sits watching him, rolling her eyes!)

Once the planes clank into one another and a crash may be imminent, he discovers all too soon what fear is and finally has some appropriate feelings from which to draw his upcoming portrayal... if he lives through the disaster!

Edwards' participation in the movie is far less pronounced. We don't really get a decent look at her until after the collision. Even then she must share the screen with higher-billed Francis.

The elegant Edwards gives the passengers in the rear of the plane emergency landing instructions.

At the end of the ordeal, Gilson and Edwards share this very brief moment together as she pours coffee for Kelly and him. In real life, though, the two would enter a tumultuous relationship which culminated in her pregnancy and their (I won't say shotgun) marriage. Their child, Tom Jr., her third, was born five months after their marital union. (Some sources give the marriage and the birth as occurring on the same day. That's multi-tasking at its finest!)

The marriage between Gilson and her was stormy. Gilson was rough, liked to drink and would often become confrontational as a result. ("Toxic masculinity" is a term that comes to mind.) There were several instances of domestic unrest between them. But on one occasion, when Gilson struck Edwards while she was holding their baby and he was hit, that was the last straw. She moved in with her sister and brother-in-law in Van Nuys.

With her own three young children (all 6 or younger) and her nephew in her care while her sister and her husband were out, Gilson called up. After verbally abusing her and threatening her on the phone, he came to the house where Edwards' brother-in-law had left her a loaded shotgun as protection. When Gilson refused to back away and continued to make threats, including killing her and the kids, she fired into his heart (from about a foot or less away) and he was dead. After only a half-hour of deliberation, the coroner ruled it a justifiable homicide.

Dead at age 28, Gilson's final film was Convicts 4 (1962), which starred Ben Gazzara, Sammy Davis Jr. and Stuart Whitman. He had TV appearances on The Gallant Men and The Dakotas in the can, which aired posthumously. A close friend of another rough & tumble actor, Steve McQueen, the soon-to-be superstar was a pall bearer at Gilson's funeral.

As for Edwards, then 24, she had to deal with the shattering reality of having slain the father of one of her three young children while still, despite all, being in love with him. Even cleared, the scenario harmed her position at Warners and her contract was allowed to lapse. She worked for a little while behind the scenes (in screen animal training) and reportedly was offered further film work (but only if she would send her children to boarding school in order to present an un-entangled public image.) Declining to do that, she ultimately faded into the general populace and passed away in 2017 at age 79.

The End.

I'm Feeling a Bit "Crowded" Today

One of disaster movie fans’ favorite trivia tidbits is the one about how Airport 1975 has commercial jet pilot Efrem Zimbalist Jr. running smack dab into private plane flyer Dana Andrews when, in 1960, the two had played reverse roles in The Crowded Sky. In Sky, Efrem Zimbalist is a navy flyer who winds up on a collision course with a commercial jet flown by Dana Andrews! Any cinematic success can be counted on to be revisited time and again (I’m surprised we didn’t have a later movie with them stationed in a retirement home, crashing their wheelchairs or Hoverounds into one another!)

The Crowded Sky is crowded indeed! Look at this collection of actors, and that’s just the key people on the plane. There are many more depicted on the ground and in recollections. Based on a novel by Hank Searls (the cover art of which is shown below, hilariously leaves little doubt as to the climax. Check out the planes at the top!), the film adaptation is as disjointed, over-encompassing and wonky a movie as you’re likely to find. However, if you find it, you’re likely to be entertained by it on some level. The screenplay attempts to fit every character (and then some) mentioned in the book and touch on his or her story. Thing is, movies are generally less than two hours long, so there really isn’t time to delve into all that. Even the fairly bloated Airport cut out a whole section devoted to an overworked, stressed-out air traffic controller. Thus, Sky has many, many characters who appear fleetingly and who we barely get to know before they’re gone!
Zimbalist plays a US Navy pilot whose scheming wife Rhonda Fleming has been caught with someone’s hand in her cookie jar, but who has devised a way out of being divorced for it. Their young daughter (played by quite possibly one of the most annoying juvenile actresses ever, and that’s saying something!) is devoted to her father and realizes what a shrew her mom is. (This character, by the way, had a much larger role in the book, but thank God she doesn’t here!)

Fleming has stopped caring for Zimbalist, but isn’t ready to be tossed out on her rump just yet either. She uses the daughter as a bargaining tool to get what she wants. Flashbacks reveal their love affair and how she was pretty cunning from the start. Second-billed Fleming was still a fairly significant star at this time and her presence was played up in the lobby cards. Two of the eight cards depict a poolside scene that, literally, passes by in seconds in the finished film! All her moments are front-loaded in the movie and she disappears completely after a while with not even so much as a reaction given to her character after the atmospheric smash-up. Her eyes and hair were always said to be well-geared to the color films of the time and she is striking to look at here, though this was practically her last hurrah in the cinema.
In the book, Zimbalist had a caring mistress waiting for him as he flies from the west coast to Washington, D.C. In the film, he is merely a cuckolded husband with his own honor intact. Another flashback reveals his boxing sparring partner warning him not to get married (and look how thrilling the reception is. And, no, that’s not Thelma Ritter in the center of the card above.) The pugilistic pal has to have some of the kinkiest chest hair ever seen on a Caucasian. At least it’s a chance to see a little skin in the otherwise mostly suit & tie or uniform-clad movie.

Zimbalist takes on a passenger in his two-seater, young sailor Troy Donahue. Donahue was not yet a major star when filming began on The Crowded Sky, but, in the meantime, A Summer Place was released and he became a major teen idol. From then on (while it lasted), he would be a leading man. In this film, he’s a secondary character, but does get a fair amount of face time. Almost all of his scenes are with Zimbalist (a good many of which have his face covered up by a black oxygen mask!) I’ve never been too hot to trot on Troy, but he does have a close-up in a café scene in which he might be the most beautiful he ever looked. His eyes are a stunning hue and he runs his left hand through his blonde hair and in that instant, I can see what all the fuss was about. He still, especially at this juncture, was no Laurence Olivier, though! (In the shot below, I think he has a sort of Alan Ladd quality.)Finally, top-billed Andrews makes his appearance and is shown to be a stern, egotistical stuffed shirt. His co-pilot is John Kerr (of Tea and Sympathy and South Pacific fame) and the two have a history of antagonism between them. They don’t even pretend to like one another ever since Andrews cost Kerr a promotion. Kerr has his own set of problems. He’s waffling between becoming a top-tier pilot and pursuing a career as a commercial artist. According to the dictates of the screenplay, he cannot do both. (In an odd choice of artistic demonstration, the film has him sketching a cuddly kitty cat for a CIGARETTE advertisement!)

Kerr is also knee-deep in a tormented relationship with stewardess Anne Francis. Their history is shown in flashback as well. She is, in her own words, an “ex-tramp” and will not kiss him at first because a kiss will lead to other things and she has sworn all that off until marriage. Thing is, he won’t marry until he has sorted out his career woes! Then there’s the fact that his late father was a tortured artist who only kept a few of his paintings, all of which centered on subjects with no faces. Veteran actress Frieda Inescort has a cameo role as one of the owners of a rare example of this art.

In another flashback thread, Andrews recalls his wife and son. The son is preordained to be a pilot, just like dad, but Andrews is so hard on him that he can’t possibly measure up. He eventually turns to delinquency as a way of acting out. (One of his “bad” teen friends is none other than ex-Mouseketeer Bobby Burgess!) The son, played with all the variety, excitement and expression of pond scum by a one shot cutie named Ken Currie, is at least easy on the eyes. It surprising that he didn’t get at least one more shot in the movies or on TV on that score alone! This was the era of predatory talent agent Henry Willson and his stable of boys (one of whom, of course, was Donahue and another was Rad Fulton, who shows up here as a brunette air traffic controller) and Currie might have been one of them as well, I don’t know.

Speaking of Rad Fulton, he and Willson had a major falling out within two years of this movie and he broke away from Willson's services. Willson allegedly declared that the name "Rad Fulton" was his and that the actor couldn't keep it! So the actor, rather happily, went back to his own name of James Westmoreland and continued a spotty career, some of it on daytime soaps. Interestingly, Westmoreland was married to actress Kim Darby for ONE MONTH in 1970! In 1984, several years after Willson's death, he appeared on an episode of T.J. Hooker as Rad Fulton, his last screen credit to date.

Francis had been working in TV and movies from the age of seventeen and had enjoyed the hits Bad Day at Black Rock and Forbidden Planet several years before this. She is photographed so well here that she actually manages to outshine Fleming, even though her role is less glamorous. Her pert, capable character is winning enough and attractive enough to make viewers wonder what on earth she sees in the sour Kerr. (Kerr has never been a favorite of mine, though he does have his supporters. Fans of his need to see him in this because he is also photographed flatteringly throughout.) Kerr later played an attorney on the primetime soap Peyton Place and it sparked him to become a lawyer in real life! He went into semi-retirement as an actor and made a living as a Beverly Hills legal eagle. Francis continued a long, prolific career in various mediums, though her experience with Babs Streisand during the 1968 filming of Funny Girl seemed to knock the wind out of her movie career. (Her part was trimmed, along with her close-ups, allegedly at the star’s insistence.)

Despite his billing, this is no great shakes for Keenan Wynn. Somehow his lothario character gets shortchanged amidst all the many, many goings on. He really only has one so-so scene. It’s possible that flashbacks involving him were edited out. In a hilarious structural conceit, the camera keeps zooming in on people whose voices are then heard in thought (later parodied in Airplane! – “That’s strange. Jim never has a second cup of coffee at home,” which was already a parody of a then-popular coffee commercial.) Their faces remain lit, but the background goes dark as they emote themselves silly to their own voiceovers, then often drifting to a flashback. Anyway, Wynn is being pursued by a woman he had done wrong years before and he is not only miscast in that vein, but is given practically nothing to do. He does, however, get to squeal like a girl when he looks out the window and sees that a wing is on fire!

The woman pursuing him, by the way, is Jean Willes. The very first time I ever saw this movie, years and years ago on the once-great, now-shitty, TNT network, I thought this was Ava Gardner! I think I can be forgiven because she does have a resemblance to Ava, which she no doubt played up, especially in this particular film. Willes’ hair is darker than it often was and is styled to resemble Ms. Gardner’s.

Fans of 1930s comedienne Patsy Kelly will be delighted to see that she is also onboard! She has a small role as the agent of a self-indulgent Method actor who is on his way to L.A. to read for an important part. She wisecracks her way through the movie and is stuck doing all her scenes with a rather annoying young man named Tom Gilson. Gilson was a busy Warner Brothers contract player with sleepy eyes and a double chin whose talent was, in my opinion, debatable.
He met (and soon married) Saundra Edwards during the filming of this movie. She is the brunette stewardess and was a burgeoning starlet in the wake of a 1957 Playboy spread. Only two years later, after he had beaten her one too may times and nearly harmed their baby, she fled to her sister’s house where he called and threatened her and then tried to break in and, potentially, kill her. She grabbed a shotgun that her brother-in-law had given her to “scare him” with and it went off, blowing a hole in him. Gilson died and, unfortunately for her, so did Edwards’ career, though the incident was ruled justifiable homicide.

Still other stories among the passengers of the film include a lonely, shy man and an insecure plain, woman seated next to each other who keep going over any potential for a relationship in their heads and a doctor who has his wife on board who is terminally ill, but doesn’t know it. This was a major plotline of the book, tossed away with unbilled actors in the movie.

It’s a pretty laborious journey to the climax of the film, though there are plenty of snickers to be had along the way. There’s the unbelievably rude, sexist way that Andrews refers to Francis (“Girl!”) and the many aforementioned voiceovers and camera zooms. Intentional humor, such as provided by the goofy flight engineer Joe Mantell, mostly falls flat.

When the big moment finally arrives, it is surprisingly arresting considering that this is a 1960 film. I waited decades to see The High and the Mighty, a film that this one allegedly ripped off, and could not wait to see it, only to be bored out of my skull for much of it and horrendously disappointed by the utter lack of disaster. At least here we’re treated to a demise or two and plenty of rattling seats and flying debris. Just like the latter Airport 1975, a hole is ripped in the side of the plane, but I wouldn’t dare reveal how that happens (it’s not what you think!)
The lobby cards and stills on this page do not really capture how beautifully the film is shot, in general. The colors are so vibrant and the people are frequently captured in hazy, gauzy glory that would make even Lucille Ball stand up and take notice. Yes, it has a staid quality sometimes and there are far, far too many characters in it for many of them to register or matter to the viewer, but it’s slick, attractive, relatively engrossing and, by the end, sort of fun.

Andrews was also behind the wheel, so to speak, in 1957’s Zero Hour, all about a veteran who has to fly the plane when the crew is done in by food poisoning (and that one was a major influence on Airplane!, in fact, much of the script was lifted right from it!) Needless to say, Andrews was not someone you wanted to be riding alongside in an aircraft if you could help it (this apart from the fact that Andrews suffered from alcoholism during the better part of his career!) Another hooty film of his is Hot Rods to Hell, about a family on a road trip being terrorized by local punks.

Since I all but exhausted the 1970s disaster films (somehow, I realized recently, forgetting 1974’s Juggernaut, however!), I will probably be touching on some prior excursions into the genre here and there. Airline disaster, for example, goes all the way back to 1939’s Five Came Back and Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent in 1940, if not further, and there have been plenty in between. I consider this an admirable entry in the field, though not without its flaws.