Second Sight Cinema

Images and ideas about the movies that haunt us, starting at the very beginning and on through the 1970s. Mostly Hollywood, with some documentaries, indies, and foreign film. Preservation and restoration, too. Second Sight Cinema

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Giant (1956): Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Oh boy, I get to write about Giant!

Bick: That is a beautiful animal (presumably he’s speaking collectively of both Leslie and War Winds)

Or rather the marriage therein, between Texan Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson), rich, powerful, and beautiful scion of a 595,000 acre ranch, and Leslie Lynnton (Elizabeth Taylor), daughter of an old money Maryland family. Giant spans 25 years, from their first meeting and hasty marriage, through their conflicts and commitment, and the movie’s conclusion, when they have become the “older generation,” happy to be at home babysitting their grandsons, relaxed with each other and close in a way they could never be in their passion and immaturity.

Giant is pretty close to Gone With the Wind good, a vast canvas of conflicts and change made relatable by this central relationship.

It’s easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole with a movie this grand and fertile—once you start digging into it, there are a lot of things worth writing about. I found myself so smitten with the character of Leslie and her splendid portrayal by the 23-year-old Taylor that I had to take a step back. Hopefully, some other time I can indulge that fascination and write Leslie Lynnton the appreciation she deserves.

But the marriage, which is the movie’s spinal column, with all the other story elements branching off from it, is very unusual for a Hollywood movie. I haven’t been able to think of another movie that follows a relationship this closely over this long a period. It’s not unusual to start with the first days of the romance, when things are lighthearted and sexy, and use that to set up a story that begins decades later, but leaves out all the stuff in between.

But the stuff in between, Stevens shows us, is not to be ignored. It’s in seeing how these two people, both indulged and confident, used to getting their own way, learn (or don’t) to do the seemingly impossible work of marriage: to commit to their partner for the long haul without ceding their own identity. Can they learn to honor the marriage without compromising themselves?

You already know the movie, right? If not, see it and let me know what you think.

If you’re new to it, here’s a plot synopsis to keep track of character names and plot points. I don’t mean to confuse, but there’s not world enough or time to provide all that context here: (insert link to imdb plot synopsis here) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049261/plotsummary

Okay, let’s start at the beginning.

Stevens was so swell at showing rather complicated emotional stuff. Bick has come to Maryland to look at some of Dr. Lynnton’s horses. When Bick meets Leslie, you can feel how aware they are of each other physically. You know that feeling, when you are so turned on by somebody that you are in a heightened state just being in the same room with them, and you’re always acutely aware of exactly where they are, what’s going on with them? Both of them feel it instantly. Leslie is engaged to David (Rod Taylor, rrrrrrrr), but it’s clear that Bick intrigues her in a way David does not. David is part of Leslie’s world, and she wants something more challenging. She gets it, in spades.

Bick in the throes of new love

…Leslie, too

  Leslie is dressed for the ball her parents are throwing that night. She listens for a minute as her mother makes polite, clueless conversation with Bick, who clearly feels very much an outsider in this lovely Eastern family, with their rolling, green land and stately house of small rooms. Then Leslie starts talking, saucy and flirtatious, challenging him: You a big enough man to take me on, Handsome?

Leslie’s fiancé, David (Rod Taylor) watches as Leslie and Bick feel themselves drawn together.

After dinner, he follows her out to the porch, and they converse awkwardly, both clearly awash in hormones and excitement. We get that this is more than just sex, though of course it’s clearly that, too. But there is some greater yearning as well as a sense of mystery in the presence of the unknown and unfamiliar.

Leslie flirting with Bick on the porch

He goes to bed, she comes home early from the ball and spends the night reading about Texas. She has decided to marry him, and when her little sister asks if she can have David, she snaps something like “Yes, now get out of here!”

So much for being engaged. I’d be a little slower to toss away Rod Taylor, but she is drawn to the adventure of moving far from everything she’s ever known, and making that her home.

Bick, too, feels that awe of being in a place he’s never been before, not just physically but emotionally.

The traditional read of Giant is that Bick is a bigot (he is) and sexist (ditto) who changes over the course of the film because of Leslie, who refuses to stay in line or act like the women he knows.

I think it’s more interesting: He’s drawn to her because she *isn’t* safe or predictable. He could have married Vashti (the marvelous Jane Withers) or any other little old gal (btw, I grew up in Texas, and I never heard anyone use the expression “little old,” nor did my mother, who grew up in West Texas, just sayin’), but instead he marries a woman who is smarter than he is and just as tough, and who isn’t going to make herself smaller to avoid pissing him off.

Stevens doesn’t show us their wedding. We go straight from the Lynntons’, Bick and Leslie in an almost visible halo of infatuation at the fence, both petting her gorgeous horse War Winds.

Of War Winds: The magnificent horse carries a lot of meaning. Watching Leslie ride him, seeing her rapport and affection for him, we’re told that he’s too wild, too much horse for anyone but her. Bick buys him anyway and ships him home on the same private railcar he brings his new bride home in.

The newlywed Benedicts on his private rail car, headed for Texas, for Reata

At this point, the beginning of the marriage, Leslie and Bick are still enraptured by each other. The work of beginning a life has not yet begun, but we see that the honeymoon has gone well; they’re like little kids who share a secret.

Leslie: Is this Texas?

Then two things happen: Leslie has her first meetings with the Mexican workers on the ranch and in her new house, a spooky-looking edifice that rises up alone on the prairie, that hasn’t been redecorated in about 50 years. And she meets her sister-in-law, Luz, a single gal whose life and identity are all based on her “running things,” including Bick and Leslie.

Leslie’s kindness to Angel Obragon rubs Bick the wrong way. And it’s only the beginning…

Bick is disturbed by Leslie’s kindness to Angel Obragon, who has brought her a little bouquet to welcome her, and to the women who keep house for the Benedicts.

Bick: You’re a Texan now, honey. Leslie: Is that a state of mind? I’m still myself. Bick: You’re my wife, honey. You’re a Benedict. Leslie: I still have a mind of my own. Elsewhere, being gracious is acceptable.

All you movie lovers know an approaching storm when you see one. Leslie’s refusal to adopt her husband’s and his friends’ racist treatment of their workers and neighbors is an affront, a threat. Bick has married a woman who knows who she is, who like him comes from old money and has the casual confidence to show it—this is perhaps one of the things that they share. She will not compromise her morals to fit in, and he’s not going to like that. And that’s going to form the plot’s central conflict. There are others, but they all radiate out from the uneasy Leslie and Bick relationship.

Leslie’s parents’ house in Maryland

The Benedict house at Reata

Bick’s sister, Luz (Mercedes McCambridge), is also on high alert at the entrance of the stranger into what she naturally thinks of as her and Bick’s domain. Luz is single, tough, and takes great pride in her ability to bully their Mexican employees. She believes they’d “sit on their honkers all day” if she didn’t terrorize them.

Luz has no grace to offer Leslie, only a reproach that they’ve been so long getting there during spring roundup. This after she walks in on them just after Bick has carried Leslie over the threshold, the two giggling and kissing. Then she tries to put them into separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the hall. Bick refuses, saying sheepishly, “We’re married, Luz…. You know how it is,” (though no, she doesn’t) while they both grin at the mortified Luz.

The whole movie could have taken a very different turn if Bick, instead of matter-of-factly making it clear he and his wife will not be sleeping 50 feet apart, had been torn, feeling Luz’s agony, and told Leslie they should do as Luz says, just until she adjusts to them being married. That would have put the marriage off on a wrong foot, with Leslie the outsider in her own home, and I don’t think it would have been long until she went home to Maryland.

But impressively, he stands up for Leslie and their marriage, and it is the first indication that these two might have a chance.

Luz keeps swinging, telling a polite but nonplused Leslie that her blood is too thin, but “You don’t have to do a thing. This rich Texas air will fix you up.” (Leslie’s blood is just fine, she doesn’t need any fixing up, and she’s not about to be characterized as some fragile little bird, thank you very much.) Luz has Leslie’s breakfast brought in, an indigestible pile of blood sausage, eggs, a yellow lump that might be cheese or butter. Leslie is horrified, in a genteel way, but politely nibbles. When Leslie faints at the barbecue later that day, Luz is thrilled.

Breakfast a la Luz (old style)

But it’s short-lived. Leslie knows Bick and Luz eat breakfast together every morning at 5am. She gets up early enough to supervise breakfast preparations herself, and triumphantly rings the “come and get it” dinner bell to summon them to breakfast. It’s a very different meal that includes grapefruit halves with maraschino cherries in the center, much less heavy than that mess Luz had served Leslie the day before.

Leslie’s revised breakfast as she takes over the household at Reata

Luz is distraught. The interloper has already taken her brother, and now she’s taking over “her” house. She appeals to Bick, but again, he refuses to be drawn into a conflict. He mildly tells her of course he’s not “setting up against her,” but says, “That gal’s my wife,” and that he expects her to be fair enough to treat her properly.

I feel for Luz. Her whole identity is being trampled, and she lacks the internal resources to change. The only thing she can think of to settle herself is to terrorize somebody, and unfortunately that somebody is War Winds. Despite being warned that nobody rides him but Leslie, Luz mounts him, saying something like “I guess you’re going to tell me how to run things, too,” digging her spurs into his sides as hard as she can, making him cry out in pain.

Leslie and Bick don’t know their honeymoon is about to end in tragedy.

Leslie doesn’t know this is one of her last moments with her beloved horse

Leslie finds her own work, advocating for the poor laborers of Reata, nursing little Angel Obragon and his mother

War Winds limps home to Reata, and when Leslie gets home from finding her own work, as an advocate for the Mexicans who live in squalor in Vienticito, left to manage as best they can without any kind of sewers, running water, electricity, access to a doctor—Luz lies dying on the couch. They found her head split open from a mesquite stump after War Winds, bless his heart, had finally succeeded in throwing her. She dies quickly, and the shot of her feet, still in their boots, as she is covered up, reminds me of the Wicked Witch of the East’s feet sticking out from Dorothy’s house.

Luz (Mercedes McCambridge), determined to exercise power over somebody, unwisely chooses War Winds

Luz’s spurs, digging into War Winds

Luz abusing War Winds until he throws her to her death

Poor War Winds limps home

Luz’ dead feet, still booted, as her body is covered

War Winds has suffered an inoperable broken bone, and Bick has shot him.

This marks the end of the honeymoon, as well as the sexually playful moment in their relationship. As Marilyn Ann Moss points out in Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film, War Winds embodied Leslie’s sexuality. His death signals an end to sexuality in the movie, pretty much all around. The closest we get is Jett Rink (James Dean) creepily sliming Leslie with his compliments, which get more brazen as his drinking develops, until he says, practically licking his lips, “You look good enough to eat,” which leaves Bick no choice but to slug him. Bick has been waiting years for a good reason to slug Jett, but that’s for another piece.

But Leslie assumes a new role, now that her sexual flame has been effectively extinguished. She becomes the mother figure, the benevolent authority figure who will move Reata and all within its vast area, including Bick, into the 20th century.

Twenty years later, we see Judy Benedict, one of Bick’s and Leslie’s twins, with her just-drafted husband, Bob, kissing in the car before going into the darkened house together, emerging in the morning with him buttoning his shirt. That’s as hot as it gets.

As a matter of fact, the degree to which sexuality is absent in the rest of the movie is itself noteworthy.

I’m telling you, I could keep on writing about Giant for ages, there’s so much to explore and say. Hopefully, I’ll be able to return to it and explore some of the many other fascinating aspects.

But for now, I hope I’ve gotten you interested either in a first viewing or a re-viewing. Like all great movies, this one rewards repeat viewings. The very unusual exploration of a marriage over a long period is only one area worthy of our attention.

We’ve only covered about the first hour, not quite to the end of Act I.

This post was written for the Wedding Bells Blogathon, hosted by Hometowns to Hollywood. Check out the other posts here. It’s a mitzvah!

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Alistair Sim: the “full-bodied” Scrooge

“An ant is what it is, and a grasshopper is what it is, and Christmas is a humbug.” —E. Scrooge

“

As so often happens when I choose a movie to write about, a movie I dearly love, I pass through a period of thinking there’s not really that much to say about it. That’s especially true with a story so often adapted and so universally beloved.

But of course as soon as I begin digging into the movie, its source material, and taking screen shots from the movie—can’t tell you how much I learn about a film during this stage—it invariably turns out there’s way too much to say and way too little time. I’m past my deadline already. That’s why this piece only goes through Scrooge’s first outing, with the Spirit of Christmas Past—I could happily spend another four hours doing screen shots, but this will hopefully whet your appetite for the greatness of this movie, if you don’t already know it, and get you ready for a re-viewing if you do.

So this will be not a finished essay but notes on an absolutely fabulous version of one of the most adapted stories in the English language. Also on my Christmas Carol watchlist: the George C. Scott version, which is regarded almost as highly as this 1951 version, and The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, which I have not yet seen. I’m taking for granted that you know the basic story and character names, at least the major ones (Scrooge, Marley, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim).

Christmastime looms large in Scrooge’s life. He was forged in the loneliness of his childhood at school, where he was left to fend for himself during the holidays. It was Christmas when his beloved sister, Fanny, rescued him from family exile and took him home, as she says in the movie, never to be lonely as long as she lives. It is Christmas Eve when Scrooge’s business partner and only friend Jacob Marley dies, and it is Christmas Eve seven years after that night when Dickens’ story takes place.

After a typical Christmas Eve, which for Mr. Scrooge means declining to make any donation to buy meat and drink for the poor (“I wish to be left alone,” he tells them) as well as telling a borrower who can’t make his payment to hie himself to debtor’s prison. “If they would rather die [than go to debtors’ prison], they’d better do it and decrease the surplus population,” and what seems to be a ritual of sneering at his clerk, Bob Cratchit, for his excitement about celebrating Christmas with his family, Scrooge has his customary solitary dinner. He shoos some tattered children carolers, singing in the snow, and walks to his house, the one he inherited from his late partner and friend, Jacob Marley. In the novella, Dickens says it is pitch dark, but that Scrooge knows every stone. But he is confronted by something he cannot account for: Marley’s face, lit by a dreadful light, appears on the door knocker…

…followed shortly thereafter by Marley’s ghost. Marley’s afterlife is going very badly indeed, and it will never get better. Marley wishes to spare Scrooge his everlasting torment, so he intervenes to get Scrooge something he really doesn’t deserve—a chance to reform before it’s too late.

The film makes excellent use of sound in this section. Marley’s shrieks are blood-curdling, and his movements are accompanied by a sort of sloshing sound, as well as the very loud clanking of his horribly heavy chain, the one he crafted in life, day by day, “of my own free will,” as he says.

Just before he leaves, Marley calls Scrooge to the window and shows him spectral, writhing figures, those who want to help other but “have lost the power, forever.” The figures remind me of a Breughel painting. He also tells Scrooge to expect, courtesy of his own intervention, visits from three spirits, and makes clear that Scrooge had better avail himself of this opportunity to avoid Marley’s fate.

“I wish to be left alone,” Scrooge told the men who visited his office on this day, soliciting for charity.

But does he, really? He is in a kind of living death, his days and nights carved in routines and silence. His beloved sister is dead, his partner is dead, he has rejected his nephew, and has lost the love of his fiancée, which seems to remove the last impediment to his fully indulging his worst impulses.

On this particular Christmas, after years of an unvarying routine, in which Scrooge not only treats other people as an offense to him personally, he shows himself no more generosity or mercy than he does others. We see him at dinner, asking for more bread. The waiter clearly knows him, so he tells Scrooge the bread will cost a halfpenny more. Scrooge says, “..no more bread.” He starves everybody, but he barely indulges himself. The harsh world he perceives, in which he has become an instrument of that harshness, offers him no escape.

Scrooge and the Spirit of Christmas Past at Scrooge’s old school…

…they see Scrooge’s beloved sister, Nanny, who has come to bring Scrooge home for Christmas, at last reconciled with the father who blames Scrooge for his mother’s dying after giving birth to him.

She reassures him that everyone loves him very much, and promises him he will never be lonely again, as long as she lives.

Scrooge spent his early years in exile from his family, at school, unretrieved during holidays. A terrible, lonely childhood. He weeps when his sister Fanny comes to bring him home, his father finally having forgiven him for supposedly having caused his wife’s death (in childbirth). Scrooge retreats into this posture, finding an identity in his hardness, his borderline criminality (when he and Marley buy out the embezzler), his righteous, unending anger and feeling that he is the one being shortchanged, the one being cheated. He thinks it’s about money, a realm where he can be master. But it’s a hedge against the terror of loneliness, a kind of mastery of it. He mocks Cratchit’s closeness with his family, his excitement at celebrating Christmas with them. It rings so hollow.

After the school visit, the Spirit takes Scrooge to an office Christmas party thrown by his first boss, Mr.Fezziwig, a gentle soul who refused to harden himself to the increasing ruthlessness of the changing world. We see Scrooge dancing with joy, and we see old Scrooge smile for the first time. The Spirit asks why Scrooge gives Fezziwig so much credit for throwing a party that must have cost what, “three or four pounds,” and Scrooge, before passing his thought through his hate filter, says something like “But look how much joy he brought, it would be worth a fortune…” before trailing off, lowering his head in shame, and saying he would like to have a word with his clerk, Cratchit.

Earlier that evening, Scrooge had looked scornfully at Cratchit, who has just wished him a Merry Christmas: “A Merry Christmas, sir, and you a clerk with 15 shillings a week and a wife and a family. talking about Merry Christmas”—he sneers. “I’ll retire to Bedlam.”

  “Perhaps the machines aren’t such a good thing for mankind after all,” Scrooge to the guy trying to buy out Fezziwig. This is the first scene where we see Scrooge tempted. The film frames many shots in doors and windows, people looking out at hard truths, or Tiny Tim looking in the toy store window at the Christmas display, or Scrooge’s fiancée Alice looking out at the world she now faces without Scrooge, who has changed in his affections, shifting them from Alice to making money at any cost.

Sister Fanny is dying in childbirth, just as Scrooge’s mother did when she bore him.

Fanny’s deathbed: she whispers a demand that Scrooge promise he will care for her son (not sure why, where’s her husband?), so similar to Oliver Twist. (Q: Does this happen in the book? I don’t think so. But if it’s an addition to this adaptation, it’s an excellent one. It makes Scrooge’s antipathy for his nephew and the power of their final reconciliation much stronger.)

Then Alice breaks off their engagement. She is still the very pure, two-dimensional character she was in their first scene together. She is poor and kind, and Scrooge is becoming rich and has no time for kindness.

Alice, breaking off their engagement: May you be happy in the life you have chosen. Scrooge, defiantly, angrily: I shall be.

Just after this, we see Scrooge reporting for work at his new job with the future embezzler. Scrooge seems to be hanging his head, he is ashamed to have abandoned Fezziwig. Proximity to the Fanny death scene creates a relationship—Scrooge changes, moves toward self-seeking and away from connection, because of losing Fanny and hating his nephew for causing Fanny’s death. He is introduced to Marley, who will cause his incipient corruption to flower.

The Spirit’s next stop after Fanny’s death and Alice’s breaking off their engagement: Scrooge’s new job, where he meets his future partner in business and corruption, and possible intercessor—it is Marley who has won Scrooge this last chance to avoid Marley’s tortured fate.

Marley: The world is on the verge of new and great changes, Mr. Scrooge. Some of them, of necessity, will be violent. Do you agree? Scrooge: I think the world is becoming a very hard and cruel place, Mr. Marley. One must steel oneself to survive it and not be crushed under. Marley: I think we have many things in common, Mr. Scrooge. Scrooge: I hope so, Mr Marley.

  Bob Cratchit, to Mrs Dilber, who has come to fetch Scrooge because Marley is dying. “He’ll come at seven.” Mrs Dilber: “I’ll try to get Mr Marley to hold out till then, I’m sure. Much obliged…and a Merry Christmas, if it ain’t out of keeping with the situation.”

Scrooge climbs Marley’s stairs, to Marley’s deathbed. At the top: the undertaker, played by the marvelous Ernest Thesiger, best known for his appearances in two James Whale films, The Old Dark House (1932) and as Dr. Frankenstein’s fellow mad scientist Dr. Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

Ernest Thesiger as the undertaker

Scrooge: You don’t believe in letting the grass grow under your feet, do you? Undertaker/Thesiger: “Ours is a highly competitive profession, sir.”

“We’ve been wrong.” “…Wrong? Well, nobody can be right all the time. Nobody’s perfect. We’ve been no worse than the next man…or better, when it comes to that. You mustn’t reproach yourself, Jacob.” “We were wrong. Save yourself.” “Save myself…save myself from what?”

Marley expires having failed to make Scrooge see the peril he is in.

Mrs. Dilber turns to the undertaker: “Just like you said.” Undertaker: “I always know”.—funniest moment in the movie, reliably from Thesiger.

Spirit: Jacob Marley worked at your side for 18 years. He was the only friend you ever had. And what did you feel when you signed the register at his burial and took his money, his house, and his few mean sticks of furniture? Did you feel a little pity for him? Look at your face, Ebenezer, the face of a wretched, grasping, scraping, covetous old sinner.” “No…no…”

The clock tolls, Scrooge wakes up, the next Spirit is coming…

This was written for the Happy Holidays Blogathon, hosted by the good people at Pure Entertainment Preservation Society. 

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Of Monocles and Mystery: Charles Douville Coburn

As Stanwyck’s shipboard cardsharp “father” in All About Eve (1942)

He’s one of the preeminent character actors of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and, like Sydney Greenstreet and Marie Dressler, among the small club of performers who started hugely successful movie careers around age 60, which at the time was not “the new 50,” it was less Golden Age than Golden Years—time to sit on your laurels and yell “Hey, kids, get off my lawn!” Instead, having only months before lost Ivah, his beloved wife and professional partner of 31 years, Coburn got on a train to Hollywood for a one-picture deal at Metro and immediately became as indispensable to the movies as he had been to the American stage for nearly four decades.

I’m as fascinated by the latecomers as I am by the Rooneys, Garlands, and Dickie Moores who started their screen careers when they were barely out of diapers. I love to watch people grow up and find their voices, see how they chart their uncertain course in the business and in their personal lives. But those who come late to the party, fully formed and with full lives already behind them, are equally intriguing. What’s the story they carry in their voices and faces, where did they come from, what did life throw at them along the way, and how did they respond? What did life make of them, and what did they make of life?

In Coburn’s case, he was prominent enough that I figured there’d be a full-length biography, or if I got luckier, even a memoir.

I didn’t get lucky.

So after the obligatory stops at his Wiki and his entry in David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, I started nosing around for other blog posts. I read just one—Cliff Aliperti’s at his Immortal Ephemera site, mainly looking for clues and sources—and started poking around for online links.

This kind of research always puts me in mind of Citizen Kane, and I indulge in an entirely unearned identification with the nameless reporter character who spends the better part of a week trying to plumb the mystery of identity before wanly saying No, he hadn’t found out what Rosebud was, but in any case it wouldn’t have revealed who Kane really was—it was just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Some of you know what this is like. You find contradictions and errors, or intriguing little factoids that raise way more questions than they answer.

With Coburn, this begins at the beginning, with his birth. Some bios say he was born in Savannah, Georgia, but it was actually, per Coburn himself, Macon, Georgia, in 1877, and it was a few years after that his family moved to Savannah. So Coburn was born in the heart of the Confederacy, where veterans of the war would have been everywhere and as Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Do the place and era of his birth explain the fact that Coburn was supposedly a member of White Citizens’ Councils, white supremacist groups? He was a proud son of Georgia who left his papers to the University of Georgia. I ran across one reference to his railing against the 14th Amendment in a late-life interview. It is painful to confront things like this about a beloved actor, someone you feel as if you know. But of course, you don’t, and people are complicated.

All accounts say he began his theatrical career at the Savannah Theatre as a program boy, though he said he was 13 and other sources say 14—I’m inclined to go with his own recollection, though one can’t ever be sure the source isn’t exaggerating for effect….

But all sources including the primary one, our boy Charles, agree that having risen through all available jobs at the theater, when he was 18, he became the Savannah’s manager. This would make it 1895.

I found no references to his parents or the circumstances of his upbringing. Was he at the theater out of love, or did his family need the money? I’m thinking here of Claude Rains, who began his work in the theater at the age of 10, his childhood one of grinding poverty. But of Coburn, at least with what I found poking around online, we have to speculate or leave it alone.

Rich, pervy Uncle Stanley, In This Our Life (1942)

In 1901, he moved to New York. That leaves six years between 18 and 24 for him to practice his trade and prepare to take on the big time. He says he originally hoped to become a “light opera comedian,” but when he saw a Shakespeare play, he was lost, or maybe found. The classics would always be the foundation of his passion for theatre.

What was that New York like? Now I’m thinking of Marie Dressler in Dinner at Eight, her eyes misting with nostalgia as she recalls the New York of her greatest years, when she was the toast of the town, young, beautiful, talented, successful, and surrounded by adoring swains. She pictures snow, and carriage rides to Delmonico’s. Dressler could probably have drawn on her own memory for that moment. Coburn’s turn-of-the-century New York was probably a bit less misty, but it’s always a good idea to have one’s salad days in one’s youth, when one is strong and has a high tolerance for squalor.

But look, by 1905 he starts his own company, the Coburn Players, and meets Ivah. They marry in 1906 and until her death in 1937, they are partners in life and work. Supposedly they had six children. Supposedly one of them became an auto mechanic who married a teacher, moved to California, and fathered movie star James Coburn. Is this true? I do not know.

I found that Playbill has a terrific site with a database of old programs, and while it doesn’t list all of the 30-something Broadway shows in which Coburn was actor, director, producer, or all of the above, it did provide a bit of background for this largely ignored part of his career. Here’s Coburn’s bio from WHO’S WHO IN THE CAST of Around the Corner (1936); according to Playbill, it ran for only 16 performances:

WHO’S WHO IN THE CAST

CHARLES COBURN (Fred Perkins), one of America’s foremost actor-managers, was honored last June by Union College with the degree of Master of Letters in recognition of his services to the American theater. Having embarked to the “enchanted aisles,” that marital and professional partnership known as Mr. and Mrs. Coburn entered upon a lifelong devotion to the classics and other nobilities of the theatre, with a repertoire eventually accruing of sixteen plays of Shakespeare, one of Moliére, three from the Greek and more than a score of the Old English, early American and moderns. They have played under the auspices of a hundred colleges and universities and once—the only actors ever invited to do so—they gave an evening performance on the White House grounds. Some of Mr. Coburn’s most important New York appearances have been in “The Better ‘Ole,” “The Yellowjacket,” “The Imaginary Invalid,” “So This Is London,” “The Farmer’s Wife,” “French Leave,” “The Bronx Express,” “Old Bill, M.P.,” “Falstaff,” “The Plutocrat” and “Lysistrata.” Mr. Coburn was in the all-star casts of “Diplomacy,” “Peter Ibbetson,” “Trelawney of the Wells,” and The Players’ production of “Troilus and Cressida.” He was Father Quartermaine in “The First Legion.” Last season he was starred with William H. Gillette, and James Kirkwood in the revival of “Three Wise Fools,” and last June he played the title role in The Players’ revival of George Ade’s comedy, “The County Chairman.” Ol’ Bill, Falstaff, Macbeth, President of the Senate of Athens, Bob Acres, Rip Van Winkle, Col. Ibbetson, and Henry VIII are among the fine portraitures in his gallery of stage characters. At the invitation of President Dixon Ryan Fox of Union College, Schenectady, the Coburns have been importantly engaged during the past two summers in organizing and directing at that college The Mohawk Drama Festival and the separate but related enterprise, The Institute of the Theatre. The central feature of the Summer Session is a festival of great drama, presented by a distinguished professional company, now established as an annual event of national significance taking on a character similar to that of the Stratford and Malvern festivals in England. /

The Coburns were part of the top echelon of the New York theater scene. For the 31 years of their marriage, they moved in those circles. I found this 1942 New York Times piece on Coburn, which has some wonderful color and detail about his life, where he lived, his sense of humor.

“Piggy,” Lorelei Lee’s dishonorably intentioned diamond mine owning friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

NYT, 1/18/42, p162, by Theodore Strauss via TimesMachine

A Man and His Monocle Charles Coburn, Traditionalist, Keeps Step in a Changing (Show) World

Charles Coburn is 63, a fact which alone gives him the right to appear in public with a monocle. Happily he also has the rather special sort of face a monocle requires, a certain paternal austerity, a benign aloofness—in short, the countenance of a man well fed upon a rich tradition. If the man is also of a height ordinarily reached by other men only on stepladders, that helps greatly too. Most of all, however, it is the tradition that counts, and in Mr. Coburn’s case he has aplenty. He has been a pillar in our theatre for longer than most of us can remember, and if latterly he has made a pretty farthing by displaying his talents in the West Coast Shangri-La in such items as the forthcoming “King’s Row,” it is a tribute to his culture and attainments that Hollywood is the place where he works contentedly eight months a year. New York is where he lives. It is understandable, of course. Mr. Coburn was nurtured in a mellower climate than that which made Sammy run. Though by no means an old fogy to sit in slippered state at The Players, his mind is solidly furnished; it has the bright polish of old brasswork. It is stocked with reminiscences of those years before the theatre became prohibitively expensive and movies alarmingly cheap, and it is strewn as full of Shakespearean quotations as a brook with pebbles. Over the years his mind has obviously assumed a sort of protective coloration that blends well with the comfortably old-fashioned furnishings of the lofty-ceilinged studio salon near Gramercy Square.

Charles Coburn, Esq. Mr. Coburn first moved into the premises in 1919 when Bohemia still stood on a bearskin and daubed pigment on six-foot easels. Somberly paneled, and with a fireplace large enough to roast a fair-sized midget, the room itself is a veritable museum of carved mahogany, portrait paintings, and assorted abracadabra. Most of the furnishings, Mr. Coburn explains, are props accumulated from that long line of plays in which he and Mrs. Coburn appeared and often produced, from their marriage in 1906 until her death several years ago. “I couldn’t sell the stuff for a nickel,” he confides gently. “But it’s a kind of reminder. It reflects the lives of a couple of people who lived here for quite a long time.” Like an elder craftsman who can wear the toga with authority, Mr. Coburn is apt to become troubled over the future of the art of acting. America, he says, has not produced an outstanding actor since 1926. Personalities, yes, and glamour boys and girls, but not an actor who can play a gentleman one night and a guttersnipe the next with equal effect. The old stock companies, where a young actor could spend his apprenticeship among experienced performers, are gone, and the colleges, where acting could be taught in concert with more mature talents, have thus far failed. The result, Mr. Coburn gloomily believes, is an art dying in the hands of those who could still pass it on.

Cycles and Bicycles Mr. Coburn himself began early. At 13, he took a job as program boy in the Savannah Theatre and five years later became its manager, the youngest entrepreneur in the country. During the two years under his aegis he saw such stars as Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Maxine Elliott, Mrs. Fiske, Modjeska, Otis Skinner, Richard Masterfield and Stuart Robson walk across his stage. Meanwhile he in turn was preparing for a career as a light opera comedian in amateur productions of “The Mikado,” or “The Little Tycoon,” and he still remembers the lingering glow of that night when Emma Abbott, a reigning favorite, snatched him from a crowd of enthusiasts and kissed him roundly. Ever since, he has been “flattered beyond words” by requests for autographs—thinking that perhaps some youngster may feel as he did. “That is as it should be,” he says, falling into quotation. “It is a world of make believe, and it is in ourselves that we are thus and so.” In later years, and before his long association with Mrs. Coburn as an actor-manager, he spent his apprenticeship as utility man, advance agent, and once, as a means of making a living while looking for work in New York, as a member of the “greatest bicycle racing team of all time.” But when that career threatened to take him from his Broadway precincts, he pawned his bicycle for $29 and hasn’t been on a wheel since. In fact, Mr. Coburn no longer cares for healthy exertion as its own reward. “Look at all those people who exercise regularly,” he exclaims. “What happens to them? They die!”

Listen to that—he sounds just like Charles Coburn!

And then in December, 1937, Ivah died, leaving Coburn bereft of his companion, his wife, his theatrical partner. But a man of such energies, an entrepreneur who had acted, directed, produced, and run his own touring company for decades, was not ready to fade away from grief at 60. Ten months later, in October, 1938, he got on a train and headed out west to begin his next act, the one we know him from.

NY Times, 10/10/37, no byline CHARLES D. COBURN TO APPEAR IN FILM Stage Actor Leaves for Coast for Role in “Benefits Forgot,” His First Motion Picture

Charles D. Coburn, stage actor, the director of the Mohawk Drama Festival at Union College, Schenectady, NY, left by train for Hollywood yesterday afternoon to appear in what was said to be his first motion picture.* He is to play in “Benefits Forgot,” a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, in which Walter Huston will be starred. J. Robert Rubin, vice president and general counsel for M-G-M, said that Mr. Coburn had been signed to a one-picture contract with an option on his future services. Production work on “Benefits Forgot” will start next week, he said. As director of the Mohawk Drama Festival, held every summer at Union College, Mr. Coburn has repeatedly voiced the belief that there is now a “crisis in the American theatre” because there were no stock companies to serve as a training school for young players. Mr. Coburn appeared on Broadway in March in “Sun Kissed” and in 1936 played with the late William Gillette in “Three Wise Fools.” For many years Mr. Coburn appeared on the stage with his wife, the former Ivah Wills, who died last December 27.

A few months later, he’s comfortably ensconced in his Hollywood Blvd apartment, throwing a reunion for cast members of a popular show he had been in 30 years before. I’ve boldfaced names you’ll probably recognize…

NYT, 1/3/39, “Old Bill” Holds Reunion Coburn is New Year’s Host on Coast to ‘Better ‘Ole” Actors Special to the New York Times

Hollywood, Calif., January 2—Survivors of “The Better ‘Ole’” company made New Year’s the occasion of their first reunion in twenty years as guests of Charles Coburn, the original Old Bill, at his apartment here. Stage and film celebrities turned out to greet him and the others comprising “three muskrats,” Charles McNaughton, Bert, and Collin Campbell, Alf. Others of the old troupe present were Mrs. Kenyon Bishop, the original Maggie; Lynn Starling, who played the French colonel; Eugene Borden, the French porter, and, collaterally, F.H. (Frankie) Day the Gramercy Park greeter of the dawn who played with Mr. Coburn in the sequel play, “Old Bill M.P.” The “muskrats,” the Tommies created by the wartime crayon of Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, donned white aprons in their post-war “pub” and served guests, who included several members of The Players in New York and many once associated with one of the five companies that played “The Better ‘Ole” on Broadway and on the road. Among them were Mr. and Mrs. Guy Kibbee, Mr. and Mrs. Monte Blue, Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth MacKenna, Mr. and Mrs. Patterson McNutt, Walter Connolly, Nedda Harrigan, Mr. and Mrs.Charles Judels, Pedro de Cordoba, Fritz Leiber, P.J. Kelly, Thomas Mitchell, Andre Charlot, Janet Beecher, Olive Wyndam, Marcella Burke, Georgia Caine, Emma Dunn, Marjorie Wood, Frieda Inescourt, Esther Dale and Irene Rich. Mr. Coburn is the only living Old Bill. The others were DeWolfe Hopper, James K. Hackett, Maclyn Arbuckle and Edmond Gurney. In the New York company, the late Mrs. Ivah Coburn played Victoire, the French maid.

So the years pass, with Coburn occupying himself on screen, stage, and radio, splitting his time between L.A. and New York.

Then, in 1959, the second-to-last mystery I found: his second marriage.

NY Times, 10/19/59 Charles Coburn Marries LAS VEGAS, NEV., Oct. 18 (AP)—Charles Coburn, 82-year-old actor, dropping his famed monocle only to kiss his 41-year-old bride, today married Mrs. Winifred Jean Clements Natzka, widow of a New York Opera Company basso. The ceremony took place in the chambers of acting Justice of the Peace J.L. Bowler.

…and this leads to yet more questions. Did he marry for love, or for a tax deduction? He railed about tax rates in some of his late-life interviews, using the issue as a hook to promote You Can’t Take It With You, the show he was then touring.

And the final mystery: Most sources say this second marriage produced a child, a daughter. To which I say, seriously? Is an octogenarian Coburn supposed to have been up to siring a child? On the other hand, he managed to sire six of them 50 years before, and he was obviously a man of remarkable stamina. But perhaps his bride was pregnant by the opera singer who had widowed her, and that’s one reason why she was interested in marrying a man twice her age?

So, like Rosebud, none of these things definitively answer the riddle, Who was Charles Coburn? But they fill in some important blanks, they give us the flavor of his life in the New York theater, and the life he carried around inside himself when he made all those glorious movies we’re still watching.

And also like Charles Foster Kane, on August 30, 1961, death came for human dynamo Charles Douville Coburn, then 84, following minor surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. One obit said his wife and one of her two sons from her previous marriage were with him when he passed.

Not a word about the baby daughter, or, for that matter, any of the other six Coburn offspring, either in this obit as survivors, or mentioned a month later in a piece about his will and estate.

So if I ever get to have a cocktail with him in that cozy little bar in the sky, I’ll see if he can clear any of this up.

This was written for the 2019 What a Character! Blogathon, hosted by Aurora, Kellee, and Paula. Please go take a look at the other fabulous entries—you’ll be glad you did.

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Raw Deal (1948): Crashing Out of Corkscrew Alley

“I believe in the nobility of the human spirit. It is that for which I look in a subject I am to direct. I do not believe that everybody is bad, that the whole world is wrong. The greatness of Shakespeare’s plays is the nobility of the human spirit, even though he may destroy the character.”  —Anthony Mann, 1964, cite source, p.8 (Introduction)

First and most important, if you don’t know this movie and you love noir, see it.

If you don’t know much about noir but appreciate exciting, beautifully made movies, see it.

If you are moved by great storytelling, acting, and extraordinary cinematography, see it.

If you have 78 minutes and feel like something thrilling, creepy, romantic and tragic?

Well, you get the idea.

Watch Raw Deal, and don’t do it on the fly—sit down, turn off your phone, and give it your full attention. You will be rewarded.

There, my job is done. Now we can talk about the movie. Here’s a link to a synopsis if you are so inclined: here you go.

Corkscrew Alley is a crushing habitat for nobility of the human spirit. It’s great shorthand for the corrupt world so many noir characters desperately try to escape. It’s just that most of its denizens have had the aspiration knocked out of them by brutality and poverty, and their spirits are in moth-eaten tatters. Even when they act on an impulse toward decency, they get it in the neck and are knocked back into crime, shabbiness: Corkscrew Alley.

  In Raw Deal, Mann focuses primarily on four characters, three in a romantic triangle. The fourth is an impressively disgusting villain, a sadistic pyromaniac criminal whose efforts to kill the protagonist before he comes to claim the $50,000 owed him create the simple, on-the-lam plot.

But it’s the romantic triangle, particularly the two women, who Mann develops beyond the usual scope of noir. As Jeanine Basinger notes in Anthony Mann (2007), it is in Raw Deal that Mann for the first time creates two characters who are deeply fused, almost mirror images, a dynamic he would develop further in his westerns. In this case it’s two great actresses and noir goddesses, Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt, who form this dyad.

I always wonder when in the thrall of a work of collaborative art, if those who made it had a sense of its quality or importance while caught up in the process of making it. Was the power of (forgive me, I date myself) Blonde on Blonde, or Sgt. Pepper, or Astral Weeks apparent to the musicians and producers as they worked?

Maybe the lower the budget, the less likely those involved are to be aware of having a  part in making something extraordinary, something that could live on for many decades and in some cases become celebrated in ways unthinkable in the movie’s own time. It’s great the Edgar Ulmer lived to see Detour celebrated, and the same of Joseph H. Lewis and Gun Crazy. But in an interview with Claire Trevor, decades after making Raw Deal, she hardly remembers it. And you can see why. She was a busy actress, going from one movie to another. Noir didn’t exist yet, not as an artistic designation, and so Trevor’s noirs when she was making them were just low-budget crime movies. Raw Deal was for Trevor just another gig.

Marsha Hunt’s memories of working on Raw Deal mostly centered on her perception that Mann didn’t direct the actors, focusing instead on lighting and camera placement, leaving his cast to work out their own characterizations and bits of business. The director, who had himself been an actor on Broadway before moving into film, knew he could trust this fine cast. The versatile Dennis O’Keefe, equally at home in comedy and drama and was also a published writer who aspired to direct, holds his own with his leading ladies, two of the very best.

To Anthony Mann, still in the first phase of his Hollywood career, Raw Deal was just a follow-up to his previous year’s success with T-Men, also starring homme fatale Dennis O’Keefe, also shot by John Alton. Like Trevor’s experience going from one film to another, Mann’s was as a busy journeyman director, air-dropped from one project to the next, so that he couldn’t afford to invest much emotionally in any of them.

//////***MOVE THE NEXT FEW ‘GRAPHS UP TOWARD THE TOP*** “There has been so much yapping over the years about the film director, the film *auteur*…that it has been very difficult for the general public and even for the informed public, to realize that making a film is an industrial process and it is perfectly possible to edit, alter, present and have a resounding success without the director having anything more to do with the film from the moment he stops shouting at the actors.” —Michael Powell

Right! Great thing to bear in mind when we love a film and imagine that the director had overall control of the project, that directing was for most an artistic endeavor rather than the reality that they were hired guns who came in, shot a movie, then moved on to the next one. Yes, there are exceptions among directors (and even stars). But in the main, Hollywood filmmaking was, as Powell says, “an industrial process,” not a personal artistic one.

That makes the greatness of so many movies made in this industrial process even more miraculous. Sometimes the stars and cinematic elements aligned—the right producer, script, director, cinematographer, and cast, and the result is a thing of beauty that continues to delight, disturb, and enrich us many decades later.

Raw Deal is one of those.

So what is it that sets it apart from a couple hundred other noirs?

First thing is what Mann said in the quote at the top of this piece, in 1964. There is a yearning for redemption, to express “the nobility of the human spirit,” that curls around the characters like cigarette smoke, like that San Francisco fog that Alton evoked so convincingly. Joe (O’Keefe) is a gangster, but when he was a kid he risked his life to rescue some other kids from a fire—Ann (Hunt) tells Joe that’s what first got her  interested in him. She wants something better for him, and though he resists her pressing him away from the dirty life he’s trapped in, toward “a little common decency,” as she says, she gets under his skin. And even Joe longs for “a breath of fresh air,” not a feature of his gangster life, prison, Corkscrew Alley.

Joe wants to crash out, like weary gangster Roy Earle (Bogart in a break-out role) in High Sierra (1941). He dreams of living like normal people, not under constant threat from the law or your own crime boss.

Joe’s moll, Pat (Trevor), is so broken, so beaten down from Corkscrew Alley life that she takes insults and abuse without flinching. But still, even Pat has a pilot light of yearning for something better. It’s just that she’s so damaged she can’t imagine anything better than a life with career criminal Joe. Unlike some other noir dames Trevor played (thinking particularly of *Murder, My Sweet* and *Born to Kill*), who are the sociopathic equals of any onscreen, Pat has the vulnerability of Trevor’s most famous role as TK in Stagecoach*(1939), as a prostitute, and in Key Largo (1949), as Edgar G. Robinson’s battered, alcoholic moll.

Course part of that is just sex, not spiritual yearning. Joe knows he’s hot for social worker Ann, but Ann isn’t quite as honest with herself about her feelings for him. She tells herself it’s just professional concern for a client, but Joe knows better. (One thing about Corkscrew Alley: it attunes you to the basic, baser motivations.)

Ann (Hunt) is the only one of the four principals who wasn’t formed by Corkscrew Alley. She grew up in slightly more genteel poverty, her father a schoolteacher who imbued her with ambition for a better life—”He died in the war of the Depression, only we didn’t get any medals,” she says bitterly to Joe when he accuses her of having had  it easy. She hits back, hard, telling him she’s had to fight, just not “that stupid way,” with a gun. She’s managed to get an education, a decent apartment and car, a solid job. Her interest in Joe is a threat to everything she’s accomplished, but she’s blind to that until it’s too late. But when she tells Joe all she wants is “just a little decency, that’s all,” he looks like she’s broken through his defenses.

The third member of the triangle is Pat (Trevor), a hard-time girl who loves Joe desperately. She reminds me a little bit of Marie, Ida Lupino’s character in High Sierra, so emotionally damaged that she doesn’t know if she’s good enough for aging gangster Roy Earle. Marie and Pat are so battered by life that they have no experience of tenderness, kindness, love. The crooks they fall for look good to them because anything better is beyond the scope of their dreams.

Jeanine Basinger writes about how Pat and Ann are almost twinned, two characters who reflect each other, I would say in their differences as well as their similarities. In the first scene, at the prison, we first see each woman hatted and veiled, so their faces, which give away their feelings, are fenced off from the world and the unstable feelings it evokes. Pat wants nothing but Joe, her slender hope for any kind of happiness is all condensed into her desire to be with him, while Ann, who has relied on self-discipline to make her way in the world, is less connected to her own feelings about Joe, and if she were aware of them, she’d see instantly how hopeless they are. Toward the end, Pat finds that as much as she wants to hate Ann, she can’t—she recognizes her as another woman who loves Joe. This approaches compassion, an astonishing spiritual attainment for someone as emotionally beat-up as Pat, and a kind of metaphorical fresh air that lifts her above her own suffering.

But it’s the feelings we don’t recognize that control us, and while Ann didn’t ask to be taken hostage on Joe’s and Pat’s cross-country odyssey, and her revulsion at their casual criminality and violence are authentic, this good girl finds herself drawn closer to Joe’s way of life than she could ever comfortably acknowledge.

One of Raw Deal’s novelties is its use of the almost ubiquitous noir voiceover, usually a male voice relating past-tense events, often in flashback. Here the first difference is that the film’s voice is present-tense, and it belongs to Pat, her feelings are about the only things she owns. The second difference is that it is a female voice, not the norm in noir. It’s fitting that Pat should speak directly to us, or rather that we are allowed to eavesdrop on her internal storytelling of the narrative in which she finds herself. One of my only quibbles with Raw Deal is the theramin that underscores all of Pat’s voiceover. It feels like one of those club-us-like-baby-seals things where someone—perhaps Mann, perhaps not—decides we need something to tell us we’re hearing a voiceover. Like we need a frickin’ neon sign. The theramin is intrusive and stylistically at odds with the very good score. I’m guessing it was a producer who insisted on it: PRODUCER, flicking cigar ash: What’s—what’s she saying? Why isn’t her mouth moving? ASSISTANT: Right, sir. It’s a voiceover. PRODUCER: Voiceover…but it’s a dame! ASSISTANT: Yes, sir. It’s a little bit different, but we thought— PRODUCER: Never mind what you thought! Put some kind of sound with it, so the audience knows why her mouth isn’t moving! ASSISTANT: Well…we have an hour’s credit at the recording studio. I’ll talk to the composer, we just need one cue, we can repeat it every time the voiceover comes in… PRODUCER: Yeh, whatever, just make sure when we hear the dame’s voice and she ain’t talking, we know it’s on purpose. ASSISTANT: Sure thing, L.Q….

Most oft-discussed of Raw Deal are its visuals: the glorious cinematography, how Mann and Alton trap Joe and his girls in tight, closed spaces. Joe is suffocating for lack of fresh air, that’s how he expresses his drive to escape the dirty dead end of Corkscrew Alley. From the film’s opening, through its series of action sequences, we and the characters are repeatedly crammed into tight shots in cars, closets, freighter cabins, and framed in windows, behind bars or mesh.

Mann makes use of his female stars’ extraordinary acting in long closeups. Their faces pass through what would take paragraphs or pages to express, and we feel an intimate connection to their interior lives.

The film’s final bravura sequence, with a thrilling gun ambush in the street followed by a knock-down, drag-out fight in the middle of a raging fire, brings us back to, where else?—Corkscrew Alley. Pat does the right thing, partly because she knows she will never really have Joe and partly because she’s not quite bad enough to let her rival face grievous harm. Joe does the right thing, too, and finally gets that breath of fresh air he’s spent his life searching for. Both of them have found a little bit of grace they didn’t know they had, but it doesn’t change their fate.

Rick meets his fate, too, and Mann and Alton make sure it’s as baroque and horrific as anything Rick could dream of doing to an enemy (or a girlfriend, but you’ll have to see the movie to understand that ref).

And Ann? Her boundaries broken, her understanding of the world and her own psyche shattered, she has to go back to the life she worked so hard to attain, but neither she or that carefully crafted life will ever be the same. At the beginning of the story, she is a kind person, but it takes the events of Raw Deal to force her to confront her own unruly desire and even potential for violence.

Everyone loses what they prize most. And three of the four find that they are able to sacrifice their own fondest desires to serve something larger than themselves. Apparently there’s room for a spark of nobility, even in Corkscrew Alley.

This post was written for the Classic Movie Bloggers’ Association 2019 Spring blogathon. Do yourself a favor and head on over to read more noiry goodness.

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All Twisted Up Inside: Arthur Kennedy and Frank Sinatra in Some Came Running (1958)

This is about Kennedy’s performance in Some Came Running (1958), directed by Vincente Minnelli. Kennedy scored his fourth Best Supporting Actor nomination for his portrayal of Frank Hirsh, the embodiment of small-town small-mindedness and hypocrisy. 

I am thrilled to be writing this as part of the Arthur Kennedy’s Conquest of the Screen Blogathon, hosted by Virginie at Wonderful World of Cinema, and today is Kennedy’s 105th birthday, which makes the celebrating all the sweeter.

Some Came Running was adapted from James Jones’s second novel. The first Hollywood adaptation of Jones, From Here to Eternity (1953), had been the vehicle for Sinatra’s comeback, and had won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Minnelli writes a little bit about it in his memoir, I Remember It Well, but he doesn’t mention Kennedy.    If you’re not familiar with the movie and want a plot synopsis, here you go.

I’m going to look at the movie, its themes, and how Kennedy’s character Frank fit into the bigger picture.

Some Came Running was Jones’s sophomore effort, and it took him seven years and 1,200 pages to say what he felt needed to be said. Minnelli writes that some critics felt the book was unfocused and lacked strong themes. Jones told Minnelli that the book’s basic theme is the failure of people to ultimately connect, and how much more people want to be loved than they want to love.

Its protagonist, Dave Hirsh (Sinatra), finds himself in his hometown, Parkman, Indiana, with a wicked hangover and no memory of getting there. The book is set in 1948, and Dave is still wearing his army uniform. He is a writer, but Minnelli makes it clear that Dave doesn’t feel good about himself or his work. He says he’s quit writing. 

 Minnelli makes it clear why Dave is so lost: older brother Frank, a wheel in the small town who owns a jewelry shop, is on the board of directors at a local bank, and is on the local planning commission, sent 12-year-old Dave to a boys’ home when he married his well-to-do wife, Agnes. Dave doesn’t even know if their father is alive or dead. It’s easy to believe that with a complete lack of family and the betrayal of being sent away to fend for himself, Dave doesn’t have much in the way of relationship skills beyond card games and bars. He’s intelligent and talented, but he feels so unwanted, such an outsider, that though he knows it was Frank who jettisoned him, that it had nothing to do with him, he’s, to use one of my favorite phrases for describing such characters, all twisted up inside. He has no reference for feeling loved, so he will need a lot of help learning to give and receive it.

Frank is not the guy who can provide it. Frank is as messed up as Dave, though he would protest mightily if he heard me say it. After all, he’s a pillar of the community, a successful local businessman, married for the past 18 years to Agnes, who is as superficial and materialistic as he is (so they’re well suited). While Dave doesn’t pretend to be anything he’s not, so authenticity is one thing he won’t have to learn, Frank has made his way in little Parkman by acting the part of the guy who belongs. He will do anything to preserve what he’s got, and Dave’s showing up in town terrifies him. He’s afraid Dave is going to show him up for the utterly phony and emotionally and spiritually bankrupt empty suit he is. Frank is a little sweaty, always afraid, always watching for an opportunity or imagined danger.

This is a classic Kennedy portrayal of an unsympathetic character. Kennedy could play any kind of man, from a hero to villain, and all points between. His honesty allows him to construct an unpleasant man like Frank—vain, self-pitying, self-involved, always on the make, unable to feel any remorse for abandoning Dave or to offer him any honest way to rebuild their relationship. 

To Frank, Dave is merely a threat to be managed. Frank and Agnes never really rest. All their energy goes into managing appearances, faking emotions, and avoiding bad press. Dave has Frank’s number, but to his credit he is able to relate to Frank’s daughter, Dawn, as a fond, protective uncle. When, inevitably, Frank and Agnes’s dishonest life leads to a family crisis that threatens their daughter and their spotless reputation among Parkman’s wealthy, it’s Dave who steps in to offer Dawn the benefit of his experience, and a way out of the inevitable false step that so many mixed-up girls in ’50s movies seem all too ready to tumble into. She avoids that, thanks to Dave, but still follows through on the sidestep such movie teen girls make: She leaves Parkman and goes to New York City, just like her spiritual sisters in Picnic and Peyton Place. 

Frank is loathsome. I wonder if the writers considered making him a little less so, perhaps softening him slightly toward the end of the movie. But it’s an honest choice to depict him this way. There are people like Frank, who when they have left tire marks on your back, have the nerve to ask you to feel sorry for how bad they feel as they pull the knife from your back.

Anyway, Kennedy isn’t the only morally compromised character in Some Came Running, but as Dave’s big brother he carries a lot of the story’s weight. Other characters have their own limitations. Gwen (Martha Hyer) is massively conflicted about her feelings for Dave, and ‘Bama (Dean Martin), Dave’s gambler friend, breaks with him when he decides to marry Ginny (Shirley Maclaine), whom he calls a “pig.” Ginny, the girl who followed Dave to Parkman from Chicago, is the only person in the story who is able to love unabashedly. That is, it’s messed up that she loves Dave, who is only nice to her when he’s drunk, but her love is unconditional, something Dave has never before experienced, and he wants to allow her to love him even if they’re poorly matched in just about every way. 

There’s a chaotic quality to this movie, perfectly expressed in its final bravura sequence, which Martine Scorsese highlights in a TCM featurette about CinemaScope. A fair at night, all brightly colored lights, noise, and chaos. It’s as if Dave’s emotional confusion has finally exploded, and it doesn’t end well. 

One more thing: Some Came Running is about gamblers, drunks, small-time hoods, and their more respectable opposites. It’s squalid, and Minnelli found the bars and louche characters intriguing. It’s another reminder that even in the ’50s, a decade before Bonnie and Clyde was said to have been the final nail in the Production Code’s coffin, directors continued to pick away at the Code. Ginny isn’t exactly a prostitute, but she is called “tramp” and “pig.” ‘Bama is a gambler, living at the edge of the law, but he still feels morally superior to Ginny. Frank tries hard to convince himself of his own virtue, but his frustration and let’s just say it, horniness almost destroys his carefully cultivated life—his, not any of the shame he so operatically fears Dave will bring upon him. A question: In this tiny town, where everybody knows everybody else’s business, isn’t it a little strange that people don’t remember Frank sending Dave off to the home? And those who knew Dave when he was a kid, like Connie Gilchrist in a terrific small part—wouldn’t they perhaps bear Frank a little ill will for throwing his brother away so his ascent wouldn’t be dragged by caring for his only living relative?

Here’s two of Kennedy’s early scenes with Sinatra. They lay out the relationship dynamic and let viewers get to know Frank, his sad, dishonest way of life, and how emotionally barren he is. 

Frank, pushing open the hotel room door: Dave? Dave, shaving at the mirror: C’mon in. Frank: How’d you know it was me? Dave: I figured it’d be you. Frank, extending his hand: Dave, you old son of a gun, welcome home. [Forcefully pats Dave’s shoulder] Oh it’s good to see you, boy. … It’s been a long time.  Dave: Sixteen years. Frank: Oh, you dog you, 16 years and not even a postcard.  Dave: I didn’t think you’d worry about me. Frank, trying again: Oh…you’re looking fine, Dave. … Oh, I know, I know, [fiddles with his hair] it’s getting a little thin on top. But like they say, not much grass on a busy street. Dave: You may be losing your hair, but you haven’t lost your razor-sharp wit. You want a drink? Frank: At 10:30 in the morning?   Dave: I don’t watch a clock.  Frank [chuckles mirthlessly]: What ever happened to your writing? When we used to see your name in print, at least we knew you were alive. Dave: I gave it up. Frank: Why? We heard you were doing pretty good, you got some— Dave [interrupting]: The old man still alive? Frank: Oh, oh…you didn’t know. No, no, God rest his soul, he passed on four or five years ago. Towards the end, Dave, he was just hell on wheels. Dave: …booze. Frank: Well, what else?  Dave: Tchew, what a family… Frank: Oh, wait till you see the new generation, Dave, why that niece of yours is a real lady. … Say, why don’t you pack up and move out to the house, huh? We got plenty of room… [Dave regards him] Well, I’m pretty sure we have. Dave: No thanks, Frank. I’m okay right here. Frank: Well then let me call Agnes and have her get a—a fatted calf out of the deep freeze. You’re gonna have dinner with us tonight, Dave, you know that, don’tcha? Dave: Sorry, Frank, I got plans. Frank: Oh. Uh, well, what are your plans, Davie? Uh, what made you decide to come back to Parkman? Dave: Cause I shot my big fat mouth off to a couple of drunken friends of mine and told them where I was born.  Frank [slightly defensive]: Well, what’s wrong with that? Parkman is your home… Dave shoots him a look. A long pause. Dave: How’d you know I was here?  Frank: Practically everybody in town knew you were here…before I did. [aggrievedly, again] You might have called me, Dave. You owe me that much.  Dave: No, I owe you more than that. Four hundred and ten dollars, to be exact, I’ve got the check all made out.  [Frank looks anxious] Frank: What’s that for? Dave: This little check represents room and board for Mrs. Dillman’s home for little boys. Three dollars and fifty cents a week from the time I was about 12 until I read a travel folder.  Frank: You can’t still be brooding about that.     Dave: I’m not brooding, I’m grateful. I was a little better off than most of the kids. I had a generous big brother. I was what they called a semi-charity boy. Frank, jumping out of his chair: What the devil’d you expect me to do, have the whole family move in with me? You knew I had just married Agnes.  Dave is silent. Frank: Good Lord, Dave, you’re a man now. You know that a man has to live his own life.  Dave: How is Agnes, Frank? Frank: Oh…Davie, I did what I thought was right. Nobody can do any more than that. Sure it was tough on you, but how do you think I felt, putting you in the home, my only brother… I’m not made of wood, Dave. [theatrically] If you only knew the nights I couldn’t sleep.  Dave smiles maliciously: Your story moves me to tears. Take the check, c’mon… Frank protests, then takes the check: Oh all right, if it’ll make you feel any better. I’m not gonna fight with you, Dave. Life’s too short for that. Say, why don’t you have dinner with us, I’d like it very much. …Not that it’ll look funny if you didn’t, you know, but…will you do it? Dave, quietly: What time? Frank: You mean, you’ll come? Dave: If you’re sure Agnes won’t throw up. I’m not her favorite relative.   Frank: Ohhhhh, what talk. Uh, meet me at the store, say, at 5, and I’ll call Agnes and have her fix something real special. [pats Dave on the shoulder again, all brisk and manly, reaches for the doorknob, then stops, chuckles to himself] Uh, Davie, about that little gag of yours of putting your dough in the other bank, and all that… Dave: I thought it would break you up. Frank [opens the door]: See you at 5. 

   *    * 

Frank enters, sighs heavily: If you could just see yourself. Dave: And a good morning to you, sir. Frank, sarcastically: That was nice going, Dave, I’m real proud of you. One day in town, just one day, and you’re picked up in a drunken brawl with a floozy and tossed in jail…like a common hoodlum.  Dave: I know all about it. Frank [pacing]: I just don’t understand you.  Dave: Is that your problem for this morning? Frank, putting his hand over his heart: What have you got against me?  Dave: Not a thing. Frank: Oh, yes you have. I take you to my home, I introduce you to the best people in town, like the Frenches, and this is the thanks I get. You seem to resent my position. It’s no crime to be successful. I’ve worked hard for everything I’ve got. Nobody’s helped me. Dave: Is this gonna be another one of those long lectures? Frank: Oh, I might have known….  Dave: Frank, I’m not trying to needle you, I don’t feel well. I got a headache, and I have to be in court.  Frank: You won’t have to be in court, I’ve squared it. And that mobster friend of yours has already skipped town. You both forfeit bail.  Dave: Ohhhh, thank you. Frank: I didn’t do it for you, Dave. I’m raising a decent girl [however, it is Frank who presents the moral hazard to his daughter, not her Uncle Dave].  Dave: That she is. She’s a fine girl. Frank: And I’ve told the judge you’ll be leaving town.  Dave [pauses]: Did you tell him where I was going? Frank, raising his voice: How do I know where you’re going? Dave: How did you know I was leaving? Frank: Aren’t you? Dave [pauses]: Yeah, I guess so. Frank, aggrievedly: I wish I could say I was sorry, Dave.  Dave: I wish you could say so, too. Frank: Well, I suppose it will be in all the afternoon papers. That’s all I need. Just when my name was beginning to amount to something. … How could you do this to me? Dave: Me, me, me, me! Don’t you ever get tired thinking about your dull, greedy, small self? [Frank does not reply] Now get out of here, I’m tired of listening to you, get the hell out of here. 

   *    *

This was written for the Arthur Kennedy Conquest of the Screen blogathon, hosted by The Wonderful World of Cinema. Go on over and read about more of his work. 

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Love Letters: Dear Thomas Mitchell

“I didn’t know I was that good” —what you said upon accepting your Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Stagecoach (1939)

Dear Tom, or Dear Kid Dabb (Only Angels Have Wings, 1939) …Diz Moore (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) …Doc Boone (Stagecoach, 1939) …Clopin (Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939) …Gerald O’Hara (GWTW, 1939) …and all the other unforgettable characters you wore as comfortably as an old cardigan,

For such a celebrated actor, there sure isn’t much ink on you.

I mean, researching you has been somewhat frustrating. Born in New Jersey in 1892, to Irish parents, with both your father and brother in the newspaper game, which you tried for a bit before ditching it for the theatuh. You were a Republican, apparently, though you don’t seem to have made much noise about it. You were an avid art collector. Otherwise, all I’ve found: obits, your Wiki, your entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Film, a YouTube of your appearance on a short-lived ’50s show (The Name’s the Same), a conversation with Gene Fowler in the last chapter of his book Minutes of the Last Meeting, his rumination on The Bundy Drive Gang, the hard-drinking circle of friends that included John Barrymore, W. C. Fields, John Carridine, and yes, you—though I perused the book in vain looking for you in some of the outrageous doings Fowler recalls so lovingly. These last two, along with an informative blog post at Immortal Ephemera, with your charmingly self-effacing line when you claimed your Oscar, provide about the only glimpses available of you as yourself.

The rest is your acting, and I gotta say, though I suspect you know, what both Academies (for film, and for television—the guys who present the Emmy Awards), the American Theatre Wing (who gave you your Tony in 1953, making you the first triple crown winner: Oscar, Emmy, Tony), along with directors including Howard Hawks, John Ford, George Cukor, Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, and the Who’s Who of actors you shared the screen with, know so well, so inarguably, that it’s just a fact: You were character actor royalty, one of the titans among names below the title. And you graced some of the very best movies Hollywood produced between 1937 and 1947. And while your movies aren’t all classics, a remarkable number of them are, a point demonstrated most impressively with your credit list from 1939, which includes five of that banner year’s greatest: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Gone with the Wind, and Stagecoach. When people rhapsodize over the remarkable list of great movies from the year widely considered Hollywood’s greatest, you cut a wide swathe with some of the most memorable performances in some of the best movies ever made.

Doc Boone, cheroot clamped firmly, hanging onto the whisky sample case for dear life.

“I didn’t know I was that good” could be false modesty, but I believe it.

Your acting is unmannered and unfussy. It reminds me of what Anthony Hopkins said Katharine Hepburn told him when they were shooting The Lion in Winter—don’t act your lines, just speak them. If you know what you’re feeling and thinking, it will come through. No need to hoke it up.

After shooting Hunchback, you spoke of Laughton with great admiration. It must have been remarkable to witness him create that heartrending role by, per Laughton biographer Simon Callow, intensifying his own physical and mental suffering almost beyond endurance. Your own approach to acting appears radically different, or at least it produced a strikingly different effect. How did you work, Tom? How did you speak so simply and clearly from inside all those disparate characters, as if you were just being yourself?

Or maybe it’s all an act, and you’re just a common actor, mostly ego and vanity. You could pull it off. I’ve been rewatching some of your movies recently—specifically the five 1939 blockbusters, and I failed to find a single instant when you blink, when your mask slips.

Great acting is so mysterious, to me at least. To you, it’s probably not. Talent looks mysterious to those who ain’t got it. Maybe to you, the process of fully becoming someone else, someone whose presence has a totally different quality from your own, is a process of the most prosaic sort.

All I know is, it was so interesting to see you on The Name’s the Same, in 1954. In that few minutes, in which Robert Q. Lewis leads a panel including Arnold Stang and former Miss America Bess Myerson as they try to guess what you would like to do. They fail, because your wish was “to do nothing.” Watching you answer their questions, amiably and intelligently, gave me even more respect for the transformation you effect when you act, because your entire presence as Tom Mitchell was so very different from any of your roles.

You memorably played drunks, at least two of them doctors (in The Hurricane and Stagecoach), and your membership in good standing in the Bundy Drive Gang suggests that you at least enjoyed the company of hard drinkers, which almost certainly means you could enjoy the occasional binge yourself. But it would fall upon you to regale me with your misadventures in that celebrated liver-destroying brotherhood, because your own personal life is a black box—no arrests, no fights, none of the chaos or medical problems that mark the lives of alcoholic movie folk, who often ended up in the newspapers despite the best attempts of the studios’ publicity departments.

But watching you as Doc Boone in Stagecoach, happily and methodically drinking your way through Mr. Peacock the whisky drummer’s sample case as he repeatedly tries, ineffectually, to reclaim it, then your expression and kindly response when you are rebuked for smoking and sickening the pregnant Mrs. Mallory…. You play Boone’s drinking for laughs, as was the custom of the era, but Doc Boone is hardly a clown. He is an iconoclast, a reproach to convention and the judgment and rejection of the respectable. He’s sort of a conduit between the respectable and shady characters. Doc is unapologetically self-destructive and committed to drinking, but we see nothing morbid about it. He’s not killing himself out of some poorly concealed self-loathing. He is, he cheerfully tells his traveling companions, a fatalist, and he knows eventually some bullet or bottle will have his name on it. Being a Civil War veteran, he long ago faced his mortality. Doc Boone is philosophical; he rejects society’s judgment of him as a drunken failure, and when Mrs. Mallory goes into labor, he pulls himself together and  delivers her baby. This gives him evident satisfaction, and he immediately rewards himself. With a drink.

As Doc Boone, you are the most self-aware of the stagecoach’s passengers. In Stagecoach, respectability is window dressing for hypocrisy or, in one character’s case, outright criminality. The banker/embezzler, Gatewood, is a dreadful blowhard, bloviating his obnoxious grievances at top volume, too wrapped up in his tirade to see how his shouting is increasing Mrs. Mallory’s distress. Gatewood is perpetually outraged, always feels hard done by. He berates their army escort for following orders and leaving to deal with Apache attacks, and treats Dallas, the prostitute (Claire Trevor), as though she is beneath contempt (note: Gatewood’s wife is the leader of the citizens’ committee that forced Dallas and Doc Boone out of town). A couple of the other passengers treat Dallas like dirt, too. But we know Gatewood is a crook who hides behind his position, and that his wife’s civic group supports the cruelty of respectable society.

In a 1921 production of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World

When Dallas falls in love with the Ringo Kid (John Wayne, sigh), it’s you she turns to for advice. There’s something about you that makes you that guy, the one women trust with their most delicate problems. Jean Arthur confides in you in both Only Angels Have Wings and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In the first, she starts out as your competitor for Cary Grant’s attention but you end up becoming allies who both love him, and in the second, you’re in love with her, but when she falls for her un-wised-up boss, you support her all the way.

You often play deeply flawed characters, but you never reduce them to their flaws. I’m increasingly aware of a shared quality among some of my favorite actors: humanism. You give us whole human beings, messy but with some divine spark of inner life. We rarely know their backstory, but you somehow offer these characters to us without obscuring either their weaknesses or their beautiful qualities—courage, intelligence, kindness, compassion. Even in weakness or downright impotence, they often see underlying, painful realities that elude most of us. Seeing the truth can be a terrible burden, and it’s possible that Doc Boone and Dr. Kersaint, in The Hurricane, may drink partly to lighten that burden.

I don’t care about space travel, but time travel is something else—that I would do in a heartbeat, given a guaranteed safe return to my own time. Watching old movies is my preferred form of time travel. But alas, I cannot make my way back to Broadway to see you onstage. If I could, I’d buy a ticket to see you as Willy Loman in the 1949 national touring company of Death of a Salesman, in which you replaced Lee J. Cobb. What would you do with such an unsympathetic character? How did your compassion express itself in Willy? I just found your performance (audio only), along with Mildred Dunnock and Arthur Kennedy and the rest of the original cast, at the Internet Archive. So at least I’ve now heard your Loman, as close as I’ll ever get to seeing you in a play.

Shortly before you left us in 1962, you premiered the character Columbo onstage. Of course a few years later, Peter Falk would make Columbo his signature TV role. I’d love to see your version, though. And I’d love to see you in Hazel Flagg, the 1953 Broadway musical version of Nothing Sacred, William Wellman’s 1937 comedy. It would be wonderful to travel even further back, to 1913, to see you learning your craft as a young actor in Charles Coburn’s Shakespearean troupe. And also the plays you wrote, and it would be fascinating to see you direct.

In his Tony-winning turn in Hazel Flagg (1953), Jule Styne’s adaptation of Nothing Sacred (1937)

If we could sit down for a couple of cocktails, and you felt comfortable talking about personal stuff, I’d love to hear about your marriages—the two long ones to the same woman, Susan, separated by a rather brief one after the first divorce. She and your only child, daughter Anne M. Lange, were at your side when you left this world at your Beverly Hills home from cancer, aged 70, just two days after Laughton had succumbed to the same disease. I’d like to hear about your farm in Oregon, the one you described when you visited a Washington state navy hospital in 1944 (from the hospital’s newspaper, also at the Internet Archive). That article says you were best friends with Laughton. Is that true?

And I would say, as I signaled the bartender for two more of the same, You’re a writer. How come you didn’t write a memoir? Your career has been so interesting, and 56 years after your death, thanks to TCM, we’re still loving your work. You were a witness and participant in a huge chunk of Hollywood history, not to mention your long career on the stage and a shorter but vibrant one in television—but there is no full-length biography. And it’s your voice I want to hear.

I want to read your thoughts and observations. Not just about yourself, but all the people you worked with, your experiences making the films (my favorite!), and whatever of your personal life you felt comfortable sharing. How did you end up married three times, for a scant two years, sandwiched between two 20-year marriages to Susan, who was with you when you passed?

You wrote plays and screenplays, so you certainly could have written a memoir, and I bet it would have been a doozy. Oh, the stories you could tell, about making some of the most beloved movies of all time. Your recollections of Laughton, Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh, Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, John Wayne, Gregg Toland, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter—oh yes, another doctor in your gallery is Doc Gibbs in Our Town (1940), with Bainter as Mrs. Gibbs. And the tales of your early career with Coburn’s Shakespeare company, and your stories of the Bundy Drive Gang….

As Diz Moore in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, showing up wet-behind-the-ears Senator Jeff Smith

Were you just so busy, what with movies, theater, and television, that you could luxuriate in a fantasy (“doing nothing”) that most actors could only envy? Maybe as a writer you knew how much work it would be, how much of your time it would consume, and it was only worth doing if you did it right. And maybe you preferred to let your work speak for you.

Seriously, Tom, why didn’t you write a memoir?

You gaze for a moment into your glass, that little smile playing across your face, that familiar mischievous glint in your eye, then you say you’re just an actor, and living life is so much more interesting than writing about it. Then you take a sip and start telling me about your art collection. And I am riveted.

This post was written for the 2018 edition of the What a Character! blogathon, hosted by Once Upon a Screen, Outspoken and Freckled, and Paula’s Cinema Club. There’s lots of great posts, so get on over and start reading.

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Love Letters: Dear Mr. Rains

Dear Mr. Rains,

Or perhaps I should say

Dear Captain Renault, …Jack Griffin (The Invisible Man), …Alex Sebastian (Notorious), …Adam Lemp (Four Daughters), …Prince John (The Adventures of Robin Hood), …Nutsy (Moontide), …Senator Paine (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), …Job Skeffington, …Dr. Jaquith (Now, Voyager), …and all the other roles you inhabited so magnificently on stage, screen, and in your own remarkable life—

It’s your birthday. Today is the 129th anniversary of your birth, November 10, 1889. Happy birthday! I hope the afterlife has fabulous birthday parties, and that you’re celebrating with all your old friends and colleagues: your acting pupils, Gielgud and Laughton; your friends from the West End, Noel Coward and James Whale; writers you worked with, like George Bernard Shaw, and directors like Michael Curtiz…and of course the ladies—lots of ladies. Not sure if you’d invite your ex-wives, but naturally you will be celebrating with your great love, Rosemary, who left you bereaved in 1964, three years before you joined her.

You contain multitudes. All great actors do, especially character actors. You are never less than utterly convincing in every kind of role and movie, but your own fire and intelligence, your own fine intensity, are always present in that amazing gallery of portraits.

I have loved you for a long time, along with legions of fans winding back through the decades, spooling through your films and long before and after that through all your stage appearances in London New York, starting when you were only 10 years old.

Unlike with some of my other dead boyfriends, there was no Aha! moment watching you in a particular role when I suddenly realized you had my heart. Maybe that’s because you were present in so many wonderful films of the ’30s and ’40s that you sneaked up on me before I even thought about it. Pretty sure our first encounter was Casablanca, where, surrounded by an incredible Warner Bros. dream cast, you came close to walking away with the film in your pocket.

Captain Renault is your calling card, the one you will be forever remembered as, just as Frank Morgan is indelibly the wizard of Oz, no matter his long list of other distinguished performances. Your Renault is an irresistible survivor: cheerfully corrupt, unapologetically self-interested, and always on the make. His sexual exploitation of pretty women desperate for exit visas may in our time prove to be his least excusable offense, but I think Renault will probably weather even that. Casablanca will always be with us.

But here you are, 129 and still devastating. I’ve been watching your movies and reading David Skal’s biography, Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice, which so evocatively conjures your childhood in a series of poor London neighborhoods in the 1890s. Your father, Frederick, was a grandiose failure, an occasional actor, singer, and songwriter. You survived, one of only three children (and the only son) to do so among the 10 your loving, mentally unstable mother, Emily, brought into this world. She did her best to shield you from the harshness your old man lavished on his only son. Imagining you as a child in those tough streets, restlessly looking for a way to do more than survive, has made me love you more than ever.

I had heard a little about your childhood speech impediments, how you called yourself “Willie Wains”—the Ws for Rs, the stutter, the Cockney accent so thick that your only child, your beloved daughter, Jessica, said she could not understand you when you sang the Cockney songs of your childhood, that it was like you became a different person.

But what was the mysterious force that drove you? Aside from hunger, I mean, and the constant awareness of how precarious your family’s position was. The first spark for what became your stellar theatrical career was when you left your job selling newspapers to follow a boy to the church where he sang in the choir, lured by the glamour of his costume, and got yourself a spot in that choir (and your own costume!). Which led, eventually, to your first appearance onstage, then to a job as a theater “call boy,” and eventually assistant stage manager, stage manager, and actor. Two men, one your boss and mentor, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, one of the greatest actor-producers of the London stage, took an interest in you and helped you to conquer your speech difficulties, which was the first step to preparing you to become an actor. One of them taught you to roll your Rs, which you did for the rest of your life, and also insisted you educate yourself by reading—you had left school in 2nd grade to go to work, to bring in a few pennies to help your family, who so often struggled to eat and keep a roof over their heads.

Early on, you were caught stealing change from an actor’s pockets, and fired. You took the money because you were so hungry, but when you were fired and had to return to school, when your mother wept and your old man beat you repeatedly for it, you felt the shame in your bones and swore never to steal again. A few months later, you got a job at another theater, and your career resumed.

You were such a little boy to be so stoic in the face of your father’s frequent beatings. You never cried. But that’s not uncommon with abused children, they learn not to flinch, they won’t give the abuser the satisfaction. Skal writes that Frederick used to beat you in the garden shed, Emily’s face floating agonized in the window of the flat. So small, but with the spark of the ferocity that would eventually find its way into your acting.

There is something so moving about you and a few other incredibly gifted actors who survived childhoods of Dickensian deprivation and loneliness—Cary Grant, Charles Chaplin, and Barbara Stanwyck—children who were largely left on your own to scavenge and somehow, miraculously, survive. Among this small group, you are alone in having had both parents, though like Chaplin and Grant, your mother was institutionalized for mental illness. Yours, unlike theirs, returned home, though she would have repeated bouts of illness that took her away from home throughout her life.

You traveled so far from that series of flats in neighborhoods that ranged from squalid to genteel poverty. But always, no matter what, Emily kept the steps tidy, brass on the door, and a paper fan on the fireplace. When there was enough money, your father would invite colleagues to dinner, and at its conclusion your mother would always ask, “Would anyone like some cheese?” Then your family all held their breath. Fortunately, no one ever wanted any, because there was none—the cheese course was out of reach at the family’s best of times, but your mother’s sense of propriety drove her to ask. Maybe it was partly that yearning for something nicer, which you had in common with her, that drove you so far. Frederick came from a prosperous family, and you never forgot a visit to one of his relatives in the country, and later in life, when you were successful and well-to-do yourself, you bought yourself a farm in Pennsylvania where you enjoyed country life to the hilt.

You came so far. At first, when you were what, 10, 11?—it was the long commute from the family current flat to the West End, an hour or more each way. Then as you grew a little older and rose in your profession, you began to tour with productions, and by your mid-teens you had traveled around England and Ireland, and then to Berlin. A little later, in the early 1910s, you came to America for the first time as advance man for another production. By your mid-20s you had traveled widely and become a respected member of your profession. During WWI, after that service-ending gas attack that took 90 percent of the sight in your right eye and gave your voice its distinctive rough undertone [sigh], you returned to London determined not to go back to the theater (after life at the front as a sharpshooter, the theater seemed “sissy”), it took a single lunch with colleagues to entice you back onto the stage. And that’s when your acting career really took off.

Reading about the London theater scene of the era, the shows you were in then, working with friends like Noel Coward and Elsa Lanchester, as an acting teacher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to Gielgud and Laughton, famously…appearing in a number of original productions of Shaw, as well as in avant garde plays—my favorite was The Insect Play, in which both Gielgud and Lanchester appeared, four episodes in which actors played butterflies, warrior ants, and other six-legged crawlies. It sounds like such an exciting scene, so much fresh creative energy and talent.

But as the professional triumphs began to accumulate, as you began to make enough money to subsidize your family and to dress elegantly, you also began to accumulate romantic disasters. You said toward the end of your life that you had loved a lot of women, but only one had loved you back.

Is that one of the stories of your life that you told yourself? It’s heartbreaking. You were ill, grieving the loss of your Rosemary, your last wife, presumably the one who had loved you back. You married six times, for periods ranging from months to 21 years. The first marriage was undone, perhaps, by World War I, which took you away from your actress bride. After returning from the military hospital to London, you caught her in the arms of another soldier, whom she subsequently married, but she seems not to have lost her yen for you.

Let’s face it: You have It. Had you been a few inches taller you might not have become a character actor until later in life; being 5’6″ sealed your fate. But the lack of height didn’t read as a lack of stature, as you discovered as a call boy observing a successful actor who was not physically imposing. You saw that his excellent posture and confidence overcame actual measurements. And just as you practiced to overcome your speech impediments and accent, you practiced carrying yourself with authority.

You created a container for your larger-than-life self, for your wit, your intelligence, your ardor. As I’ve seen written repeatedly, you are able to cut a man to bits just by slightly raising your right eyebrow. You set hearts a-flutter for decades. Matter of fact, my dear sir, you are still doing it today, 51 years after you left us.

Bette Davis was in love with you. Shortly after your death in 1967, she told your daughter—gushed, really—about you as both actor and man. She said you had brought your wife and daughter to the set of Mr Skeffington to keep her in line, and that she bet your dressing room / trailer was as busy with lady callers as Grand Central Station. That she would have loved to get you drunk… I mean, dayum, Bette, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?

Anyway, I hope you will forgive me for bringing up such personal matters when we just met, but…with a world full of women who adore you, how on Earth did you wind up marrying five who didn’t love you back? Or did some of them love you, but you couldn’t see it because you believed they didn’t or couldn’t?

What I’m asking, Dr. Jaquith, is if the sad story is that women did not love you, which we know is not true, or that you repeatedly managed to marry women who did not love you, which is possible, or that you were so convinced that they could not love you that you were unable to perceive that they did?

Reading about your jealousy at your first and second wife’s betrayals, pounding on the door of your flat when you heard another man’s voice inside, I think of Alex Sebastian in Notorious, realizing  that the beautiful wife he adores is a spy who is not only betraying his love, she very well may get him killed. And of Job Skeffington, surely the epitome of unrequited love, married to a woman whose vanity renders her incapable of loving anyone until her looks are gone: maybe the power of your extraordinary performance is partly generated by your own pervasive sense of not being loved back.

We all have these stories about ourselves, whether we are aware of them or not. We live by them. They have real consequences in the choices we make, how we interpret the contours of our lives. And for the artists among us, like you, they are origin stories, potent emotional fuel that inform and drive your work.

So on the one hand, I hate to think you believed yourself not loved back when a world of women love you still, and on the other, maybe if you did believe it, it helped drove your absolutely incredible work, and that is no small thing.

Anyway, look at the time, I better wrap this up. But I want to thank you for your beautiful work, for all the pleasure you have brought me in my long, obsessive movie watching life. It’s been wonderful to have this blogathon as an excuse to spend so much time with you, watching your films, reading about your life, speculating about your inner life. At the age of 129, your work still speaks to us, and thanks to film, the only time machine we will ever have, you are still racking up female conquests. May our love reach you. May you, at long last, know fully and deeply, that we love you back.

Here’s more Rains-related posts:

The Invisible Man

Now, Voyager

This post was written for The Claude Rains Blogathon, hosted by Pure Entertainment Preservation Society. Head on over and check out the other swell entries.

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Shoes, Brows and Gowns: Now, Voyager (1942)

“My mother didn’t think Leslie was suitable for a Vale of Boston. What man is suitable, Doctor, she’s never found one…. What man would ever look at me and say ‘I want you’? I’m fat. My mother doesn’t approve of dieting. Look at my shoes. My mother approves of sensible shoes…. I am my mother’s well-loved daughter. I am her companion. I am my mother’s servant…. My mother says…. My mother, my mother, MY MOTHER!”

On the set with Paul Henreid

When we first meet Charlotte Vale, who is having a nervous breakdown, she is saddled with both bushy black brows and unnecessary eyeglasses—two of Hollywood’s stock ways of telegraphing: unattractive. She’s also supposed to be fat, and she’s dressed as unflatteringly as her monstrous mother can make her, in a hideous print dress and a pair of those ghastly sensible shoes Charlotte so despises.

Which means she’s only a good tweeze and a trip to Bergdorf’s away from being unrecognizably chic. That and a “very clever doctor” Charlotte finds in South America who gets 20 pounds off her.

Mother-approved, sensible shoes.

  Post-Cascade, non-Mother-approved pumps.

When the movie starts Charlotte’s kindly sister-in-law is about to stage an intervention, with my all-time favorite movie psychiatrist, Dr. Jacquith (Claude Rains, also one of my favorite imaginary fathers). They have their work cut out for them, gaining Charlotte’s confidence and convincing Mother that “my little girl” is actually dangerously ill, and that not getting her some serious treatment will reflect poorly on the Vale name (she wouldn’t even consider such a thing out of concern for her daughter). They succeed, and Mother allows Charlotte to spend a few months at Jacquith’s sanitarium, Cascade.

Charlotte faces “the fork in the road,” asks Jacquith if he can help her.

And Cascade, rustic and cozy in the Vermont woods, and some psychotherapy with Jacquith, do the trick. Hell, just being away from Mother worked wonders. But of course Charlotte dreads going home, and again the sister-in-law steps in with a plan to let Charlotte try her wings, on a South American cruise.

“Could we try to remember that we are hardly commercial travelers? It’s bad enough to have to associate with these tourists on board.” —Mother

Charlotte had confided to Jacquith during the intervention about her last cruise with Mother, when Charlotte was 20. Her shipboard romance with a handsome young officer (see photo at top), inevitably foiled by Mother, was her last hurrah until now, This post-Cascade cruise is a redo of that previous idyll, and for the second time Charlotte will fall in love with a man she meets onboard. Charlotte has good luck on ships. Maybe it’s the fresh air.

Now, Voyager is one of the great “women’s pictures,” that most derided of genres. It is a bit of an outlier, though, subverting some of the genre’s conventions. The theme of a woman who finds her own voice and authentic self is not common in the 1940s. Much more common were the movies Ginger Rogers seemed fated to star in, where her unhappiness is revealed to be the fruit of her being a successful career woman, who needs to subordinate herself to a man to find true happiness. But in Curtis Bernhardt’s My Reputation (1946) and NV, the protagonists find themselves unable to hew to the conventions of their milieu, forced to defy their families’ and communities’ expectations. Neither Charlotte Vale or Jess (Barbara Stanwyck) in My Reputation are bomb throwers—they’re not out to bring down the patriarchy or challenge inequality or injustice. But in a time of rigid conformity, they’re still pretty damned brave.

Another spectacular Orry-Kelly gown, which bloodless Brahmin Elliott appreciates but finds too hot to handle.

NV depicts Charlotte’s severe depression fairly realistically, and Davis portrays it in all its complexity. The novel’s author wrote from her own experience of a breakdown, and Charlotte’s behavior—eyes cast down or darting like an animal’s, a jumble of emotions rattling just beneath her anxious surface, is agonized and confused. it’s as though she’s functioning by rote, trying to act normal with only the sketchiest sense of what that looks like, aching and exhausted, without a shred of confidence that she can find her way back. She is terrified of herself, of her rage, life, the world. When she asks Jacquith in anguish if he can help her navigate “the fork in the road,” I absolutely believe her desolation, her sense of dislocation and terrifying isolation. Mother has succeeded in keeping Charlotte from becoming a “commercial traveler,” a normal person with normal social relationships, including with men.

In NV‘s third act, when a guilt-ravaged Charlotte returns to Cascade after Mother’s bitter little heart finally gives out, she finds Tina, her lover’s unwanted daughter, in residence, and we see in her what we saw in Charlotte in the opening sequence. Tina is broken by her mother’s rejection, and she is as uncertain, lost, and consumed by feelings of unworthiness and morbid fancies as Charlotte was. Charlotte recognizes herself in the kid, and she finds herself irresistibly drawn into giving Tina the love she herself was denied. It’s a beautiful impulse, the kind of healing that restores things to their proper order. By becoming a good mother to Tina, Charlotte rewrites her own story and saves Tina from the decades of wounds she suffered at Mother’s hands.

Tina (janis Wilson) as Charlotte finds her at Cascade.

But let’s talk about sex, for it is in this realm that Charlotte’s vibrant being finds expression. When Charlotte says to her first boyfriend, “I thought men didn’t like girls who were prudes,” which she admits to Jacquith she had learned from novels, she displays a frankness about her own desire that is surprising in an aristocratic Boston girl. Of course Charlotte learned whatever she knows about love and sex from books—Mother certainly wouldn’t have told her anything. But Charlotte acts throughout NV with a maturity and lack of pretense around sex.

When she is preparing to leave Cascade after her first stay, Jacquith removes and breaks her glasses. “But I feel so undressed without them,” she protests. “It’s good for you to feel that way,” he replies. He has been preparing her to live an adult life, to learn to manage the vulnerability of not just feeling but some day perhaps actually being undressed in front of a man.

“But I feel so undressed without them, says Charlotte. “It’s good for you to feel that way,” says Dr. Jacquith.

Our first glimpse of Camille Beauchamp, Charlotte’s nom de cruise, still feeling fragile but looking stunning.

Upon her return, Charlotte finds the strength to defy Mother partly because of the camellias Jerry has sent.

Charlotte’s vulnerability at first makes her standoffish when she is thrown together with Tina’s father, Jerry, her soul mate. But his gentleness and small gallantries—the way he leans in when he lights her cigarette, the bottle of perfume he gives her as thanks for helping him shop for his wife and daughters—move her deeply. When she confesses that she’s the family spinster aunt and that she’s recovering from a breakdown, he doesn’t recoil. It’s only the second time in her life she has enjoyed the attentions of an attractive man, and she is still as responsive as she was on her first cruise.

One of my favorite gowns in the movie, with its plunging neckline and Jerry’s flowers, offends Mother deeply. But Charlotte has the camellias, she can’t be cowed. She knows she is loved.

And let’s face it, a Boston Vale has to be in foreign lands to fall in love outside her class. The Vales’ Boston is a tight-knit community of old, wealthy families, and Charlotte has zero social mobility when she’s at home. But on the ship, or later in a cabin in the mountains after a car accident strands them overnight, she can be herself with Jerry in a way life as a Vale denies her at home. It’s pretty clear that Charlotte and Jerry make love that night in the mountains. Later on, when Charlotte is trying to get her dull Boston fiancé to show a little sexual interest in her, she suggests they go to some little bistro, have a few drinks, perhaps loosen their inhibitions, and he is shocked. “You must think me very depraved,” she says. Well, yes, he does. But he’s a stiff, and marrying him to prove herself normal would be suicidal.

Charlotte’s single post-Cascade clunker, the dress Mother would approve, which she wears when trying to behave conventionally.

Styling and clothes are used masterfully throughout NV to express Charlotte’s inner state. Davis’s clothes were designed by Orry-Kelly, who enjoyed an excellent working relationship with her. In this scene with Elliott, the fiancé, Charlotte wears the only unbecoming dress we see her in after her recovery—it sticks out like a sore thumb. Why, I wondered, does the dress seem so wrong? Then it struck me: Because she’s betraying herself, marrying a man Mother approves of, that’s why. The dress is a busy floral print with a high neckline—it’s a dress both Elliott and Mother would find most suitable, but it does nothing for Charlotte. It’s not her. All the other clothes she wears, which she has chosen herself, are incredibly flattering. She looks fantastic—the clothes are tailored but not severe, simple and beautifully cut—as long as she is being herself. She has almost fallen into a trap, looking for approval, doing what’s expected of her. When she tells Elliott they’d better call it a day, they are both visibly relieved. I wish Elliott luck finding a wife who won’t make any distasteful sexual demands of him. But the important thing is that Charlotte’s connection to her own erotic imagination is strong enough to steer her away from this dire marriage with a man she does not really love.

One of the things I love most about NV is that it’s a movie about an adult, written for grown-ups. When life brings Charlotte a soul mate in Jerry but traps him in a loveless marriage, they don’t ditch the kids and responsibilities and run away together. No, that’s a noir setup. Charlotte makes her failed attempt to act the part of a Boston matron, but when she realizes it’s no good she doesn’t take to drink and picking up guys at a dive bar. She makes peace with being alone, which is what you do if you don’t end up with a partner and you don’t intend to ruin your life over it. Charlotte finds a way to restore herself, help Tina, and maintain a connection with Jerry. It’s by definition a sexless solution: If Jacquith finds Charlotte and Jerry even flirting, he’ll remove Tina from Charlotte’s house. It’s a huge, improvisational compromise. Jerry characteristically fumes about taking Tina away because he doesn’t want Charlotte to sacrifice herself for his child (rather dense of him). But as Charlotte famously says at the movie’s end, “Don’t ask for the moon; we have the stars.”

Charlotte thanks Jerry for their first day together—”for a few moments when I almost felt alive.”

Jerry and Charlotte don’t ride off into the sunset, but they might live happily ever after. Sort of. Sometimes life is like that, even in the movies. In the film’s final sequence we are once again at the Vale mansion where we began, but the place is transformed. When Charlotte first returned from her cruise, she shocked her brothers by ordering a fire in the drawing room. “Mother never uses that fireplace,” they say. “High time we did, then,” she says, and we see in the final scene how Charlotte’s fire has breathed new life into the old, formerly gloomy house. Now, instead of a house that cannot breathe, presided over by an miserable matriarch who cannot stand for anyone else to be happy, is a house full of life, love, and good works.

Charlotte has also been transformed from a broken person who gets her few kicks smoking, drinking, and reading naughty books in her bedroom to a woman passionately engaged with life. Really, how much happier an ending can you ask for

Charlotte and Jerry say farewell, their time together over. But look—Charlotte is blooming. This is the only floral dress she wears that suits her, reflects her inner glow.

The final scene, back at the Vale house, Tina transformed.

Jerry: Shall we have a cigarette on it? Sure, they’re rather make love, but they’ll have to settle for a Camel….

This post was written for Cinemava’s Free for All Classic Film Blogathon. Go read the other fab posts here:

https://cinemavensessaysfromthecouch.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/the-free-for-all-blogathon/

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Marsha Hunt: Living Well Is the Best Revenge

Last month, in October of 2017, Marsha Hunt began her 101st transit around the sun. She continues to grace our increasingly graceless planet, and while we were always lucky to have her, she seems even more precious now, when we are really in the soup.

Marsha Hunt in 2007, radiant at 90. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Miss Hunt is legendary among serious classic movie fans, but is largely unknown beyond our geeky precincts. Why is that, do you suppose? There are so many reasons that one artist is beloved, even iconic, while another with the same amount of talent and accomplishment is known only to the most devout movie lovers. Why is Bogart the most recognizable star of the classic movie era, while James Cagney, whose career was longer than Bogart’s and equally lustrous, is not equally venerated? Why do fantastic actors like, say, Eleanor Parker or Richard Widmark, who were big stars in their day, now languish in relative obscurity?

The most obvious answer in Miss Hunt’s case is the blacklist. Her career was thriving, and not just in film: In the summer of 1950 she had an offer to host a TV talk show and was starring in a hit on Broadway when she returned from France, where she had dined with Eleanor Roosevelt (they had met in January, 1937, when Hunt, along with Jean Harlow and Robert Taylor, visited the White House). She called her agent to check in, and the offers had dried up. That was it—poof! All gone.

While Marsha Hunt is more than worthy of celebrating for her acting, beauty and impeccable style, it’s bigger than that—that doesn’t get at the unique person she is. Hollywood has always been awash in talent and beauty. It’s the totality of her being being and her generous life that are so compelling.

The Human Comedy (1943), here with James Craig and Mickey Rooney.

That life, she acknowledges, has been extremely lucky, and I am inclined to agree with her despite the fact that her career got trampled along with so many others during the Red Scare that began in the late 1940s and spiraled into a crisis that took a sledgehammer to the American values she believed in. McCarthyism stained virtually everything it touched, with a few notable exceptions. Marsha Hunt is one of these. Her long, beautiful life is a refutation of the industry’s moral collapse under the pressure of the fear and betrayal that roiled America starting about 70 years ago, when she was 30.

All she did was refuse to compromise her ideals to save her career. All she did was let go of what she could not hold onto. After her film work dried up, she and Presnell did some international travel, and Hunt found a new focus. What she saw of hunger and homelessness challenged her to become active with the United Nations, and she became an activist. The commitment to making things better, which had not been gratified in her time at SAG as it sank into political madness, found expression in her new work. And she continued to find ways to help, not just internationally but in her own community of Sherman Oaks, California. She had never been interested in communism, and was not accused of being a member of the Communist Party. But that wasn’t a prerequisite for blacklisting. In that paranoid time, the zealous began demanding loyalty oaths and denunciations, and anything short of a blanket condemnation of communism—not just current or previous Communist Party members but anyone who had ever gone to a meeting or signed a petition that had now come under scrutiny—and loud vows to oppose it to the death were insufficient to clear oneself of suspicion.

Hunt’s great luck includes an excellent gene pool, a happy childhood with loving parents, as well as striking beauty and natural elegance, a keen mind, a good sense of humor, a long, devoted second marriage, and a deep love of and great gift for acting. And that’s not all: her passion for helping others, which found expression in the activism that absorbed her abundant energy when she could no longer work in movies, is a gift to the world. It’s truly an embarrassment of riches, and she has squandered nothing, made the most of everything. It’s no wonder that, at 100, she is still winning new fans and friends.

Hunt’s figure was perfect for fashion—her waist was 22 inches.

In the summer of 1950, Hunt’s name appeared on the infamous Red Channels list of 150 people in broadcasting who supposedly had dangerous political sympathies. Decades later the actor George Murphy, who started his career in politics as the president of the Screen Actors Guild and eventually served as U.S. Senator for California, said that there was no such thing as the blacklist. Murphy had been a passionate commie hunter during the HUAC years. Poison of this sort grows stronger when it’s denied. What did Murphy’s denial even mean, and what was he saying—was he denying his own role in this disastrous chapter in American history?

  Miss Hunt does something for hats…

  Whispering campaigns by their nature grow in darkness, which makes them difficult to counter—there’s nobody on the record who can be challenged on the facts. In the years after Red Channels, Hunt continued to work on the stage, and eventually she was again able to find sporadic film work, but she had lost the momentum built over 15 years in the business, and there was no way to regain it.

She’s actually better known now than she was 20 years ago thanks to TCM, which shows her films occasionally, as well as to her continuing presence on the classic movie scene, and to strong advocacy by the Film Noir Foundation. Just this past April she turned up unannounced at a TCM Film Festival screening, to the delight of everyone lucky enough to be in the theater. She’s still doing interviews, telling stories about the Hollywood she knew, the blacklist era, and her wonderful, lucky life. I would be thrilled to be as lucid at 60 as she is at 100, but you can’t have everything.

Marsha Hunt entertaining soldiers.

Hunt had made more than 50 movies in 15 years, and while she was not a top star, she was in demand and had appeared in some prestige pictures like Pride and Prejudice (1940), Cry Havoc (1943), and The Human Comedy (1943), as well as a number of less prominent movies well worth discovering, like Kid Glove Killer (1942) and Seven Sweethearts (1942), both with her friend Van Heflin (sigh),  A Letter for Evie (1944), Carnegie Hall (194?), Lost Angel (1943), The Affairs of Martha (1941), and more famously Raw Deal (1947), considered one of the greatest of noirs. In Raw Deal she has the unenviable task of playing the good girl, a particular challenge playing opposite the great Claire Trevor’s vulnerable bad girl. But Hunt makes the good girl believable and attractive. She says, “All I want is a little decency!” And when she witnesses Dennis O’Keefe being savagely beaten by two thugs, she has to make an agonizing choice: Shoot one of them, or watch O’Keefe being murdered. We see her face that conflict, in those few seconds. She shows it all to us without being obvious or looking contrived.

From what I’ve seen, she is never less than excellent. She is a pleasure to watch; her sensitivity to tone and nuance are always evident. As Mary Bennet, the bookish daughter whose inability to hit the high note in “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” is a running gag in Pride and Prejudice, she spends most of her screen time in the back of group shots, but even there her reactions are perfectly calibrated to add to the sum of the dramatic effect without distracting from the more prominent characters. And her few scenes showcase her flair for comedy. If you know Hunt for other movies it takes a few seconds to register that gawky, geeky Mary is the same impeccably turned out Miss Hunt who was a costume designer’s dream. But Hunt’s ambition was never to be the biggest star, but the very best actress. She took pride in being called “Hollywood’s youngest character actress,” and did her best to live up to it.

Pride and Prejudice (1940): Maureen O’Sullivan, Hunt, Mary Boland

Marsha Hunt had been 17, already a successful New York fashion model with her sights set on becoming an actress, when her film career began in 1935. That’s when Paramount  signed her to a seven-year contract, followed by a long, happy period at MGM in the 1940s that produced most of her best-known work.

in 1947, Hunt and her husband, writer Robert Presnell Jr., didn’t think twice about joining the Committee for the First Amendment in support of the Hollywood Ten, the group of prominent writers and directors who defied the House Committee on Un-American Activities and refused to answer the infamous question “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Today, Dalton Trumbo is the best known of the Ten, but Hunt didn’t know him until decades later when he hired her to play the mother in his film adaptation of his book Johnny Got His Gun. In 1947, Hunt only knew one of the Ten: screenwriter/producer Adrian Scott, who she says is one of the finest people she has ever known. Standing in support of Scott was a no-brainer for Hunt.

Raw Deal (1947)

She recalls, in her interview in Patrick McGilligan’s and Paul Buhle’s Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, that when she served on the Screen Actors Guild’s board in 1946-47, she was a political innocent. Her father was an extremely conservative Republican, and at first she had been uncertain about even the idea of labor unions because he so disliked them. But her interest and concern in the lives of others was stirred by the meetings, where at first she just listened, but then she began to speak up. She wanted to address the serious issues affecting the membership, including Olivia de Havilland’s suspension by Warner Bros, and stereotyping in casting—not just the very narrow restrictions on the kinds of roles offered to minorities, but how those all-too-rare characters were written. But increasingly, the union’s leadership was focused not on these issues but on what they believed to be the threat of communist infiltration of the industry.

“Flow Gently, Sweet Afton”: Hunt’s dodgy intonation is the movie’s running gag.

Director Sam Wood was among those who in 1944 founded the Motion Picture Alliance [for the Preservation of American Ideals], a single-issue organization dedicated to rooting out supposed industry infiltration by communists. The politically conservative membership included Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, George Murphy, Ward Bond, Walter Brennan, Clarence Brown, Leo McCarey, Irene Dunne, Laraine Day, Dick Powell, and Ginger Rogers, and many of HUAC’s friendly witnesses were drawn from its ranks. These were the people eager to “name names,” though given their political sympathies, the idea that they would know who was batting for the other side seems ridiculous.

Their eagerness to protect America from what they perceived as a real danger was evident, and despite a paucity of evidence regarding communist messages being smuggled into Hollywood movies, the advent of the Cold War provided fertile soil for what it’s now clear was their paranoia. The relationship between HUAC and Hollywood—the studios, the unions, and the Motion Picture Alliance—further confused issues for those accused of being commies. How could you find out who had named you, and how did you fight back? Who did you see to restore your reputation, to regain your position in the industry and community?

Pride and Prejudice (1940): She finally hits that high note when she meets her match.

But that was a few years later. In 1947, nobody could yet see where things were headed. Hunt and Presnell joined other prominent Hollywood liberals like John Huston, William Wyler, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Henreid, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall who formed an organization of their own, the Committee for the First Amendment. They only knew that American values, starting with the freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, were under siege, and they believed that standing in support of the Constitution, as well as their friends and colleagues, was the right thing to do.

The group chartered a plane and flew to Washington in support of the Ten, to attend the HUAC hearings where their testimony had been subpoenaed. Hunt recalls the overnight flight from Los Angeles as cheerful and optimistic, with friendly groups greeting them at the airports they stopped at on the way. Nobody on that flight, and none of the Ten, had any idea what they were about to face. They were about to get their first taste of the ferocity, power, and intractability of the forces arrayed against them, and the mood was altogether different on the flight back home—the contagion of fear had infected them, and their group dissolved soon after.

Marsha Hunt (at front) with the Committee for the First Amendment, on their way to Washington to attend HUAC hearings in 1947. They were confident and optimistic on the way to Washington; the mood was very different on the way home.

Hunt says that they faced immediate hostility, including from the press. Some sources  quoted her as saying things she not only did not but would never say, just as her listing in Red Channels a few years later would list political affiliations she never had. Where did the damning information come from? We will probably never know.

Hunt believes she fell under suspicion from her SAG work, from her attempts to refocus the union on what she saw as its core issues, but more specifically because she contradicted previous SAG president Robert Montgomery’s account of an attempt to merge SAG with the Directors Guild of America and the Screen Writers Guild. He was the venerated insider; she was the earnest newbie who lacked political sophistication. And, though she doesn’t say this, perhaps misogyny also played a part—that is, perhaps her account was discounted before she opened her mouth.

Raw Deal (1947): Director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton shoot Hunt with great delicacy

In any case, after their Washington excursion, those who defended freedom of speech were told they needed to distance themselves from their now-tainted colleagues. Hunt heard that Bogart and Bacall had been called on the carpet at Warner Bros and told in no uncertain terms that their careers were on the line, which shows you how out of whack things already were—usually if you’re making money for the company, they will allow you some leeway in these matters, and Bogart and Bacall were huge stars. But what had been concern over eroding civil rights began to bleed into panic, and Bogart released a statement to square himself with his bosses and the suspicious minds of the Motion Picture Alliance. He was among the first of what would become a flood of artists who would fold under the pressure and compromise their ideals to avoid ruin. It’s hard to overstate the power of seeing the Ten lose everything—not just their power and lucrative careers, but their houses, their marriages. And some of them did prison time. The chilling effect on Hollywood’s liberals permeated everything. Hunt says she waved hi to a friend at the supermarket, and the friend looked away. As she says, it was a cowardly time in Hollywood.

As Victor Navasky writes in Naming Names, his study of the political and ethical disaster that was taking shape:

“The talent blamed their agents, and the agents blamed the studios, and the studios blamed HUAC, and HUAC blamed the pressure groups. The pressure groups blamed their members, said their hands were tied. (However, when the national commander of the American Legion told Martin Gang that the Legion helped to circulate the names of subversives only because their members insisted on it, his fellow attorney Milton Rudin made a tour of Legion posts across the country, only to find that few of the members really cared.) Lawyers blamed their clients, and clients blamed their lawyers. Blacks blamed The Man.

Thirty years after the documented fact, George Murphy asserts that there never was a blacklist. Denial of fact can always be disproved by evidence; not so denial of responsibility.”

 *     *    *

  Marsha was lucky again, among the victims of the blacklist: Her husband, bafflingly but fortunately, was not blacklisted, so he continued to work, and they were able to keep their home. While movies, TV, and radio were closed to her, she was able to work in stock and on Broadway. The money was in no way comparable to what she had made in movies—and she says that while she was never among the high earners, she did well enough—but she got to keep doing the work she loved and contributing something to the family coffers.

Raw Deal (1947), with Dennis O’Keefe

In the plague time of the blacklist, panic drove out decency—that word that finally struck at Joseph McCarthy, the Grand Inquisitor, when Joseph Welch spoke for the nation and denounced the great denouncer, saying “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” (And remember Marsha Hunt’s character in Raw Deal saying, “All I want is a little decency!”) Those with a will to power, as they always do, exploited the situation to become judges and executioners as well as fixers who could save you if you’d just follow their instructions and say what they told you to say, denounce who they told you to, condemn your own past, your own ideals, your friends and colleagues.

So there is something particularly surprising and lovely about Marsha Hunt being pretty much the last (wo)man standing from the blacklist era. Miss Hunt somehow evaded the taint. She sold no one out, including herself. She suffered the loss of a career that was developing solidly, and that she loved with all her heart. We lost all the movies she would have made had her life in the movies not been cut off suddenly and irrevocably. It is a serious loss because she was an excellent actress with a unique screen presence and a look all her own, suffused with inner radiance. But in the end it is the radiance that has prevailed. Perhaps Marsha Hunt is still here to remind us that, no matter how dark things may be, in the long run, decency will prevail.

This post was written for the CMBA 2017 fall blogathon. Head on over to see the other entries; you’ll be glad you did…

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“Acting is a ridiculous profession…” —notes on Peter Lorre

This post is part of the 2014 What a Character! blogathon. To see more, click graphic (above). 

“Acting is a ridiculous profession unless it is part of your very soul.”  —Peter Lorre

Even people who have never seen Peter Lorre in a movie know his nasal, dreamy voice and instantly recognizable bug-eyed face, a caricaturist’s dream, from cartoons and voice mimicry that continue to appear as the years go by—two vividly etched on my memory are the apoplectic cartoon chihuahua Ren (of Ren and Stimpy), who got his bulging eyes and his voice from Lorre, as did The Firesign Theatre’s character Rocky Rococo.

Lorre was born Laszlo Loewenstein in 1904 in Hungary and died in Los Angeles not quite 60 years and 79 films (and a lot of radio and TV) later. His phenomenal screen debut came via Fritz Lang’s M(1931), playing the child molester and murderer Hans Beckert, and the 27-year-old Lorre’s singular appearance and indelible performance burned him into the minds of both moviegoers and filmmakers as a monster capable of the most unspeakable horrors. This, along with his long-term morphine addiction, appear to have been his central tragedies. His huge success in M almost made inevitable the typecasting that kept Lorre, one of the finest actors of the century, from playing more than a fraction of the multitudes he contained. His last appearance on film was in Jerry Lewis’s The Patsy, a satire of Hollywood phoniness that Lorre, with his cordial hatred of the studio bosses whose failure of imagination kept him from the roles he fought so hard for, might well have approved. In between there were great films, good films, and stinkers, and while I cannot claim to have seen anywhere near all of them, I do feel safe in saying that he always added  something worthwhile—Lorre made no film worse, and a great many were better or even succeeded because of his contribution.

Lorre was born Laszlo Loewenstein in 1904 in Hungary and died in Los Angeles not quite 60 years and 79 films (and a lot of radio and TV) later. His phenomenal screen debut came via Fritz Lang’s M(1931), playing the child molester and murderer Hans Beckert, and the 27-year-old Lorre’s singular appearance and indelible performance burned him into the minds of both moviegoers and filmmakers as a monster capable of the most unspeakable horrors. This, along with his long-term morphine addiction, appear to have been his central tragedies. His huge success in M almost made inevitable the typecasting that kept Lorre, one of the finest actors of the century, from playing more than a fraction of the multitudes he contained. His last appearance on film was in Jerry Lewis’s The Patsy, a satire of Hollywood phoniness that Lorre, with his cordial hatred of the studio bosses whose failure of imagination kept him from the roles he fought so hard for, might well have approved. In between there were great films, good films, and stinkers, and while I cannot claim to have seen anywhere near all of them, I do feel safe in saying that he always added  something worthwhile—Lorre made no film worse, and a great many were better or even succeeded because of his contribution.

Lorre’s unique onscreen personality and delicacy as an actor could convey menace, madness, homicidal rage, and both sly wit and an extravagant sense of humor, and that was just in the typecast roles. But he knew he could do so much more. And in the rare instances when he got to play outside type, like Three Strangers, where he is decidedly offbeat, a gentle, sweet-tempered drunk who gets the girl, he proved he could do just about anything.

Like Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, Lorre was a great talent who was only partially understood by most of his audience. That is, Fats Waller was such an extraordinary entertainer, such a delightful and fabulous personality, that a lot of audiences probably didn’t notice that he was one of the greatest of stride pianists and a damned good composer. Back when I was growing up in the ’60s, Armstrong was known for “What a Wonderful World” and “Hello, Dolly!” rather than his stunning trumpet and vocal work from the ’20s and ’30s. It seems difficult for people to accommodate complexity, and most of the time when they’ve decided who you are, they simply don’t see anything else—they’re blind to it.

I think Lorre was, in this, like Waller and Armstrong—a great artist who is beloved, but only for a fraction of his gift.

If you’re curious about Lorre’s life and work hie yourself to Amazon or B&N or your local bookshop and pick up a copy of Stephen D. Youngkin’s authoritative, exhaustively researched The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre (University Press of Kentucky). Lorre presents a lot of interesting items for study, but time is short. So we’ll restrict this post to looking at two areas: how his career was shaped and a few  films in which he played atypical roles that allowed him to showcase the spectrum of his talents, such as The Mask of Dimitrios, Three Strangers, and The Constant Nymph.

One of Fritz Lang’s goals in M was to present the escalating madness and violence, the sense of a society at the edge of disintegration, that he saw in the daily papers.  Mass murders were occurring with shocking frequency in cities and towns across Germany, horrific crime sprees not by gangsters but by people who seemed utterly ordinary. In Lang’s previous crime films he had depicted master criminals, evil geniuses, but in M he made Hans Beckert as ordinary as the killers of the day. Beckert is no antisocial mastermind, he’s a pathetic dweeb—that’s Lang’s and his wife and collaborator Thea von Harbou’s innovation. But casting Lorre as Beckert was essential to the film’s success. From The Nation‘s review: “[Lorre] gives us an intuition of the conflict of will and desire such as we are accustomed to only in the great classic dramas when they are played by great tragic actors. And in the last scene…his wide-eyed, inarticulate defense is made the equivalent of those passages of rhetoric at the close of Greek or Elizabethan plays in which the hero himself is forced to admit his helplessness before the forces which have undone him. The modern psychopath, through Peter Lorre’s acting, attains to the dignity of the tragic hero. It does not matter that the forces are no longer on the outside. They are perhaps the more ruthless for being inside him. The moirae may be given different names by the doctors, the judges, and the audience, but they have lost none of their ancient inevitability.”

Youngkin says that in that final scene, “the dialogue itself…does not touch Lorre’s performance, which sealed his fate as an actor. Rawly emotional and physically racking, it is as exhausting to watch as it was to give. ‘If I play a pathological part,’ Lorre later admitted, ‘I put myself into this character until I begin to display his symptoms.’ He sweats, screams, pants, pleads, and squeals. His eyes bulge, his fingers clench, and his voice pitches toward an ecstatic frenzy.” Lang, famously autocratic on the set, shot that final scene in a marathon that began at 10 a.m. and finally ended at 1 a.m. after Lorre had actually fainted—the director finally had what he wanted, and he used the shot of Lorre’s collapse.

Such a tour de force debut is as often a curse as a blessing. Brilliant debuts not only create inflated expectations, they create a demand for more of the same. For writers, musicians, actors, painters—the more clearly defined you are in an audience’s mind, the less likely you’ll get a chance to branch out, try something new. The money guys don’t like to gamble: If you succeed as a mug, you’re probably going to play a lot of mugs (ask Cagney). And if you get pigeonholed just out of the gate, before you have a chance to get to know the industry and chart a course that’s consistent with what you want and can do, you may get swept along in the current and end up with a one-way ticket to Poverty Row… Stories like Myrna Loy’s, in which she managed to transition from playing exotic yellowface and bad-girl roles (Fu Manchu’s daughter) to playing impeccably respectable but still sexy (Nora Charles) are very rare.

In contrast to Lorre’s career-defining debut, Bogart’s career benefited from growing slowly through a series of appearances in films throughout the ’30s. He mostly (but not always) played bad guys, but even leading roles as villains in The Petrified Forest and High Sierra somehow didn’t fix him so firmly in the minds of the studio bosses that he couldn’t get a shot at playing Sam Spade. Audiences were familiar with him but not so much that they wouldn’t accept him in the part.

The Maltese Falcon may not have broken the bonds of Lorre’s typecasting, but it did rescue him from the downward spiral that typecasting creates—studios refuse to cast you outside your designated type, then grow stale on the type and refuse to cast you at all. Warner Bros. was not much interested in Lorre, but John Huston was: “Peter just seemed to me to be ideal for the part…. He had that international air about him. You never knew quite where he was from, although one did of course…. He had that clear combination of braininess and real innocence, and sophistication. You see that onscreen always. He’s always doing two things at the same time, thinking one thing and saying something else. And that’s when he’s at his best.”

Huston also noted that some of Lorre’s finest touches were not apparent when they were shooting: “I’d often shoot a scene with Peter and find it quite satisfactory, nothing more…. But then I would see it on the screen in rushes and discover it to be far better than what I had perceived on the set. Some subtlety of expression was seen by the camera and recorded by the microphone that the naked eye and ear didn’t get. He’d be doing little things that the camera close on him would pick up that standing a few feet away you wouldn’t see. It was underplaying; it was a play that you would see if you were close to him, as a close-up, as a camera is close. Things would flicker there and burn up slightly, like a lamp, and then dim down, and come on again. You’re watching something as if it were in motion.”

Lorre said in 1962 that making Maltese Falcon was one of his happiest times, and that for years after, “we used to have a sort of stock company, an ensemble…It was a ball team…Each one of those people, whether it was Claude Rains or Sydney Greenstreet or Bogart, or so on, there is one quality about them in common that is quite hard to come by: You can’t teach it and that is to switch an audience from laughter to seriousness. We can do it at will, most people can’t.”

The Maltese Falcon also brought together the 37-year-old Lorre, a screen veteran, with 61-year-old stage actor Sydney Greenstreet in his first movie. Joel Cairo and Caspar Gutman don’t have a very substantial relationship, but there was an inevitability to the meeting and subsequent pairing of the two. They complemented each other so perfectly—Greenstreet’s girth and Lorre’s slight physique; Greenstreet’s rich, low purr and Lorre’s thinner nasal whine… Lorre drove Greenstreet around the bend on the set, having none of Greenstreet’s serious, detail-oriented professionalism. But when the cameras rolled it always turned out that Lorre had been yanking Greenstreet’s chain (he could never resist) and that Lorre knew the script backward and upside down.

I’m particularly fond of The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), adapted from Eric Ambler’s novel. As directed by Jean Negulesco, it is a tricky little noir thriller that starts in Istanbul and ends in Paris with several stops along the way (at least one in one of the multiple flashbacks). I like Lorre as Leyden, the Dutch mystery writer who becomes obsessed with the story of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a criminal whose ruthlessness and sheer nerve makes him seem a natural subject for Leyden’s next book. Greenstreet appears out of nowhere, looking to confirm Dimitrios’s death, and cultivates Leyden’s friendship by searching his room and pulling a gun on him. As Peterson (Greenstreet) often observes, “How little kindness there is in the world today…” It’s true the film occasionally loses its momentum in long dialogue scenes, but since all of them involve Lorre I’m happy, and as the film goes on Lorre and Greenstreet spend more and more time together, things just get better and better. Lorre functions as the audience, listening to the pieces of Dimitrios’s exploits and the wreckage left in his wake. Youngkin finds him wooden in this; I find him natural and reassuring—I would tell him anything.

And then there’s Three Strangers (1945), from a story by John Huston, also directed by Negulesco. Lorre saw it as an opportunity to play a romantic lead, and for once the studio let him have his way. He plays Johnny West, a petty thief and drunk with a gentle soul. The other two strangers, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Greenstreet, have stories of their own, all anchored by shared ownership of a sweepstakes ticket and an oath to a Chinese statue that is supposed to bring them what they desire. Fitzgerald is a respectable-looking horror, desperate and deceitful, manipulative and utterly solipsistic, and Greenstreet is a respectable-looking embezzler, as bad a lot as Fitzgerald. Only Lorre, the criminal and drunk, has any honor or decency. A nice girl falls for Johnny and moves heaven and earth to save him from the doom that seems to have been made just for him.

One more, though Lorre’s part mostly ended up on the cutting-room floor: The Constant Nymph(1943). This is one of my favorite movies these days. It has a hyper-romanticism that reminds me of my beloved Frank Borzage. The whole cast is fine, from stars Charles Boyer, Joan Fontaine, and Alexis Smith down to supporting cast including Dame May Whitty, Charles Coburn, and Lorre. Lorre’s Fritz doesn’t have much screen time but as always he finds exactly the right tone for the piece. You always enjoy his presence but he doesn’t suck all the air out of the room, chew scenery, or otherwise hog bandwidth.

Films like this demonstrate what Lorre could do when he was allowed out of his dungeon. Don’t get me wrong—the madmen and fiends he gave us are among the most memorable we will ever see, and that’s fine. But I can’t shake a sense of melancholy for him, imagining his frustration and sense of waste. Lorre left us an interesting catalogue of work, but I always wonder what we missed, what we might be talking about right now in a parallel universe where Lorre had been able to maneuver more easily in the studios. Perhaps he would have made disastrous choices… who knows?

It’s a mystery.

Note:

Quotations are from The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre, by Stephen D. Youngkin. Buy a copy; it’s really good.

Also, The Films of Peter Lorre, by Stephen D. Youngkin, James Bigwood, and Ramond Cabana Jr., is a good resource, as is, to a lesser degree, Masters of Menace: Greenstreet and Lorre, by Ted Sennett

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Notorious (1946): Name Your Poison

Post under construction: It will be live on Saturday, please come back then, thanking you! 

Notorious is one of Hitchcock’s greatest films, an espionage thriller and romance that rewards multiple viewings and can stand multiple readings. When I was younger, what stood out for me was the onscreen chemistry between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, both at their most devastatingly attractive, and the swoonworthy kissing scene set on the terrace of Alicia’s (Bergman’s) apartment in Rio. Since they met in scene 2, Alicia and Devlin (Grant) have been circling each other warily and hungrily, Flashes of desire and distrust, feints and taunts, punctuate Ben Hecht’s perfectly pitched dialogue. 

This post was written for the ‘Til Death Do Us Part blogathon, July 24, 2017, hosted by CineMaven’s Essays from the Couch. Go see the other excellent submissions here.

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Sublime and Underseen: Peter Ibbetson (1935)

Yes. We do love each other. We’ve loved each other all our lives, and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.”

Still putting together this post, but please come back later today and read about this extraordinary romantic fantasy. Thank you for your patience, it’s been kind of nuts around here! 

  “Peter, listen to me! Don’t you understand? We’re dreaming together, just as we did once before.”

“But…it isn’t real.”

“Who is to say what is real and what is not real? We’re dreaming true, a dream that is more than a dream.” 

      This post was written for the 2017 CMBA Spring Blogathon. Read all the other posts here. 

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Behind the Door (1919) Blu-ray/DVD Giveaway

Flicker Alley and a group of amazing sites for fans of silent and classic film are proud to bring you this giveaway for Behind the Door (1919) on Dual-Format Edition Blu-ray/DVD.

Legendary producer Thomas H. Ince and director Irvin V. Willat made this—͞the most outspoken of all the vengeance films according to film historian Kevin Brownlow—during the period of World War I-inspired American patriotism. Hobart Bosworth stars as Oscar Krug, a working-class American, who is persecuted for his German ancestry after war is declared. Driven by patriotism, Krug enlists and goes to sea. However, tragedy strikes when his wife (Jane Novak) sneaks aboard his ship and is captured following a German U-boat attack. Krug’s single-minded quest for vengeance against the sadistic German submarine commander (played with villainous fervor by Wallace Beery) leads to the film’s shocking and brutal climax.

This newly restored edition represents the most complete version of the film available since 1919,thanks to the collaboration of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Library of Congress, and Gosfilmofond of Russia. Sourced from the only two known remaining prints and referencing a copy of Willat’s original continuity script, this edition recreates the original color tinting scheme and features a new score composed and performed by Stephen Horne. Flicker Alley is honored to present Behind the Dooron Blu-ray and DVD for the first time ever.

Bonus Materials Include:

Original Russian version of Behind the Door: The re-edited and re-titled version of the film that was distributed in Russia, with musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

Original Production Outtakes: Featuring music composed and performed by Stephen Horne.

Restoring Irvin Willat’s Behind the Door:An inside look at the restoration process with the restoration team.

Kevin Brownlow, Remembering Irvin Willat: Directed by Patrick Stanbury, an in-depth interview with renowned historian and honorary Academy Award® winner Kevin Brownlow on the career of director Irvin Willat.

Slideshow Gallery: Original lobby cards, production stills, and promotional material.

12-page Booklet: Featuring rare photographs and essays by film historian Jay Weissburg, film restorer Robert Byrne, and composer Stephen Horne.

  Official Release Date: April 4, 2017 Pre-order now at the special sale price of $29.95 for a limited time!

Giveaway Hosted By: Flicker Alley

Co-Hosted By: Nitrateville Silent Era Once Upon a Screen Silent-ology Ferdy on Films Caren’s Classic Cinema Toronto Film Society Spellbound By Movies A Classic Movie Blog Second Sight Cinema Sister Celluloid Cinematic Catharsis Classic Movie Man Old Hollywood Films Thrilling Days of Yesteryear True Classics

One lucky winner will receive a copy of Behind the Door (1919) on Dual-Format Edition Blu-ray/DVD from Flicker Alley! Giveaway is open to residents of U.S./Canada and ends on April 12, 2017.

Entry-Form

Please watch the trailer above and let me know what your favorite part was in the comments below!

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Children of Divorce 1927

I had the extraordinary pleasure of my first viewing of Children of Divorce

I had no expectations before seeing Children of Divorce—I had never heard of it. Gary Cooper was the featured star at Capitolfest 2016, where old movie fanatics gather for a few days each August to watch silent and early sound films in a dilapidated movie palace with a fantastic pipe organ for live accompaniment. When I slipped into my seat

A passion for old movies and the people who made them can be consuming.

There was a show called Divorce Court on daytime TV when I was a kid in the ’60s. The opening credit was an illustration of a kid kneeling by his bed, hands clasped, praying, with a voiceover something along the lines of, “And please…make Mommy and Daddy stop fighting.”

Children of Divorce is the story of three kids whose parents did not stop fighting, and whose lives have been as a consequence uprooted. Kitty, the youngest, will grow up to be Clara Bow, with everything that entails. Ted (CK) grows into tall drink of water Gary Cooper, just beginning his long career as a major star, and Jean turns into Esther Ralston, of whom I knew nothing until seeing her her.

Children of Divorce is one of those wonderful surprises. It’s not a masterpiece, an “important” film. That is, unless you love old movies and enjoy stepping into a past that feels phenomenally remote, seeing stars you may know from their later work when they were just starting out (Gary Cooper), rising to their peak (Clara Bow) or already moving toward the end of their Hollywood career (Esther Ralston, **CK**).

In addition to all the usual stuff that strikes us in movies—acting, screenwriting, direction, set and costume design, cinematography—in old films we **enter** the past in a more fully dimensional way than we do in the imaginative act of reading, or looking at art from another time, or even speaking with our elders about their experiences in the past, that remote country. When we become open to old movies, when we fall in love with these visits to a past that is at once impossibly foreign and has brief moments that could be happening **right now**, time does not move relentlessly forward for us as it does in real life. Or at least we get to enjoy little respites from the grind of 21st century life.

Kitty’s end is dictated by her character. That’s what drives the plot. Another person in her situation might have reacted differently. She could have left Cooper, either with or without their daughter. She could have stayed, knowing that Jean and…Ted? love each other but are too honorable to give in to their love. Or she could have taken the road she chose, the only one she was able to see. Thing is that scene—it has a visual motif that I know from the famous Kane shot after he busts up Susan’s room, where he walks through a series of doors, becoming more and remote all the time. And I thought, Wait a minute—this scene is way more arty and stylish some of the rest of the movie. And it turns out there’s a reason for that.

Turns out that the execs or preview audiences decided that as directed by DIRECTOR TK, Children of Divorce was a stinker. At which point Schulberg (CK) brought in the young Turk Josef von Sternberg to reshoot the picture. Small detail: He would only be able to shoot for three days.

You know how Abbey Road kept these incredibly precise records of recording sessions, so that we have extraordinary detail about how the Beatles records came together? Who did what, when, how many times. How things changed.

That’s the film historian’s dream, records like that, which document the process of making the film. Who did what, when, how many times. How things changed.

Children of Divorce opened April 25, 1927. Place that in time: Two years before the Crash of 1929, and at the moment when sound was very new but starting to become a thing (CK).

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A Viewer’s Guide: How to Watch Grand Hotel (1932)

“Grand Hotel…always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.”

courtesy Pre-Code.com

Grand Hotel took home the Best Picture Oscar for MGM in 1933, beating another MGM release, The Champ, as well as Samuel Goldwyn’s Arrowsmith, Fox’s Bad Girl, First National’s Five Star Final, and three films from Paramount—One Hour With You, The Smiling Lieutenant, and Shanghai Express, the only movie to out-earn Grand Hotel at the box office that year. Both films feature an ensemble cast in a story set primarily in a single setting, but while Shanghai Express has a fabulous cast headlined by Marlene Dietrich at the height of her pre-Code magnificence, Grand Hotel‘s ensemble is all-star, a concept Irving Thalberg invented for this movie.

In Cedric Gibbons’ opulent Art Deco settings, Adrian’s stunning costumes, William Daniels’ glamorous cinematography, Edmund Goulding’s sure-handed, sophisticated direction, a clever script (adapted from MGM’s successful Broadway adaptation of Vicki Baum’s novel), and first-rate performances by its stellar cast, Grand Hotel is one of those films that displays the glories of the studio system, bringing together top talents in all areas of production, all excellently coordinated by those in charge of the project. It’s funny, romantic, tragic, camp, and always entertaining. It’s also very much a pre-Code movie, despite its plush trappings. But if you want to go a little deeper to enrich your viewing experience, here is a primer on its making, which is a pretty good story itself.

  Origins, development, the producer

Menschen im Hotel was German writer Vicki Baum’s tenth novel, an instant sensation when it was serialized in Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, so popular that enraged readers wrote to protest the death of one of the characters. It was immediately adapted for the Berlin stage, the production directed by Max Reinhardt (many of whose actors went on to illustrious Hollywood careers). MGM bought the rights for $35,000 and then had another theatrical adaptation written for a Broadway production to test the material. This was an Irving Thalberg project, and Thalberg would use a similar method four years later with the Marx Brothers’ before shooting their first MGM feature, A Night at the Opera, sending the brothers and other cast members out on the road to perform scenes from the script in front of live audiences.The show was a success, resulting in a $55,000 profit, so MGM was $20K to the good before the movie was even produced.

MGM’s creative chief, Irving Thalberg, was extremely enthusiastic about Grand Hotel. It was his pet project in the early ’30s, and he lavished time and care on it. Since Thalberg had to oversee all MGM productions he made producer Paul Bern his supervising producer/point man to handle day-to-day production issues. Bern is sadly most remembered for his death a few months after marrying Jean Harlow later in 1932.

Though Garbo and Crawford were locks for the leading ladies, MGM whispered rumors all over town about possible casting for the male roles, including the possibility of Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, Edmund Lowe, Ramon Novarro, and best of all John Gilbert (heavily lobbied for by Garbo) as Baron von Gaigern, a gambler, failed jewel thief, and Garbo’s lover. Mayer, however, wasn’t having it, and John Barrymore got the part. He was fresh from playing a more successful aristocratic jewel thief in Arsene Lupin, in which he had for the first time shared the screen with his older brother, Lionel. Pairing the two again made good sense. Preysing, the incompetent industrialist, bully, snob, and hypocrite, was perhaps to be played by (again) Gable, or Warner Baxter, or Jean Herholt, who would end up in the smaller role of Senf, the porter half-crazed with worry about his wife, who is giving birth in a clinic while he works. Director Edmund Goulding had wanted to cast Buster Keaton as Senf, but he did not prevail, and years later he remembered how awful it was to call Keaton with the bad news, for which Keaton thanked him, followed by a silence, then hung up. In the end it was Wallace Beery, riding high on Min and Bill and The Big House, who played Preysing. He would almost reprise the role in MGM’s followup all-star movie, Dinner at Eight, in 1933: Dan Packard, the vulgar, ruthless tycoon, is Preysing’s American cousin. And the indispensable Lewis Stone, an MGM mainstay, completed the ensemble of principals as melancholic Doctor Otternschlag, the WWI veteran with half his face shot off, Grand Hotel‘s Greek chorus. It is Otternschlag whose utterance (see quote at top) is both prologue and epilogue to Grand Hotel’s several stories as well as the many others that take place behind closed doors, which we do not witness.

Here is Fortune magazine on Irving Thalberg’s arrival at his office: 

He enters—a small, finely-made Jew of about thirty-three, changeable as the chameleon industry in which he labors. He is five and one-half feet tall, and weighs 122 pounds after a good night’s sleep. This lightness, in calm moments, is all feline grace and poise. In frantic moments he appears as a pale and flimsy bag of bones held together by concealed bits of string and the furious ambitiou to make the best movies in the world. He seat himself, in his moderne, beaverboard office, at a massive, shiny desk, in front of a Dictograph which looks like a small pipe organ and partially hides a row of medicine bottles. Before him are huge boxes of cigarettes, which he never opens, and plates of apples and dates into which he sometimes dips a transparent hand. Squirming with nervous fervor in the midst of his elaborate apparatus, he speaks with a curiously calm, soft voice as if his words were a sort of poetry. He describes parabolas with one hand and scratches his knee with the other. Rising, he paces his office with stooped shoulders and hands clasped behind him. This reflective promenading he learned from Carl Laemmle, Sr., who discovered Irving Thalberg when, recently released from a Brooklyn high school, he was an office boy in the Broadway shop of Universal Pictures.

The Director

Edmund Goulding’s name isn’t one of the better-remembered directors of his era, but he was a fine director who left us some memorable films including Dark Victory (1939), The Constant Nymph (1943), Nightmare Alley (1947), and The Razor’s Edge (1946). He was also a standard-bearer for an extravagant lifestyle, famous for his lavish parties/orgies, his bisexuality, his heroic alcohol and drug consumption, and his kind, gentle nature. Thalberg tapped him for Grand Hotel partly because Goulding had previously worked with both Garbo and Crawford, and both actresses would need strong support, a director they could trust. Also, Thalberg felt Goulding had the proper combination of artistic ideas, the authority to bring in a large, complex project on time and within budget, and the personal relationships with Grand Hotel’s leading ladies necessary to coax from them their very best performances. 

Here is Mark Alan Vieira on Goulding and Grand Hotel, from Sin in Soft Focus: 

Edmund Goulding, who directed the film, was probably one of the “perverts” [Joseph] Breen mentioned. “Eddie” was too careless to cover his indiscreet drinking, drug-taking, and homosexuality, and too absent-minded to remember the dazzling ideas he devised, so Thalberg had them transcribed. This excerpt is from the murder scene: “Flaemmchen looks this way and that. After all, it is Flaemmchen and not Lillian Gish running across the ice in “Wah Down East”—it is Flaemmchen, the Berlin girl. She pauses to try and clear her brain. ‘What the hell is this—what is it?’ The impulse naturally is to scream in alarm. She doesn’t—Flaemmchens don’t.”

Grand Hotel was convincing because of the way it handled its adult themes. During an early story conference, Thalberg told Goulding how to rewrite the scene of the Baron watching Grusinskaya undressing: “When he’s on a sex thing, he’s perfectly within his rights. When he has seen a naked woman, he can suddenly, very honestly, have a sex desire come over him…. Why does a man want one woman and another man [want] another? That’s the kick of it, God damn it!” 

Goulding worked closely with Thalberg, Bern, and Vicki Baum on the script. 

Matthew Kennedy writes in Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory: Hollywood’s Genius Bad Boy that

“On the first day of shooting, Eddie strode onto the stage and climbed a sixty-foot steel crane to address his already assembled cast from high above the set. It was an irresistibly dramatic touch that quickly established order. “No one on the set without felt slippers throughout the shooting,” he announced with his strong baritone. “The only voices I want to hear are those of Mr. Stone, the Barrymores, Miss Crawford, and Mr. Hersholt. Miss Garbo will be in the scene but she will not speak. As she passes through the lobby, glance at her. She is a great dancer leaving for the theater. Are you ready? Start your action.”

Eddie was exacting in what he wanted. He frequently assumed actors’ places before the camera and marked the floor with chalk. His white handkerchief came in handy when he wanted to measure heights for camera angles. Then he would act the scenes as he wanted them played, as was his custom. He most often played the woman. Such was the case when he was caught in an embrace with John Barrymore. As they moved closer, Barrymore said, with breathless sincerity, “I love you.” Eddie’s head tilted so that his lips could meet Barrymore’s at any moment. A watching Garbo broke the tension by asking, “Vel, Eddie, vat are you waiting for?” Laughter cooled the scene immediately. 

Goulding’s careful preparation paid off in a smooth shoot, truly remarkable given the five stars on a single set, most of them shooting other films at the same time as this one. In the whole 49 days of shooting the press did not report a single problem on the set, and Goulding was justly proud. “When the film began rolling, general peace and calm prevailed on the set,” [Goulding] recalled. “All Hollywood said, screamed, and prophesied that all hell would break loose on the first day of shooting, there would be recasting and a new director assigned. Thank God no temperamental firecrackers exploded.” (per Kennedy)

The art director

Cedric Gibbons’ extraordinary set design for the Grand Hotel were exquisite and vast, sprawling over six of the studio’s largest sound stages. They covered 16,000sf, a massive space that created exactly the world Goulding wanted to create, first for his actors and then for the movie’s audience. 

The actors

Garbo’s performance is eccentric, and while her melancholy scenes, solo emoting her despair, are not always easy to watch, her scenes with Barrymore are spectacular. Grusinskaya is transformed by love, brought back to life. When she takes Barrymore’s face in her hands, murmurs his mother’s pet name for him, smiles tenderly, and kisses him, you can feel the warmth flooding her body and spirit. Barrymore is perfect in his performance and seems Grusinskaya’s soulmate. Their brief scene on the bed has a real erotic charge, and I wanted the scene to last a little longer. 

Crawford’s Flaemmchen is rather strange, at least at first. She comes to the hotel to do some stenographic work (hard as it may be to imagine from the 21st century, people used to hired others to do their typing and other clerical work) for Preysing, and she reports to his room. Finding the door open, she goes in (already weird), then, seeing Preysing through the open bathroom door, just out of the shower, wrapped only in towels, doing some painful-looking stretches, she walks in on him. She acts like this is natural, normal. Preysing is uncomfortable, asks her to please wait outside. She looks like, Okay, whatever, but takes her sweet time leaving the room. What’s up with that? I’m not sure what they’re trying to tell us about Flaemmchen here. If it’s that she’s been around the block a few times, it still seems kind of peculiar. We learn what we need to in her first scene with the Baron, flirting outside Preysing’s room. We learn that she’s not averse to being picked up by the right man, that she can’t support herself on her wages and relies on men friends to buy her the nicer things. She’s a little bit hard, but just a little—she’s a city girl; it’s her way. But as their conversation reveals that the Baron understands her situation but doesn’t look down on her, she falls a little bit in love with him. 

Lionel Barrymore’s Kringelein took the longest for me to warm to. On my first viewings, his whininess worked my last nerve. But I have come to admire Kringelein’s open-heartedness, his naivety, his real pleasure in his first taste in his 46 years of pleasure and good things. He is a good soul, a good friend. He would do anything he could to help his friend the Baron. At the beginning of Grand Hotel, Kringelein is exhausted, fretful, but willing to stand up for himself, to insist that they give him a proper room. He hates Preysing, his old boss, who personifies Kringelein’s life as a nebbish, never considered or treated with any respect or kindness. But in the end it is Kringelein who calls Preysing to account, and Kringelein finds companionship with beautiful Flaemmchen, no longer distressed by his mortality but thrilled: “I never thought anything so beautiful would come to me.” 

  This is part of Hot & Bothered: The Films of 1932 blogathon, hosted by the delightful Theresa at Cinemaven’s Essays from the Couch and Aurora at Aurora’s Gin Joint. Click the links to see more of the excellent entries. 

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Day 3: Order in the Court! The Classic Courtroom Movie Blogathon continues…

Oyez, oyez!

Welcome to Day 3 of our courtroom extravaganza! In the first two days we saw posts on lynching (Fritz Lang’s Fury), Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Pandora’s Box, Kramer vs. Kramer, and the Three Stooges—from the tragic to the sublime to the ridiculous, and now we swing into Sunday with lots of good stuff still to come, including a lesser-known Hitchcock and Mae West cross-examining witnesses. Leave your link in a comment with your blog name and movie title below this post or tweet it @zleegaspar and I’ll add it to the roster of live links. We’ve had a few last-minute sign-ups and guest posts, and we’re thrilled you chose to get into the act! 

We appreciate all of the writers taking the time to participate! Please be sure you’ve included one of our banners (from either of our websites) in your post, and link it back to the day’s host post with that day’s roster (that would be me today, while Cinemaven takes over tomorrow, our final day in court). And don’t forget to to stop by the other writers’ websites and have a look at their posts over at my delightful cohost’s place, Cinemaven’s Essays from the Couch!  We’ll be posting a full-event wrap-up with the whole roster on Tuesday, June 14. 

Court will continue in session today, June 12, and tomorrow June 13.

Sunday, June 12

The Ox-Bow Incident / Sometimes They Go to Eleven 

The Crucible / Moon in Gemini

The Mouthpiece / Pre-Code.com

Attorney for the Defense / Immortal Ephemera 

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Disembodied: Waldo Lydecker, the Voice in the Dark in Laura (1944)

  “McPherson, if you know anything about faces, look at mine. How singularly innocent I look this morning. Have you ever seen such candid eyes?” 

“Laura considered me the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting man she’d ever met. I was in complete accord with her on that point. She thought me also the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world…. McPherson, you won’t understand this, but I tried to become the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.”

“Have any luck?”

“Let me put it this way. I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbors’ children devoured by wolves.”

Laura is a stealth movie. It sneaks up on you. It’s so beautifully made, its elements so seamlessly woven together that it’s possible to watch it a number of times and enjoy it for its formal components—Joseph LaShelle’s Oscar-winning cinematography, with its impeccably composed shots and gorgeous lighting; the sharp, clever dialogue of Jay Dratler, Betty Reinhardt, and Samuel Hoffenstein (adapting Vera Caspary’s novel), delivered by the uniformly excellent ensemble; Bonnie Cashin’s costumes, so flattering and chic on both Gene Tierney and Judith Anderson; David Raksin’s evocative score, most famous for its haunting title theme; and Otto Preminger’s brilliant direction—without feeling the undertow of its subterranean pull. Laura’s flawless surfaces are seductive, but that’s the point: The milieu of careless affluence and privilege carries with it a kind of rot that infects its characters.  Laura’s distinctive finish, like that of its characters, conceals the murky depths beneath so successfully that you can love it without letting yourself be pulled into its deeper mysteries. 

Waldo between Laura and Shelby, eating his liver

I’m assuming that you, Gentle Reader, have some knowledge of the film, but if you don’t, be advised that there are spoilers a-plenty. If you need a plot synopsis you can find one here.  

Waldo Lydecker is our guide to Laura’s underworld, the urgent, unexamined desires that drive its characters and story. And it is Waldo, the wasp-tongued columnist and radio commentator, who bookends the movie, which ends with his last gasp and begins with one of the greatest opening lines ever:

“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.” 

If the movie itself is very close to impeccable, the characters are all flawed. Nobody in Laura is clean. Even Laura Hunt herself, played by Gene Tierney as a photographic negative of the gorgeous monster she portrayed a year later in Leave Her to Heaven, is not completely clean, though she certainly sits at the virtuous end of the continuum along which the other characters are arrayed, with Waldo at the far end and McPherson, Ann Treadwell, and Shelby Carpenter somewhere in between. Laura’s sin is one of omission, and it kills Diane Redfern and in the end almost kills Laura as well. She couldn’t bring herself to turn away from Waldo, who had done so much for her. It would have been awkward within their shared social circle. And as Laura knows all too well, Waldo does not let his enemies go in peace. So she tried to find a middle path, to begin to build a life for herself while keeping Waldo as a close friend.  

Let’s talk about Waldo. He’d like that. Waldo talks a great deal about himself. He also thinks a lot about himself, his obsession with Laura, Laura’s obsession with handsome men, how he can disentangle her from the latest one, and how he can restore their normal routine, an unending series of evenings alternating between him squiring her to openings, parties, and restaurants, and quiet little dinners at his apartment, just the two of them listening to his records or better, her listening to him read his latest column—he says the way she listens is more eloquent than speech, and he loves her best as a passive listener with no needs, desires, or voice of her own. 

Laura as Waldo likes her best: silent, appreciating him

Within the action of the movie, that is, in the wake of Laura’s murder, Waldo has new concerns: fingering Shelby for the murder and getting back his clock from Laura’s apartment before McPherson finds the murder weapon Waldo stashed inside its hidden compartment after shooting Laura/Diane. 

Here’s a central question from which a great deal of bad analyses flows: Is Waldo gay? If we answer Yes, the story doesn’t make any sense. Robert Ebert’s analysis goes down this road and comes back empty, with Ebert concluding that the movie is all style, with which I respectfully disagree. 

I too was an unexamined Yes to this question until I read Despina Veneti’s and Olivier Eyquem’s reflections on Waldo at their website Preminger Film Noirs. Some writers go a lot further, suggesting that both Shelby Carpenter and Ann Treadwell are also gay, while Foster Hirsch says that Laura herself may have some “sexual surprises” up her sleeve. Of these last there is not a single shred of evidence in the movie, and even Waldo’s assumed homosexuality hangs on rather flimsy premises. That Clifton Webb himself was gay is not in dispute. At the time of his star-making turn in Laura, Webb was a 55-year-old Broadway veteran, a musical comedy star with no significant experience in movies or playing drama. Webb had appeared in a few silents and was briefly under contract to MGM in the ’30s, but they let him languish until his contract ran out, and he went back to New York, back to the stage. But to conflate Webb’s sexual orientation with Waldo’s is an error, as Despina points out. Yet that one fact about the actor and a single line in the film, addressed to Laura just before Waldo tries to kill her for the second time (“The best part of myself, that’s what you are”) are the poor shreds of evidence that support the idea that Waldo is gay, and while the first is simply irrelevant, the second doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny. 

Waldo giving Laura bad news about her fiancé

If Waldo wanted to be Laura, that wouldn’t indicate that he’s gay—gay men don’t want to be women. Nobody has yet suggested that Waldo was transgender, but I’m sure that notion is already in some critic’s pipeline. No, Waldo wants to be the person he thinks Laura thinks he is—“the kindest, gentlest, most sympathetic man in the world”: He knows he’s none of those things, but under Laura’s compassionate gaze he can pretend that he is both lovable and capable of loving. As long as Laura stays within the airless precincts of their relationship, Waldo can perpetuate his illusion that she is his creation rather than an autonomous person whose feelings he cannot control. But while Preminger’s Laura, lighter than air and very different from the character as Caspary originally wrote her, has less substance than any of the movie’s other principal characters, she still has desires of her own, and these threaten Waldo enough to go on the attack. The first threat was Jacoby, the handsome artist who painted Laura’s portrait and fell in love with her. Waldo dispatched him via a hatchet job in his column. Waldo’s second rival, Southern ne’er-do-well slime ball Shelby Carpenter, offers abundant dirt for Waldo to use against him, but Laura doesn’t ditch him fast enough, and Waldo’s frustration and bitterness finally boil over into homicidal rage. 

“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died”

Reflect for a moment on that line, Gentle Reader. Remember that it is spoken by her scorned Pygmalion, the man who went to her apartment, rang the bell, and emptied both shotgun barrels of buckshot into her face at close range. It is, oddly, spoken onto a black screen, and it hooks us instantly and totally, plunging us into the story. But when you stop and think about it, the line raises questions, such as, When and where does he say it, and Who is he talking to? 

The screen lightens to reveal Waldo’s living room, his art collection prominently displayed. The clock that is one of the film’s central images and that figures so prominently in the plot is shown at the back of the frame, its top cut off by a glass shelf displaying Waldo’s glass collection, but we do not yet know the significance of the clock, so we see it only as another piece in Waldo’s extensive art collection. 

“A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York. For with Laura’s horrible death, I was alone. [dramatic pause] I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her, and I had just begun to write Laura’s story when another of those detectives came to see me. I had him wait. I could watch him through the half open door. [the clock chimes; McPherson walks to it to look it over] I noted that his attention was fixed upon my clock. There was only one other in existence, and that was in Laura’s apartment, in the very room where she was murdered.”

McPherson takes in a little art in Waldo’s living room before their initial interview in the bathroom

McPherson isn’t the only one interested in that clock, or rather its twin in Laura’s apartment. Next time you see Laura, notice that Waldo keeps showing up at the Laura’s apartment trying to retrieve the clock, which he claims he only loaned Laura. He drops in several times a day, hoping either to get the clock out when McPherson isn’t there or to blackmail the detective into letting him have it back. Waldo is very clever, so in each visit he assesses the current situation with McPherson and his investigation, and Waldo only brings up taking back the clock back if he thinks it’s safe to do so in that moment, that it won’t arouse McPherson’s suspicions. 

One key to Waldo is that he is first, last, and always a writer. He thinks in sentences, always planning his next column or essay. Waldo Lydecker’s life is a story he is always writing. At the end of Caspary’s novel, the dying Waldo continues to write out loud, in the third person, until his last breath. Waldo’s ongoing, endlessly revised story about his life occasionally intersects with reality, but much of what he chafes against is the world’s stubborn refusal to conform to his version of it. When McPherson points out to Waldo that two years before, Waldo had reported in a book review that a man was murdered by the same means as Laura, a double barrel of buckshot to the face, but that the guy was actually killed with a sash weight, Waldo says, “How ordinary. My version was obviously superior.” That’s how it is with him—the reality of being Waldo is unendurable, so he obsessively rewrites reality. And the imaginary life he chronicles is as fragile as his priceless collection of glass.  

Suspect meets detective

Just after Waldo’s opening narration, we finally get our first glimpse of him. He is soaking in the bathtub of his “lavish” bathroom (Waldo’s term, of course; it is roughly the size of my New York apartment). There he sits on this blazing Sunday, up to his chest in tepid water, writing on a desktop. He is middle-aged, thin, pasty, sunken-chested, graying, with a face that is not handsome but memorable, theatrical, and easy to caricature, and a voice vibrant with malice, curiosity, and disdain. He entertains McPherson from the tub the same way LBJ held conferences from the toilet, to assert his dominance, and then rises from it without embarrassment, giving McPherson the Full Waldo. We know this because we hear the splash of Waldo’s getting up in the tub, and a brief smirk crosses McPherson’s impassive face. Waldo’s second purpose here is to graphically demonstrate to the detective that he has nothing to hide.

Laura expanded the landscape of film noir into the upper class, and Preminger shows the moral rot beneath the well-maintained veneer with clear, understated references to decadence and corruption: Shelby, engaged to Laura while living off Ann and shtupping Diane Redfern; Waldo’s bathtub interview with Detective McPherson; the two quick and scattered references to the fact that when Waldo shoots Diane Redfern in the face, she is in Laura’s apartment with Laura’s fiancé, wearing Laura’s mules and negligee—Shelby certainly lives up to his own description of himself as “not the conventional type”: He’s not just cheating on his fiancée, and not just in Laura’s own bed, not just with a colleague who Laura herself hired, but he’s got her in Laura’s lingerie. Excuse me, I need a quick shower…. 

Waldo collapses when he sees Laura alive

The other surfaces of note in Laura are those of the characters’ faces. In a standard movie convention, all of Laura‘s main characters have secrets they are at pains to protect. Even Bessie, Laura’s loyal, adoring housekeeper, destroys evidence in hopes of protecting her beloved boss’s privacy from the prying of the police and the press. Preminger uses this, revealing character by monitoring how successfully each manages their emotions and maintains their secrets. For example, McPherson’s little toy, which he pulls out whenever he wants to rattle Waldo; McPherson pulling out the bottle of cheap scotch Shelby had brought to Laura’s for his meeting with Diane and offering Shelby a drink from it; Waldo showing Laura the results of his private investigation of Laura, then taking her to Ann’s, where he knows they will find Shelby having dinner; Waldo initiating a party to celebrate Laura’s return without first checking with either Laura or McPherson. 

Preminger was adamant that Waldo had to be a new face, somebody the movie audience had no preconceptions about. Having worked as a director in New York before coming to Hollywood, Preminger knew that Clifton Webb was not only unknown to film audiences, he was exactly the kind of dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker Preminger needed to ensure that Laura not feel like Los Angeles, that the rarified Manhattan milieu would saturate every frame of the film. Creating a sense of place is one of the mysterious elements of filmmaking. Mean Streets only shot in New York for a few days. Ditto The Apartment, and Rear Window was shot entirely on that extraordinary set at Paramount. But all of them evoke New York. It took some fancy stepping to sell Zanuck on Webb, but as Preminger so often did, in the end he won. 

Clifton Webb, 1930s, during his brief time at MGM

Caspary’s Waldo is as physically different from Clifton Webb as two men could be. Caspary’s Waldo weighs 250 pounds and has a Van Dyke beard. Laird Cregar was the obvious actor to play Waldo when 20th-Century Fox bought the rights to Caspary’s book in June, 1943, and the studio’s press release announced Cregar and George Sanders for the leads. But a lot happened between then and the movie Laura eventually became—for a long time Preminger was the only person who really believed in the project, but he marshaled his enormous energy, will and vision and against formidable odds and obstacles somehow managed to make Laura the film he wanted to make. His Waldo was the haughty, cadaverous Webb. Caspary’s Waldo is as insulting as Preminger’s, but not as succinct. Caspary sometimes said Waldo was partly modeled on Algonquin Round Table regular Alexander Woollcott, a pasty, rotund columnist, radio commentator and all-around character in the New York theatrical and literary scene, he was also the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner; on other occasions she denied it. But Caspary’s Waldo sounds like Woollcott, his rhetorical style flowery and ornamented. Preminger credited one of his screenwriters, the poet Samuel Hoffenstein, with transforming Caspary’s wordy Waldo into the movie’s terser but no less self-dramatizing version of the character. 

To me Waldo seems asexual rather than homosexual, a man so estranged from his own body, so disconnected from normal physical sensations that he is disgusted by even the suggestion of the sex act. “I hope you’ll never have reason to regret what promises to be a disgustingly earthy relationship,” he sneers at Laura when she tells him she’s going to be seeing McPherson romantically and that she doesn’t think she and Waldo should see each other again. Also, if Waldo were gay, wouldn’t he evince some desire for the handsome fellas Laura favors? Maybe, but Waldo would have to be at least emotionally functional enough to experience his own desire, and clearly he is not. 

Waldo sizes up his new rival

Waldo really believes he loves Laura. When she asks him why he’s doing this, as he reveals the results of his private investigator’s report on Shelby, he says, “For you, Laura.” He tells her this days only one day before shooting her (he thinks) in the face at close range. While Waldo’s dirt on Shelby drives Laura to reconsider marrying him, it also reminds her of Waldo’s last foray into controlling her romantic life, and she now doubts both Shelby and Waldo—with good reason: Shelby thinks Laura is guilty, and while Waldo vows to mount a vigorous defense of her in his column, it is as likely that he will use his platform to reinforce the evidence against her. This is what sets Waldo off, bringing his latent violence to the surface in the most brutal way. Brutal—that’s what the newsboys outside Laura’s apartment shout the day after the shooting—”Brutal slaying! Brutal slaying!” 

Waldo is weary from the burden of his self-hatred. His constant need for attention, whether acclaim or shock, is his way of compensating and distracting himself from his ever-present awareness of his inadequacies as a man. Waldo’s feelings for Laura flower not when he meets her and sees her extraordinary beauty but when she tells him she feels sorry for him: “You’re a poor man.” She has glimpsed him through the monumental edifice of his narcissism, and he feels a bond with her that he feels with no one else. 

With the men in her life: the murderer, the mooch, and the cop

Naturally, he sets out to make her a more suitable companion for his celebrated self. When she introduces herself to him as he eats his lunch at the Algonquin she is an untarnished 17, and he undertakes a makeover, changing her hairstyle and advising her on clothes. He also mentors her into a successful career in advertising and a place in New York society. Waldo’s Laura is no less his projection than Judy is Scottie’s in Vertigo—the girl he adores is the one he has created, the one he can control. 

Waldo’s Laura is a dream, and the reality of Laura creates a conflict for Waldo that he cannot resolve. When McPherson falls in love with Laura the murder victim, his infatuation is first kindled via Waldo’s seductive depiction of her, then by McPherson’s fetishistic investigation of Laura’s personal effects in her apartment. It would be routine for the detective to read the victim’s correspondence, but McPherson indulges his burgeoning feelings with less ethical investigation, taking the top off a bottle of her perfume and inhaling it, obviously fantasizing about her. Thus, as Veneti points out, Laura is “a shared dream between two men.” 

In the end Waldo is as tragic as he is dangerous, and that’s what makes him so compelling. His whole life is built on the fragile structure he has constructed, a huge collection of priceless glass, and his dream of Laura is central to that structure. Without her as his muse to see him as so many things he suffers from knowing he is not—a kind, gentle, sympathetic person, and a man—the whole thing collapses. His life becomes unbearable, and he has no option but to end it and to take his creation with him. The idealized relationship he spins to McPherson is a living death, a closed system in which he and Laura forever remain frozen in place. Laura is too much alive to submit to this static condition. Waldo, speaking of McPherson, tells Laura: “I don’t deny that he’s infatuated with you in some warped way of his own. But he isn’t capable of any normal, warm human relationship.” That is, he thinks he’s talking about McPherson, but we know what Waldo, as clever as he is, cannot see: He’s really describing himself.

“Goodbye, Laura…. Farewell, my love”

“He’ll find us together, Laura, as we always have been, as we always should be, as we always will be”—nothing less than that, a static eternity, will satisfy Waldo. Those are his last words before he lifts the gun to take one more crack at the woman he “loves.” In a few seconds he will be fatally shot by one of McPherson’s men, and his own last shot will miss Laura and McPherson but smash the clock’s face.  Waldo slumps, defeated, dying. Laura and McPherson move past the camera to go to Waldo, and the camera moves forward, coming to rest on the destroyed face of his priceless clock.

Again, as at the beginning, we hear Waldo’s voice offscreen: “Goodbye, Laura…. Farewell, my love.” 

This post is an entry in The Great Villain Blogathon, hosted by Speakeasy, Silver Screenings, and Shadows and Satin. Click the links to read more about great villains. 

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