Thursday, February 10, 2011
My Missing Picture Nominees: One Hour With You (1931-32)
By Edward Copeland
In the split year 1931-32, One Hour With You was one of the eight films in contention for the best picture Oscar. Now that I've seen it, I only lack two films from that year's list to have seen all eight. One Hour With You shares a distinction with that year's best picture winner, Grand Hotel: In both cases, the best picture nomination was the only nomination each film received. That's the only time a film won best picture on its sole nomination.
Anyway, I'm here to discuss One Hour With You, an amusing and watchable little trifle that was intended to be George Cukor's directing debut, though Paramount insisted that the great Ernst Lubitsch supervise his work. Apparently, Lubitsch and star Maurice Chevalier found something to be dissatisfied in Cukor's direction and Lubitsch took over so the final credit reads Directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the line Assisted by George Cukor in smaller print below on the same title card.
Based on a play by Lothar Schmidt, One Hour With You was one of four musical comedies in which Lubitsch directed Chevalier (and three of those also co-starred Jeanette MacDonald). It's a delightful pre-Code marital farce which also features fine support from Genevieve Tobin, Charlie Ruggles and, most especially, Roland Young.
The plot revolves around a happily married couple (Chevalier, MacDonald) living in Paris and still madly in love with one another, even getting carried away on a park bench and getting caught by a policeman who warns Chevalier that they can't make love there to which MacDonald replies, "He can make love to me anywhere," exciting her husband at the prospect. As I said, this was a pre-Code musical.
Chevalier plays Dr. Andre Bertier and MacDonald is his beloved Colette. Near the film's opening, Colette can't hide her excitement about an impending visit from her best friend Mitzi Olivier (Tobin), unaware that Mitzi has never heard the word monogamy, much to the chagrin of her professor husband (Young) who has hired a detective in hopes of catching her in the act of cheating so he can divorce her. Adding another layer of complication, though mostly of the humorous kind, is that Andre's best friend Adolph (Ruggles) longs for Colette, but can never bring himself to make a move until he sees Mitzi start chasing Andre and believes that Andre will stray from Colette, giving him an opening.
The trio of men in this lust pentagon really spark the film, particularly Young, who gets many of the best lines. When he's meeting with the detective, he points to a portrait of Mitzi with blonde hair. "When I married her she was a brunette, now you can't believe a word she says," the professor tells the detective. Later, spying what he thinks is Mitzi sneaking off with a lover, he confides to another, "In Switzerland, they have a very peculiar law that if a husband shoots his wife, he goes to jail."
As you would expect, many complications ensue, especially once the Bertiers hold a dinner party and the various pursuers and pursuees clamor about the place, often in song and always in service to that Lubitsch touch. One recurring piece of business that stands out as unusual for this type of film is the breaking of the fourth wall. Sure, some film comedians did it at the time (I'm thinking Groucho), but it surprises you when Chevalier's Andre does it and he does it throughout the film (joined later by Colette).
Before the guests arrive, Ruggles gets a funny bit where he phones Colette, slowly working up more and more courage to address his true feelings, and informs her that he's coming dressed as Romeo, as in Romeo and Juliet, only to be informed by his unrequited that it's not a costume party. When he hangs up, he angrily confronts his butler Marcel (Charles Coleman) and asks why he told him it was a costume party if it wasn't. "I so wanted to see you in tights," Marcel confesses.
Nearly all the songs have lyrics written by Leo Robin while the music for most were composed by Oscar Straus with the exception of the title tune which had music by Richard Whiting. One Hour With You, which has a screenplay credited to Samson Raphaelson, even has large sections of dialogue that rhyme even though there isn't any music in those scenes.
In the category of "Things You Learn on TCM," one of the actresses who plays an uncredited party guest is Bess Flowers who, according to Ben Mankiewicz, appeared in 21 movies that were nominated for the Oscar for best picture and five that won. (Since I tend to be skeptical of trivia delivered via TV, I did my own cursory check of Flowers on IMDb and while I didn't do an actual count, the strange thing is that the vast majority of her appearances in movies and on TV were uncredited and in the role of either "party guest" or "patron" of some sort. Also, by the claims of IMDb, she practically appeared this way in almost every Hitchcock film. Smells strange to me.)
One Hour With You isn't a great film, but it does entertain (which is more than I can say for a couple of 2010's 10 nominees) and though I still have two 1931-32 nominees to see (Bad Girl and another Lubitsch/Chevalier musical, The Smiling Lieutenant), I think they might have made the right choice with Grand Hotel (though it's a close call with Shanghai Express).
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Labels: 30s, Cukor, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Marx Brothers, Musicals, Oscars
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Sunday, December 26, 2010
The course of true love gathers no moss
By Edward Copeland
Believe it or not, despite her early success in films including winning her first Oscar for Morning Glory in the split year 1932-33, by the end of the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn had begun to be known as box office poison and was dumped by RKO, so she retreated to the New York stage where she triumphed in the role of Tracy
Lord in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story, which debuted March 29, 1939 with Joseph Cotten, on loan from Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre, in the role of C.K. Dexter Haven and Van Heflin as Macaulay "Mike" Connor. As Josh R wrote in his Centennial Tribute to Hepburn, "(she) secured the film rights (thanks to Howard Hughes), and more or less strong-armed Louis B. Mayer into letting her repeat her performance for the MGM film adaptation. The role of Tracy Lord, a haughty socialite who views the imperfections of others as an insupportable blemish on her otherwise charmed existence, cannily exploited her natural imperiousness and debunked the prevailing notion that the actress was too proud to show her flaws." Now, she didn't get all the casting she sought. She'd hoped to either get Spencer Tracy or stage co-star Van Heflin, as Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. pointed out in his Centennial Tribute to Heflin, to play Mike alongside Clark Gable as Dexter, but work commitments prevented it and Cary Grant and James Stewart turned out to be more than acceptable and with Joseph L. Mankiewicz producing and George Cukor directing, the play made a fairly smooth transfer to the screen 70 years ago today.
The film begins with a nearly silent prologue detailing the quick but comically brutal end of the marriage between wealthy ship builder C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) and socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn). As Dexter moves his things out of the Lord estate, Tracy follows with his golf bag, stopping to remove a club and snap it in half. A furious Dexter's first instinct is to sock Tracy in the jaw, but he holds back and just shoves her in the face, as if he's James Cagney and she's Mae Clarke only minus the chair and the grapefruit, and Tracy tumbles backward through the doorway and lands in the entryway. Flash forward two years later as Tracy prepares for her second wedding, to one George Kittredge (John Howard) though her little sister Dinah (scene-stealer Virginia Weidler) would rather Dexter return as well as her own father Seth Lord (John Halliday), who has left their mother Margaret (Mary Nash) to carouse elsewhere, though Tracy seems more upset about her father's actions than her mother does.
Meanwhile, at the offices of the tabloid magazine Spy, one of its top reporters, Macaulay Connor (Stewart) is ready to storm into the office of its unscrupulous owner Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell) and tell him he won't take
any more of his sleazy assignments because he's going to devote himself full-time to being a real writer. His frequent photography partner Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) would love to follow the same course, but she's too addicted to having a roof over her head and food in her stomach to quit in a huff. Before Connor, known as Mike to his friends, can get much of his spiel out, Kidd already has explained the new assignment: They are to infiltrate the upcoming nuptials of Tracy Lord and George Kittredge. When his employees suggest that getting in may not be an easy thing to do, Kidd has them show Dexter in, introducing him as a friend of Tracy's brother, though Liz recognizes him as her first husband because Liz was the only photographer whose camera he didn't break during his honeymoon with Tracy. Mike asks if he's doing it to get even and Dexter says it's something like that, but he doesn't sound convincing. Despite his plan to stand on principle, Mike agrees to cover the society wedding.
We meet two more of the farce's main characters as Tracy and Dinah go out to the stables to greet the usually inebriated Uncle Willie (Roland Young) and George Kittredge happens to be there as well. As if we didn't suspect from that the outset that the deck would be stacked against the self-made man Kittredge, his introduction solidifies it as he blanches at Tracy's attempt at getting his riding clothes dirty, his perusal of Spy for articles about their upcoming nuptials and his struggles mounting a horse whose sex he can't even identify. When Tracy's father Seth arrives later, he doesn't think much of Kittredge either, telling his daughter that George isn't "a tower of strength. He's just a tower." In high school, our drama department staged the play (I served merely as producer) and it always amazes me how Young underplays Uncle Willie compared to the friend who had the role in our version and tackled the role as if he were a
mutant Don Knotts in the middle of taking an incredibly painful shit. When Tracy, Dinah and Uncle Willie return to the main house, they are surprised to find the presence of Dexter and his two new friends. Both Dinah and Tracy's mother are pleased to see Haven back, but the same can't be said for Tracy who smells a rat. Dexter explains to his ex that Mike and Liz are indeed reporters for Spy, but he felt compelled to agree to help get them in because otherwise Sidney Kidd was going to publish a story linking Tracy's father to a young dancer. Tracy reluctantly agrees to go along with the charade, but since she won't allow her father Seth at the wedding, she recruits Uncle Willie to pretend to be her father. Soon though, Seth arrives anyway and must play the role of Uncle Willie. They take turns entertaining the reporting team, especially young Dinah who presents them with an enthusiastic rendition of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." (Still, she's no Groucho.)
Re-watching The Philadelphia Story this time, one thing I noticed that had escaped my attention before was how subtly they played Dexter's status as a reformed alcoholic and how his drinking may have had a great deal to do with the quick dissolution of his marriage to Tracy. At one point, when he talks to Mike, Mike mentions that he only drinks a little and Dexter responds, "I thought all writers drink to excess and beat their wives." then with a glance at Tracy, "You know, it occurs to me that at one time I wanted to be a writer." Later in the film, when Mike goes on a real bender and shows up on Dexter's doorstep, it's the first time Dexter explicitly says that he no longer drinks. Mike's there to berate Dexter for what he sees as his mistreatment of Tracy earlier in the day and by dragging him and Liz there to feed on her. When Mike confesses the things he could tell him about Sidney Kind, Dexter tells him the truth and starts to get some good blackmail stories of his own that he hopes to use against Kind to save Tracy's father's reputation.
In a way, The Philadelphia Story can be seen as Tracy Lord's transformation from a haughty socialite who looks down upon many to a human being, and Tracy is often couched in some pretty harsh terms. Dexter often compares
her disdainful look to the withering glance of a goddess and tells her that she's far and away her favorite person in the world. Kittredge sees in her a "kind of a beautiful purity, like a statue." It's her father who delivers the harshest blows when he all but blames her for his infidelities and for acting more jealous than his wife does. "What most wives fail to realize about their husband's philandering is that it has nothing whatsoever to do with their wife," he tells them both. When Tracy inquires further, Seth plunges deeper. "A reluctance to grow old, I think. A devoted young girl gives an old man the illusion of youth." When Tracy (correctly) accuses her father of blaming her for his cheating, he hits her with the hardest blow. "You have everything it takes to make a wonderful woman except one thing — an understanding heart. Without that, you might as well be made of bronze." In contrast, when Mike and Tracy later get their drunk on together (only the second time in her life she's imbibed), Mike doesn't compare her to a goddess or a statue, but "a radiant queen." At least royals are human, so rumor has it.
Donald Ogden Stewart's adaptation of Barry's play won one of the film's two Oscars, the other going to Stewart in what is widely considered to be one of the earliest occasions of a makeup Oscar since he lost the year before for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Truth be told though, Donat is great and he also faced Gable's Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind, though Gable already had a statuette for It Happened One Night a mere five years earlier. Stewart's win may not only have been a makeup one, robbing Henry Fonda of a deserved trophy for John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, it may have been a miscategorization as well. While Hepburn is the ostensible lead of The Philadelphia Story, it truly is an ensemble piece where many of the major characters share an almost equal amount of time on the screen. Still, it has to be Stewart's delightful drunk scene that won Oscar voters over. (We'll ignore the fact that Grant wasn't nominated, not so much for this but for the same year's His Girl Friday and neither was his co-star, Rosalind Russell, in the lead actress category.)
Hepburn should have been a leading contender for her second Oscar in her screen comeback, but she lost to her Stage Door co-star Ginger Rogers, someone who deserved a win at one time or another but instead got it for a somewhat out-of-character turn in the soapy Kitty Foyle. One thing about Hepburn's performance that stood out for me this time was her excellent use of hand gestures. Many times, she completes sentences and thoughts with simple sweeps of her hands instead of words and it's perfect, subtle and funny. Of course, the Academy more than made it up to Kate decades later. Still, while half of Stewart's schnockered sequence gets played with Grant, the real magic comes in the scenes he plays with an equally hammered Hepburn. Her interest in the young reporter already had prompted her to look up the book he'd written and left her suitably impressed, telling him he talks so big and tough but then writes like that. It's part of Tracy's humanization, the other coming when Dexter's wedding gift turns out to be a model of a ship he built for them that met an
untimely end. It annoys Kittredge, but touches Tracy. If her heart is bronze, it's melting. Still, even in her drunken state, she thinks that Mike may be a snob, at least against High Society (the title of the later musical version of the story). "The prettiest sight in this fine pretty world is the privileged class enjoying their privileges," Mike slurs to her, before she wheels him in a chaisse lounge off for a late-night swim. Mike, who has never allowed himself time for women, has convinced himself he's falling for Tracy while Liz Imbrie pines in silence for him. Dexter asks her, after she ends up staying to help him type up his blackmail note to Kind, why she doesn't marry Mike. "He still has a lot to learn and I don't want to get in his way," the photographer tells him. Dexter asks Liz what she'll do if another woman gets to him first and then she admits she guesses she'll be forced to scratch her eyes out. By this time, it's early morning when Dexter has returned Liz to the Lord estate and before he can exit he spots Kittredge coming with something on his mind. Over his shoulder, Dexter sees the returning Mike and Tracy and failing to get Kittredge out of the way tries to pre-emptively stop the explosion about to occur.
Clad in bathing robes, Mike and Tracy appear on the horizon with the writer crooning, "Over the Rainbow" to the socialite bundled in his arms. A still loopy Tracy gleefully greets Dexter and Mike, but significantly lowers her voice to say, "Hello, George." Dexter urges Mike to take Tracy to her room and try not to wake Dinah, unaware that the little dickens already is up and spying from her window. Dexter tries to calm George, but to little avail. When Mike returns a little while later, Kittredge is ready for war so to prevent too much damage, Dexter acts just as outraged and socks Mike himself, apologizing but explaining he figured he'd hurt him less after Kittredge leaves. A little while later, as a hungover Uncle Willie greets the day against his will, he's informed by the butler that Dinah is waiting for him outside and she takes him on a horse and buggy ride (which his head certainly did not need) and fills him on what she saw. Dexter joins them and does his best to convince her
that she dreamed it. When Tracy arises later, she gets a letter from George so outraged by her actions, that he thinks they should call off the wedding, but Kittredge arrives as she reads it aloud to everyone within shouting distance. However, when Kittredge realizes that Dexter knows Sidney Kind and Mike and Liz work for him, he suddenly has a change of heart, considering the publicity potential. With so many suitors, even if you've never seen The Philadelphia Story, you can probably guess how it turns out. Cukor moves it along well for a farce, even if some of its attitudes are hopelessly dated and it is a bit too long, but coming from the stage with that many characters, it would be hard not to be. Still, with a cast this great, it makes it all worthwhile. Of course, in the end, Dinah takes credit for making everything work out the way it did.
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Labels: 40s, Cagney, Cary, Cukor, Gable, Ginger Rogers, H. Fonda, Howard Hughes, J. Stewart, John Ford, Joseph Cotten, K. Hepburn, Mankiewicz, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Roz Russell, Theater, Tracy, Van Hefiin, Welles
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Saturday, February 27, 2010
Centennial Tributes: Joan Bennett
By Josh R
The more one sees of Joan Bennett, the more there is to like — that is, if one is willing to undertake a cineaste’s version of a search-and-recovery effort. Of the major credits discussed in this piece, only a handful are readily available for viewing — most notably three of the four films she made for Fritz Lang, the German auteur who saw past her nondescript prettiness and found something both unique and uniquely unsettling simmering beneath her unperturbed ingénue’s countenance. The roles on which her reputation was based were atypical of American cinema of the 1940s. Her best work came for European directors, in films that were decidedly European in character, while her depiction of unvarnished feminine carnality was markedly different from anything Hollywood had attempted since the pre-Code era (and it should be noted that not even Harlow or Stanwyck in their pre-Code days can match the coarseness of Scarlet Street's ‘Lazy Legs’ — but more on that to follow).
Fittingly, she wound up plying her trade more often than not on the margins of the commercial filmmaking establishment, if not altogether outside of it; there is no other leading lady of the 1940s whose resume can boast outings for Lang, Renoir and Ophuls. The films she made for the latter pair, as well as the fourth she did for Lang, remain stubbornly out of reach, consigned to the scrap heap of films deemed unworthy of release on video or DVD. If Joan Bennett’s career is one that has been sadly overlooked, with but a fraction of its treasures assigned their rightful value, the impression created by the remaining pieces testifies to an uncommonly adventurous and challenging body of work, at once both singular in character and aching for rediscovery.
In life, as on film, she proceeded to the beat of her own drummer, and her personal history was not without
its share of incident and scandal. She was the younger sister of the platinum-haired Constance Bennett, a top box office attraction of the early 1930s — it took several years and a change of hair color for Joan to emerge from her sibling’s shadow. By 16, she was married to a millionaire; by 18, a divorced single mother with a few silent film credits under her belt. She was Katharine Hepburn’s petulant pre-adolescent sister in Cukor’s adaptation of Little Women. Quite literally, there was more to Joan Bennett than this and other early roles revealed — flouncy blonde ringlets and masses of ruffles could only partially disguise the fact that she was noticeably pregnant at the time of the film’s shooting. She made a lot of costume pictures and minor melodramas and was serviceably winsome, even though at times she seemed to be struggling to suppress a yawn — romantic ingénue roles did nothing to test her, and by the end of the decade, her boredom was becoming increasingly evident. If she had staked her claim to semi-stardom as an innocuous, diffident little blonde, raising her naturally husky voice several octaves to a strained helium-induced squeak so as not to seem abrasive, it didn’t take Joan Bennett too long to wise up, get practical and allow caution to fall by the wayside. When her second husband left her for the raven-haired exotic Hedy Lamarr, she dispensed with both the peroxide and the inhibitions, reinventing herself as a worldly brunette with enough sexual swagger to put any other screen siren, French or otherwise, in her place. The transformation literally occurred onscreen — in the opening scenes of 1938’s Trade Winds, she is a guileless, flaxen-haired debutante draped in ermine and demurely playing Chopin on the piano. Ten minutes into the film, she has shot a man in cold blood, eluded capture by the police by driving her roadster into San Francisco Bay and resurfaced on a Shanghai steamer with a forged passport, a survivalist mentality, and hair the identical shade of her ex-husband’s new paramour. Even her makeup was reminiscent of Lamarr’s, in a manner that could hardly be chalked up to coincidence; at the time, her defiant response to being jilted, in the form of a thinly veiled swipe at her romantic rival, was regarded as one of Hollywood’s better inside jokes.
She made a brave try for the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara, and impressed David O. Selznick enough to have briefly been considered a leading contender for the assignment. Without the backing of a major studio, her
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opportunities were limited; nevertheless, she landed a plum role in Lang’s 1941 noirish chase film Man Hunt, as a cockney streetwalker trying to help Walter Pidgeon evade capture by Nazi pursuers. It was a fruitful collaboration from the start; the affecting blend of toughness and vulnerability Lang was able to extract from his new muse was enough to convince Bennett that she had found her champion. With her third husband, producer Walter Wanger, she and Lang formed a production company. 1944’s The Woman in the Window played almost like the flip side of Preminger’s Laura — a variation on the same theme, but observed in a much more fatalistic vein and without any concessions to conventional sentimentality. Edward G. Robinson’s buttoned-down psychology professor becomes enamored of a portrait of Bennett he sees in a gallery window; once he encounters the model in the flesh, he is drawn into a web of murder, blackmail and treachery that sends his life into a tailspin. In contrast to Tierney’s goddess figure, Bennett’s equally enigmatic Alice Reed is both angel and demon rolled into one — temptation personified, she leads men to their doom without even having any obvious designs on doing so. The theme of temptation was revisited by Robinson, Bennett and Lang — Man, Woman and The Devil, if you will — to even more stunning effect in 1945’s Scarlet Street. Adapted from Renoir’s La Chienne (once again, the European influence at work), the film observes a masochistic weakling who falls prey to the machinations of a particularly slovenly specimen of femme fatale, of a strain that would make Double Indemnity's Phyllis
Dietrichson seem downright genteel by comparison. Indeed, Bennett’s Kitty March — nicknamed ‘Lazy Legs’ by the smarmy, abusive pimp she dotes upon — had the dubious distinction of being the most graceless, classless and altogether vulgar piece of cheap fluff ever to make an appearance in high-grade film noir (due in no small part to the influence of Scarlet Street, she wouldn’t be the last.) Lolling about her filthy walk-up in a tacky negligee, scattering candy wrappers and cigarette butts on the floor while waiting for her worthless boyfriend to materialize for rough sex and even rougher treatment, Lazy Legs is indolent to the point of inactivity; lack of ambition would be her most salient characteristic if not for her total lack of sensitivity or scruple. Stretching her whisky-soaked alto into a slatternly drawl, Bennett embellished the role with subversive flashes of humor; seductive and repellent at the same time, Lazy Legs is all the more alluring for her lack of any appealing trait beyond her beauty. It amounted to a revelatory performance, in a film not only startling for its stylistic brilliance, but for its unmistakably sadomasochistic undertones (of her unsuspecting quarry, who treats her with affection bordering on reverence, Kitty asserts that “If he were mean or vicious or if he balled me out or something, I’d like him better.”)If Scarlet Street marked Bennett’s crowning achievement, it wouldn’t be the actress’s last successful foray into the realm of film noir. Based on a short story by Ernest Hemingway, The Macomber Affair cast Gregory Peck as a typically Hemingway-esque great white hunter/rugged individualist hired to lead a wealthy American
couple on a Kenyan safari, only to find that he has been drawn into an elaborate game of recrimination and cruelty. An unsettling examination of passion and betrayal told against the backdrop of the African wild, Zoltan Korda’s vastly underrated film furnished its leading lady with a role of even greater emotional complexity than the Lang films had; Margaret Macomber’s cool, patrician exterior masks long-held resentments and deeply destructive impulses, neither of which can be prevented from bubbling to the surface in an isolated wilderness where the rules of civilization no longer apply. Just as the character cannot fully comprehend how she allowed herself to be trapped in a dysfunctional marriage of convenience built on lies, her efforts to avoid being poisoned by years of accommodation and denial have ended in futility. Even as the film moves to its inevitable conclusion, Margaret’s motives remain clouded in ambiguity — we’re never really sure how many of her actions are intentional, and to what extent she’s simply at the mercy of her own subconscious. It was another striking, unusual performance that deserved — and still deserves — a wider audience than it ultimately received. The Macomber Affair, like Trade Winds, is among the aforementioned films not to be found on VHS or DVD. Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach was butchered on the cutting room floor by anxious studio executives, and occasionally appears in its bastardized form on television (sadly, not soon enough for the writing of this piece). Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door is cited by film historians as one of her better vehicles; given Bennett’s track record with Lang, such assertions can be readily believed, even if circumstance requires they must be accepted on faith.
The postwar era marked a shift in values — once the boys were back and Ike was in, many of the no-good dames of the 1940s were expected to shove their trashy heels to the back of the closet and forsake their wayward ways. Implausible as it may seem, a scant five years after Lazy Legs had vamped her way to infamy,
Bennett found herself at the side of Spencer Tracy, embodying the values of bland suburban matronhood and fussing over Elizabeth Taylor’s trousseau in Father of the Bride. The film was profitable enough to merit a sequel, Father’s Little Dividend — to say that Bennett was wasted in these films would qualify as an understatement. After that flush of mainstream success, her career fell by the wayside; once the temptress had been domesticated, no one thought to inquire just what kind of a wild life Ellie had led prior to becoming Mrs. Stanley Banks — worse still, no one seemed to be particularly interested. In real life, the reverse may have proved to be the case; in 1951, Walter Wanger shot his wife’s agent, asserting that the latter “was breaking up my home”, and was briefly imprisoned. The ensuing scandal did his wife’s career no favors, and she worked sparingly in films for the remainder of career. She found renewed life on television in the gothic horror soap opera Dark Shadows, earning an Emmy nomination for her efforts, and with a supporting role in Dario Argento's cult classic Suspiria. In a day and age when film buffs and writers speak at length about glory deferred — Jeff Bridges is frequently cited as one of our most underrated actors — a case can be made for Joan Bennett as one of the more egregiously overlooked talents in the annals of film history. Academy Award nominations are often judged to be the barometer of career success; Bridges, it must be said, has been honored on five such occasions (and if people are still referring to him as underrated now, I suspect they won’t be after next Sunday night). Joan Bennett never received an Oscar nomination; but then, her best film work was ahead of its time. Sadder still is the realization that time has yet to catch up with her. Had she received a nomination or two, it’s tempting to wonder whether or not she’d enjoy a higher profile than she does now. ‘Lazy Legs’ stands as one of the more daring film noir performances of its era; her other efforts testify to the fact that she was more than a one-hit wonder. With or without the recognition she deserved, it must be asserted that she made an indelible mark on the American cinema. For whatever reason, The American Cinema has yet to recognize her true worth.
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Labels: Cukor, Edward G., G. Tierney, Gregory Peck, Harlow, Hemingway, Jeff Bridges, Joan Bennett, K. Hepburn, Lang, Liz, Ophuls, Preminger, Renoir, Selznick, Stanwyck, Television, Tracy
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Centennial Tributes: James Stewart
By Josh R
Jimmy Stewart created the impression of being the most self-effacing of movie stars. Skinny and gawky in his youth, and given to stammer with slack-jawed embarrassment when flustered, his charmingly abashed quality immediately endeared him to audiences of the 1930s — in black and white, you could still see him blushing.
Never a fantasy figure like Cary Grant or Gary Cooper, he quickly established himself as America’s boy-next-door, the kind for whom pronouncements like “I didn’t knew they grew them that way anymore” were presumably intended; even decked out in a white tie and tails, the bottom of his shoes were still caked with the soil of the heartland, roots he never tried to shake off no matter how many tremors he produced in the gilt-edged, glittering cocktail shaker of Hollywood. He retained his sense of modesty in the face of uncommon success, and never gave way to pretension; he was, in terms of both his approach to acting and his philosophy of life, a man of the people.
It would be easy to write him off as being too lovable for words, if not for the unexpected, frequently harrowing shades of anger, bitterness and genuine madness that informed his performances for Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Mann and, on one glorious occasion, the director with whose work he is most closely identified, Frank Capra. For if Stewart’s early persona never conveyed as much of a whiff of danger, his career is one with a decisive turning point. Patriotic to a fault, both onscreen and off, he was among the first Hollywood stars to enlist for active duty in WWII, and served in the air force with great distinction. What effect the war experience had on Stewart the man is not entirely clear — just as he was not given to boastfulness, nor was he particularly inclined to discuss his inner demons — but in terms of his work, it had a clearly felt impact. Beginning with It’s a Wonderful Life, audiences were treated to intriguing glimpses of the dark undercurrents of anxiety and despair that can prey on such unassuming, wholesome specimens of non-threatening All-American manhood; the sense of internal conflict barely hinted at in the pre-war years was suddenly made explicit.
Tellingly born in the town of Indiana in the state of Pennsylvania — even with his Keystone State stubbornness, there was always an air of corn-fed Midwestern sincerity about him — he grew up in the idyllic, small town America of picket fences, porch swings and potted geraniums. His father owned the local hardware store; when Jimmy won his Oscar, he sent it home to Pop to proudly display in the storefront window. He might easily have traveled the same path as his alter ego, George Bailey — the younger Stewart was likewise expected to assume responsibility for the family business when he came of age. Circumstances were kinder to Jimmy than they would proove to be for George; rather than toe the line and settle into a life of diminished expectations among the white steeples and striped awnings of Main Street, he set out for Princeton, with the aim of becoming an architect. After falling in with The University Players, a collection of Ivy Leaguers with theatrical aspirations, his set his sights on the New York stage. Some very modest success on Broadway led to interest on the part of Hollywood talent scouts; encouraged by his friend Henry Fonda to make a screen test, he was signed to a seven year contract by MGM.
Too sensitive and awkward for a traditional leading man, and too delicately handsome to fit into the mold of a character actor, his first two years in Hollywood were something of mishmash. He played a disturbed youth in Rose Marie and a baddie in After the Thin Man — neither assignment fit him comfortably — before settling into the role of the sensitive, sentimental male ingénue, the masculine equivalent of the delicate flowers suffering so nobly in three-hankie weepies. His first good lead came in Next Time We Love opposite Margaret Sullavan, with whom he shared a chemistry remarkable for its artless delicacy. The two had reportedly carried a torch for one another going back to their University Players years; The Shopworn Angel and The Mortal Storm provided further evidence of the extent to which the flame endured. Bolstered by his successful outings with Sullavan, his progress was swift, if incremental. 1938 revealed his aptitude for comedy, with a highly enjoyable pairing with Ginger Rogers in Vivacious Lady and the first of his three collaborations with Capra, You Can’t Take It With You. Through comedy, he grew in confidence, and seemed more distinctive a presence as a result (truth be told, he could seem a bit one-note playing delicate and doomed). The true breakthrough came in so spectacular a fashion that it seemed right off the pages of a Hollywood script.
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1939 is often cited as the greatest year in the history of motion pictures, producing a bumper crop of classics. Certainly, no actor reaped more of the benefit of that yield than Stewart — he appeared in no less than five films, two of which would proove to be among his very best. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was Capra at his corniest, but such was the conviction the actor brought to his portrayal of a naïve scoutmaster thrown into the shark-invested waters of professional politics that the corn actually managed to pop in the midst of so much soggy high-mindedness, wrapped as it was in a tear-stained blanket of red, white and blue. For doing the seemingly impossible — namely bringing a sense of dramatic fire to a character intended as the living embodiment of wide-eyed idealism — he received the first of his five Academy Award nominations. It’s a Wonderful World and Made for Each Other were pleasant outings with Claudette Colbert and Carole Lombard, but George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again revealed qualities that Capra and others hadn’t been canny enough to recognize. There was no earthly reason why he and Marlene Dietrich should have complemented each other to the extent that they did — on paper, it made about as much sense as casting Mickey Rooney opposite Garbo. The wholesomely appealing Stewart had registered with female moviegoers as the kind of man they’d like to marry, as opposed to one they fantasized about going to bed with; attractive though he was, it had been said that he lacked something in terms of virility. Being trapped in close quarters with the heavy-lidded Teutonic siren rectified the situation — Dietrich’s decadent sensuality worked on Stewart’s libido like a tonic, just as his laconic charm chipped away at her smirking self-containment and coaxed warmth and vulnerability out of its manicured shell. As the deputy spouting folksy truisms while trying to maintain the peace in a rambunctious western town, he was as nice as ever, but sexy too; in the scene where he backs Marlene’s naughty saloon floozy into a corner and wipes the make-up off her face, the heat generated by the two actors practically burned holes through the celluloid. In the era when Gable was king, Destry was one of the few films to acknowledge that while shady ladies may initially be drawn to the tough-talking manly men, it’s the sensitive types with quiet assurance who can really get them hot and bothered.
1940 was another banner year for Stewart — within a two-year period, he had participated in four classic films. The Oscar he received as a tabloid reporter covering a society wedding in The Philadelphia Story was really a compensatory gesture for his having lost the year before for Mr. Smith — nevertheless, he did outstanding work for George Cukor, and played well opposite Katharine Hepburn, even if their romantic chemistry was never entirely convincing (both seemed much more at home in their scenes with Cary Grant). More importantly, The Philadelphia Story was the first film to give him a character with a bit of an edge. The part of the cynical, smart-allecky Macauley Connor, a frustrated fiction writer with a chip on his shoulder, allowed Stewart to distance himself from the “aw shucks” bashfulness and diffident naiveté that had been his stock in trade, and showed that he was willing and able to take on roles with more complexity. Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, while not really a step forward toward that end, was a romantic comedy with an old-world charm and a glorious reunion with Margaret Sullavan. Both actors gave much more spirited performances than they had when working within the constraints of melodrama, and as a result, their chemistry seemed more potent than ever. As if to proove he could be fallible, no amount of diligent effort could save No Time for Comedy, adapted from a stage hit about a conflicted playwright and his actress muse. Since 1940 was such a good year for Stewart and co-star Rosalind Russell otherwise, both emerged from the wreckage unscathed.
The 1940s might have proceeded along much the same lines — an innocuous string of romantic comedies, pausing for the occasional instance of inspirational flag-waving — if not for a little dust-up in the Pacific Ocean involving the bombing of an American naval base. The war put the film career on hold for half a decade, and the James Stewart to emerge in the aftermath was an older, sadder and wiser figure, comprehending of the darkness lurking just beneath the surface of the homespun American Dream perpetuated by Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post covers and Hollywood fictions. The charm was still there, to be sure, but coupled with a hard-earned awareness — not just of mortality, but a feeling that good and evil existed in closer proximity than the callow youth of the 1930s might have been given to suppose. It’s a Wonderful Life is frequently mistaken for a misty-eyed yuletide classic, with about as much bite to it as the average cup of eggnog. In truth, Capra’s definitive work is spiked with stronger stuff than cinnamon and nutmeg; there’s a bitter aftertaste that comes with the tacit admission that in every hometown hero lives a frustrated, disappointed loner trapped in a life of quiet desperation. Stewart’s George Bailey is an American everyman, immediately identifiable and admirable to a fault, but with a dark streak of resentment over the compromises he’s had to make, and a stinging contempt for the circumscribed, small-town life that a lifetime of selfless, conscientious behavior has seemingly condemned him to. This being Capra, George’s journey ends on an uplifting note, but the scenes that linger in memory the longest are the ones in which the character’s pain and anger are brought into sharp focus. Consider the moment when George takes out his frustration on his wife and children, followed by the look of remorse and self-loathing that flickers across his stricken features once he sees their frightened eyes peering back at him — it may be the bravest single piece of acting Stewart ever attempted, and ultimately, all the more heart-wrenching for its startling lack of sentimentality.
The postwar Stewart took a more intrepid approach to his career; he was a free agent now, pursuing projects that challenged his established persona and spoke directly to his affinity for characters faced with tough moral choices. There would be occasional returns to folksy, homespun sincerity — in Harvey, he was just credulous enough to make you believe there actually was an eight-foot white rabbit hovering in the margins of the frame — but for the most part, he seemed increasingly content working in a darker vein. Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country and The Man from Laramie — five fine, tough-minded westerns for Anthony Mann — contemplated the degree of self-imposed isolation that comes with the territory of rugged individualism. In each of those films, Stewart seemed to be a man searching, not only for outlaws on the run or wayward herds of cattle, but for deliverance from the suspicion that mankind was fundamentally corrupt and cruel. Darker still were his exercises for Hitchcock, which veered even further away from the norm into the realm of genuine disturbance. Stewart didn’t shy away from acting out Hitch’s perversions — in Rear Window, he indulged in voyeurism, while in Vertigo, he was obsessed with Kim Novak and more than a little bit crazy. More than any other project he’d ever worked on, Vertigo allowed Stewart to bring his darker impulses to the forefront — as if George Bailey’s paranoia had finally caught up to him. As a reflection of how unwilling audiences were to conceive of anything base or impure in their All-American boy, The Glenn Miller Story was his most commercially successful film of the period — Stewart could still do bland nobility as well as anyone, but he was much more interesting when traveling a different course.
After Vertigo, the quality of the films went downward. Anatomy of a Murder was considered rather shocking at the time, but looks fairly quaint from a modern standpoint. Nevertheless, it had some enjoyably tacky Otto Preminger flourishes, and allowed the actor the chance to hint at some undercurrents of depravity. The younger Stewart would have stared in bug-eyed, wholesome disbelief at the vulpine Lee Remick as if he’d just been struck by cupid’s arrow; the worldly veteran appreciatively took in her supple proportions as if he’d secretly imagined what it would be like to violate her in the manner of her supposed attacker. The Man who Shot Liberty Valance was an acceptable entry from John Ford, while the sprawling mediocrity of How the West Was Won could find no better use for him than a very unconvincing courtship of Carroll Baker, an actress meant for more lurid things than a little house on the prairie. The Flight of the Pheonix was fine if formulaic, while a succession of increasingly dull westerns rounded out what had, at its best, been an unusually unpredictable career. He did a bit of TV work in the '80s, but seemed mainly content to make occasional appearances on talk shows or The Oscars, charming viewers with his well-rehearsed stammering fits and misty recollections of the old days.
Few stars, male or female, have ever inspired as affectionate a response as that accorded Jimmy Stewart. In a way, he represented the best of our selves — an idealized version of the good, moral American boy trying his best to make the world a better place. At the same time, he never shied away from revealing the extent to which the pressures of living up to that image of decency and goodness can unnerve a man and breed self-doubt; perhaps Stewart himself felt that pressure more keenly than most. Whether or not that was the case, as an actor, he never lost sight of his characters’ humanity, or felt the need to portray them on anything other than a human scale — it’s part of the reason audiences identified with him so strongly. Movie stars can often feel like a separate breed, a world apart from mere mortals. Jimmy Stewart was one of us.
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Labels: Anthony Mann, Capra, Cary, Cooper, Cukor, Garbo, Ginger Rogers, H. Fonda, Hitchcock, J. Stewart, John Ford, K. Hepburn, Lombard, Lubitsch, Marlene, Preminger, Roz Russell
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Friday, March 07, 2008
Centennial Tributes: Anna Magnani
By Josh R
Of the nearly 50 films that Anna Magnani made during her storied career, only a handful are available for viewing by the general public. I can therefore lay claim to having seen only but a fraction of her life's work (would that I could rectify the situation by being granted unfettered access to the vaults of Cinecitta Roma or the archives at UCLA). As it is, Magnani fans can only be grateful that many of her most celebrated performances remain readily accessible, given what a remarkable and singular talent she was, and what an impressive career she had.
While there is a fair argument to be made for the fiery yet tender leading lady as the cinema’s first truly naturalistic actress, it is also worth noting than no other performer from her country — not even the great Mastroianni — occupies a more important place in the history of global cinema. Italy’s cinematic output before the advent of the neo-realist movement had been negligible; Magnani was the face of that movement, and the impact of her work was immediate and far-reaching. She was the first Italian actor to achieve global stardom, with crossover success working in foreign productions and in other languages. These facts, while impressive, do not fully account for what qualified her as a pioneer, firing off the first and most penetrating shots in an ongoing campaign that, even now, is still being waged. In breaking the rules, she nearly succeeded in changing them.
Put simply, Anna Magnani was not beautiful, thin or young. She was over 40 by the time she achieved her widest stardom, with a Rubenesque figure, coarse features and a throaty voice. There was some precedent for this: Marie Dressler, a portly character actress of the early sound era with the countenance of a St. Bernard, had risen to the rank of leading lady and marquee attraction not before she was 60. Dressler was a star, to be sure, but envisioning her in a revealing negligee playing out a slow-burning, erotically charged seduction scene with some bare-chested, brawny buck 10 years her junior — say Lancaster, Brando or Franciosa — gives you some sense of how radically different Magnani was from anyone who’d come before, or many who have come since. Not even Italy’s premier sex symbol, Sophia Loren, ever exuded as much earthy sensuality, or expressed carnal desire as freely or as frankly as Magnani did. In The Rose Tattoo, Wild Is the Wind and a handful of other films, Anna Magnani was not only cast as an object of male desire; she was so persuasive to that end that she made slim, fine-featured young things like Marisa Pavan and Dolores Hart look pallid, prissy and frigid in comparison. In film after film, she was an irresistible source of fascination for the opposite sex, and why wouldn’t she be? Pretty girls are often no more than just that; passionate women are harder to forget.
The daughter of an Italian father and an Egyptian mother, she was brought up in the slums of Rome — that she displayed such a keen understanding of the hard-edged survival instincts of working class women was the product of firsthand experience. She began her career as a singer, performing in nightclubs. By the late 1930s, she was almost as famous as Piaf was in France; their backgrounds and career trajectories were strikingly similar. She made many poor, time-marking films before being cast by Vittorio De Sica in Teresa Venerdi, the film that launched her acting career in earnest. Roberto Rossellini’s Open City, in which she was the aching soul of a war-ravaged Rome, paved the way for international stardom. For that film, she received the best actress award from the National Board of Review — the first time any major American prize had been bestowed upon a foreign language performance. She worked for Rossellini again as the peasant woman convinced she is carrying the child of Christ in L’Amore, which cast her opposite the young actor who had also written the film’s screenplay, Federico Fellini. In Bellissima, directed by Luchino Visconti, she was tough, testy and ultimately heartbreaking as the stage mother determined to get her tiny daughter into films. The scene in which she observes, unnoticed, as her daughter’s screen test is being mercilessly ridiculed by studio executives showed how effortlessly she could segue from forceful bravado to quiet humiliation and despair. While Magnani was almost always cast as hardy, hearty women, she invariably managed to locate the fragile, wounded soul beneath the armor; audiences were always provided glimpses of the nagging self-doubts, irrational fears and easily bruised feelings that can reduce even the toughest of cookies to a state of naked vulnerability.
The world took notice, and a somewhat reluctant Magnani found herself a sought-after commodity on the international scene. She was the tempestuous star of a commedia del arte troupe in The Golden Coach, giving a grandly operatic performance; the film’s director, Jean Renoir, declared her to be “the greatest actress (he’d) ever worked with”. A star struck Tennessee Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo, a raucous comedy-drama about an Italian widow coming to terms with her late husband’s infidelity, specifically for her. Magnani declined the invitation to appear in the stage version, fearing her English wasn’t up to the task; her decision to opt out effectively launched the career of the unknown actress chosen to replace her. While Maureen Stapleton earned much praise (and a Tony) for her Broadway triumph, by the time the film version was being cast, Magnani had decided to reclaim the property. As Serefina Della Rose, her volcanic fits of fury were juxtaposed with moments of aching tenderness and grief — not even the clowny showboating of Burt Lancaster could derail her intensity, and the raw emotionalism of the performance was astonishing. She won the Oscar for the film, but the American career never really took off; not many scripts were being written with middle-age women with heavy accents in mind. She was very good — actually, too good — for the pulpy Wild Is the Wind, which brought her a second best actress nomination. If George Cukor seemed at a loss for how to temper the hamminess of Anthony Quinn, he didn’t allow it to upset the balance of the film too badly, and Magnani’s scenes with Anthony Franciosa generated more erotic heat than her ones with Lancaster had. Sidney Lumet cast her opposite Brando in The Fugitive Kind, a reworking of Williams’ Orpheus Descending — the film, while a flop, actually was better overall The Rose Tattoo, and featured a performance by Magnani that was, in some ways, superior. Her failure to receive an Oscar nomination for that film is somewhat baffling in retrospect, considering how a lean a year 1959 was for leading ladies; but Magnani lacked the transformative abilities of Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman, and Oscar voters tune out when actors don’t exhibit enough range. As great as she was in The Fugitive Kind, some critics carped that, since her arrival in Hollywood, she’d been giving the same performance over and over again.
The Hollywood phase of her career behind her, she returned to Italy, probably somewhat relieved to get away from the type of films that were inclined to view her as an exotic; Magnani was too salt-of-the-earth to be considered anything of the kind, least of all by herself. Mario Monicelli’s The Passionate Thief provided her with a rare foray into the realm of comedy, while Pier Paolo Passolini’s Mamma Roma, in which she played a streetwise prostitute trying to give her teenage son a better life, was deemed too controversial to be released in the United States until 1995 (it’s not hard to see why). She was outstanding in a film that didn’t shy away from revealing her capacity for ruthlessness, or wondering how quickly unabashed, unapologetic sexuality can pave the way to madness. Stanley Kramer’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria was a reunion with an unrepentantly florid Anthony Quinn, allegedly a comedy, and definitely a mistake.
While Magnani got a late start in the world of film, her death from pancreatic cancer at the age of 65 was sadly premature. The conventionally pretty girls born around the same time had ceased to be interesting by the time they reached middle age; but at the age of 40, Anna Magnani was only getting warmed up. In her 70s, or even in her 80s, she might well have retained her ability to generate heat.
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Labels: Brando, Cotillard, Cukor, De Sica, Fellini, Lancaster, Lumet, Magnani, Nicole Kidman, Renoir, Tennessee Williams
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Thursday, September 27, 2007
From the Vault: Gone With the Wind
on my all-time top 100 of 2007
Even after 50 years, Gone With the Wind still manages to delight and entertain, especially when one gets the opportunity to see it projected on the big screen in all its Technicolor glory instead of viewing the faded copy that has played in recent years. Having seen the film many times before, I found myself focusing more on the visuals and trying to ignore the story, a quite difficult task when you have Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh's caustic chemistry to distract you.
This time, the hands of the director (or more accurately, directors) were more evident to me. I'm not sure if all the scenes and shots I liked should be attributed to Victor Fleming, George Cukor or Sam Wood, but the scenes were stunning no matter who directed them.
One sequence, which escaped my notice watching the film on television, depicts a minister speaking in front of large stained-glass window of Jesus Christ as an explosion rips through Christ's midsection. The minister continues to speak and the camera pulls back to reveal that the minister is speaking to a wounded soldier, one of many who have turned the church into a makeshift hospital.
The restoration also highlights other stunning shots and their vivid colors. There are some flaws in the print — certain parts still seem faded and occasionally blotches of red, blue and green bleed through the image.
The film itself may be unsurpassed in terms of storytelling, holding your interest for 222 minutes, something even films less than 90 minutes long have trouble doing today. In fact, one should admire Gone With the Wind for doing what television miniseries such as North and South do today at more than twice the running time.
The pacing flows naturally, with the exception of the final portion of the film beginning with Scarlett's acceptance of Rhett's marriage proposal. From there through the birth, life and death of their child and the resolution of the remainder of the film almost feels rushed.
Then again, who cares? When you build up to the final scene with no less than three memorable lines including the first, and arguably the most famous, piece of profanity ever put on screen. In 1939, Gable's "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" shocked and almost didn't make the cut. Thank goodness it did.
The main problem I've always had with Gone With the Wind still bothered me when I watched it again and that problem is named Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes. Having never read Margaret Mitchell's classic novel, I don't know if the problem lies in Wilkes' character or in Howard's interpretation, but he has always bothered me as being weaker than the rest of the cast.
Howard looks too gaunt, too bland and too boring to be believable as someone Scarlett would carry a torch for for decades. His indecisiveness and weakness seems unbecoming for someone who's supposed to be a leading officer in the Confederate Army.
Howard aside, the rest of the performances are unsurpassed. Olivia de Havilland stood out for this time. Melanie, the most kind person Rhett ever knew and Ashley's wife, could come off as a goody two-shoes, but de Havilland overcomes that. Melanie is nice and loyal, but you can see that she also is very bright. Scarlett may believe Melanie is naive, but the audience knows better.
It doesn't need to be said, but Gable excels as Rhett, who actually is on screen less than you might think, but the times when he is never bores. His sparks with Leigh stand with any of the great antagonistic love interests of all time.
What more can be said about Leigh that hasn't already been said. She is Scarlett O'Hara. You forget she's British, something you always notice as far as Howard is concerned. Her facial expressions, her delivery — nothing she does misses the mark. One forgets that this same actress made just as indelible an impression as a very different Southerner — Blanche DuBois — 12 years later.
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Labels: 30s, Cukor, de Havilland, Gable, Movie Tributes, Television, V. Leigh
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Monday, June 04, 2007
Centennial Tributes: Rosalind Russell
By Josh R
The casting of the female lead in His Girl Friday represented a compromise, and one which director Howard Hawks was initially loath to make. Everyone on the filmmaker’s wish list was either uninterested or unavailable — Jean Arthur was the first choice, followed by Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne and Ginger Rogers. Rosalind Russell would have been well at the bottom of the list — that is, if it had even occurred to Hawks to put her there in the first place. The actress had made a modest name for herself playing elegant ladies and frigid bitches in turgid melodramas — usually in support of another female star. The Women, another film the actress had to fight to be cast in and the first to challenge the industry’s perception of her, was still awaiting release, and there was little indication from her other work that she had the chops to meet the demands of screwball comedy.
Needless to say, Hawks was in a bad temper when filming commenced in the summer of 1939, and regarded his leading lady, who’d been forced upon him by the studio in a last ditch effort to get the film made on schedule, with no small amount of resentment. Picking up on his hostility, Russell took the director aside and told him, “I know you didn’t want me, but we’re stuck with each other.” The tension was alleviated, and Hawks would later insist that no one — not Hepburn, Lombard or any of the others — could have brought as much verve, style and wit to the part as Russell did. Viewing the finished product, no one would challenge that appraisal.
Hawks can hardly be blamed for harboring some early doubts — from the very beginning, Rosalind Russell was an unlikely candidate for stardom. The Connecticut-bred lawyer’s daughter, the product of a scrupulous Catholic upbringing, was a tall, almost ungainly woman with a raspy contralto voice and plain, sensible features. Her no-nonsense appearance, which was smart and well-tailored without being austere, suggested both a practical outlook and a bemused sense of irony. No one would ever mistake her for an ingénue or a sex goddess — which probably suited Russell just fine. Never beautiful in the conventional sense, she could generate more heat with an arched eyebrow and a deadpan retort than any of the glamour girls could with smoldering looks and coy displays of their natural assets. She could be side-splittingly funny in films that tapped into the zanier side of her nature, but made surprisingly few comedies during her four decades as a cinema fixture. It’s a testament to the impact she had in the handful of films that allowed her to cut loose that she is remembered first and foremost as a comedienne.
After making her film debut in 1934’s Evelyn Prentice, the next five years of her career proceeded without incident. Hollywood wasn’t quite sure what it had on its hands, or exactly what to do with her — she didn’t fit comfortably into any easy category, and seemed slightly embarrassed as a result. More often than not, she wound up playing patrician ladies in fussy costumes which tried to minimize her height. Typical of the period was China Seas, where she was cast as a romantic rival to Jean Harlow for the affections of Clark Gable. The cool brunette didn’t stand a chance — Harlow’s curvy, hip-swinging brashness made the lanky interloper seem like even more of a stiff than she actually was.
When the actress graduated to leads, the results were initially less than rewarding. As the title character in Craig’s Wife, she was a domestic dictator and an evil oppressor of men — somewhat surprisingly, this study in
misogyny was the work of a female director, Dorothy Arzner. From an acting standpoint, Russell failed conspicuously in a role that, as thinly conceived as it was, would seem to call for an element of shamelessness — Joan Crawford, never one to shy away from playing brass-knuckled bitches, did much better by the same material in Harriet Craig 14 years later. To be fair, no one could have brought much in the way of human dimension to the character, a soulless martinet with an only slightly more complex pathology than The Wicked Witch of the West. As someone less interested in the subtleties of film acting, Crawford probably responded to something in the material Russell didn’t — Mommie Dearest’s late-career philosophy might be best described as “when in doubt, bare fangs.” Russell fared somewhat better in her next two films, Night Must Fall and The Citadel — box office hits which helped to solidify her position, but not affording her the opportunity to do much more than adopt a reactive stance while her male co-stars delivered star turns. Roberts Montgomery and Donat were nominated for Oscars, while their leading lady remained largely an afterthought — in both outings, she affected an earnest wholesomeness which gave little indication of an arresting personality.
If her prospects looked dim, the actress remained undaunted — she had some of Hepburn’s can-do Yankee feistiness, and an intelligence to match. She lobbied for the role of Sylvia Fowler, the loose-lipped socialite who views the dissemination of gossip as something akin to a higher calling, in George Cukor’s star-studded screen adaptation of Clare Booth Luce’s The Women. It was apparent that after years of playing it safe and fading into the scenery, she’d learned her lesson — the deliriously uninhibited comic brio that she exhibited in the role gave lie to the presumption that refinement and restraint were her salient characteristics as a performer. With her peerless talent for physical and verbal slapstick, she stole the film right out from under Crawford, Norma Shearer, Paulette Goddard and a gallery of others. It was as if someone had let loose a fox in a henhouse — untrammeled malice has never been more sublimely ridiculous.
Having finally broken out of her shell, she hit her stride. The role of Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday was originally written for a man, and in its transmogrified incarnation could have easily come across as a shrill, insulting parody of the tough-minded career woman as a masculine (or worse still, asexual) entity, but Russell was much too smart, and far too inventive, to fall into that trap — her Hildy was one of the boys, alright, but more woman
than ever. For the first time in motion pictures, here was a truly modern woman — not only the professional equal of her male counterparts, but with a quickness and creativity that left them in the dust. The pride of The Morning Star is an ace reporter who can outtalk, outthink and out-maneuver every man in the room, and rather than resent her for it, her colleagues can only peer out from under their porkpie hats and newsman’s visors with a mixture of awe and respect as she runs circles around the rest of them. The actress was a whirling dervish of energy, sprinting through entire pages of dialogue at warp speed without missing a beat, and her inflections throughout were priceless. She threw herself into the part with the same kind of edgy, go-for-broke tenacity that the character exhibited when chasing headlines, and made it clear that, for Hildy Johnson, no other kind of life is possible. She needs the thrill of the chase, and a guy like Walter Burns who can not only keep up with her, but is only too happy to let her run with the wolves. That’s why nice, bland Ralph Bellamy had to be sent packing at the end of the picture — there’s no way he could avoid being blown away by this sonic boom in heels.
Her resounding success in the Hawks entry dramatically altered her career trajectory, and the next five years saw
her playing a series of variations on the same character. She was very good in Take a Letter, Darling opposite Fred MacMurray — one of the few leading men, other than Cary Grant, with whom she managed a genuine chemistry — but My Sister Eileen was a bigger hit with audiences. Her neophyte journalist braving the wilds of the urban jungle was sort of a country cousin to Hildy Johnson, and showed how fully she’d come into her own in the realm of screwball comedy. If the film itself was an inferior showcase, it nonetheless provided her with a welcome opportunity to hone her talent for slapstick — she earned the first of her four Oscar nominations for her efforts. Her best vehicle of the 1940s, after His Girl Friday, was the comedy-drama Roughly Speaking, which revealed an element of defensiveness as a component of the super-competent, overachieving persona. Wary of being typecast, she shifted her focus to drama, to somewhat disappointing effect. Sister Kenny, concerning the heroics of an Australian bush nurse who pioneers a revolutionary treatment for polio, was a Greer Garson film with crippled children standing in for illegitimate babies and the isolation of radium. She carried the film with dignity, but no amount of solid professionalism could keep it from seeming like a step backward. The marathon theatrics of Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill’s Civil-War-era riff on the precepts of Greek Tragedy, made for a creaky, ponderous affair — the play was not an ideal candidate for cinematic adaptation, especially at a time when its Oedipal undertones had to be tiptoed around in order to pass muster with the censors. Russell was rather badly miscast in a role that required more volatile nervous energy than she could muster — Bette Davis would have been more appropriate — but she made a brave try nonetheless. The Velvet Touch went so far as to cast her as a sweaty murderess; the entire enterprise seemed badly in need of Hitchcock.
The New York stage paved the way for career revitalization, and the actress took Broadway by storm with her star turn in Wonderful Town, Leonard Bernstein’s musical treatment of My Sister Eileen. If her singing skills posed no threat to the likes of Martin and Merman, she could still fire off Comden and Green’s custom-crafted zingers like a champ, and earned a Tony Award for her efforts. Since Hollywood had nothing better
to offer than a supporting stint as a boozy spinster in the sodden mess of Picnic, she returned to the theater to take on the title role in Auntie Mame, a performance she repeated for the film version. The character of a madcap nonconformist, whose personality is expansive and irrepressible as her hair color is changeable, was a seven-course meal of a part, and the actress made the most of it. Everything about the globe-trotting, gin-swilling, convention-flouting Mame was writ larger than life, and Russell attacked the role with such giddy abandon as to make the entire mixed-up universe, from the Heart of Dixie to the Himalayas, seem like her own personal playground. It was her most unabashedly silly performance, and ultimately her most iconic; by thumbing her nose at conservatism, with behavior as outrageous as her wardrobe, both Mame and the actress playing her inadvertently kicked off the drag queen movement.
If Russell never again soared to Mame or Hildy-like heights, she continued to work steadily, and not without acclaim. The Majority of One cast her as a Jewish widow being romanced by Alec Guinness’ Japanese businessman — it was as bizarre as it sounds. If the actress had gotten by in Wonderful Town, it was clear
that for the purposes of Gypsy, Styne and Sondheim’s backstage musical about the stage mother to end all others, her singing would have to be dubbed. While her acting as Mama Rose was credible, it was painfully apparent that a key element of the performance was being faked; as Ethel Merman’s participation in the original stage production testified, the role needed a great singer more than it required a great actress. For both of these late-career performances, she was recognized with citations from The Hollywood Foreign Press Association — it’s worth noting that a performer who never won a competitive acting Oscar still holds the record for most Golden Globe victories by an actress (her other three came for Kenny, Mourning and Mame). In a shame-faced apology for its habitual neglectfulness, The Academy presented her with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1973 — Russell pursued an active interest in philanthropy long before it became fashionable for movie stars to do so.
If the remainder of her film work failed to capture the spark of her earlier triumphs, she never lost the affection of her audience. The silly The Trouble with Angels was profitable enough to merit a sequel, Where Angels Go — Trouble Follows. In both films, she returned to her Catholic school roots as a tough-but-tender Mother Superior presiding over the likes of Hayley Mills and Susan Saint James — the material was beneath her, but she played it for what it was worth. Looking back over her career, it’s startling to realize how few of the films that she participated in were genuine classics — and fewer still were those that really allowed her to shine. Nevertheless, the performances for which she is cherished — His Girl Friday, Auntie Mame and The Women — when taken out of context, would individually stand as the highlights of any career. It took only one to encompass all three.
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Labels: Bellamy, Bette, Cary, Comden and Green, Crawford, Cukor, Gable, Garson, Ginger Rogers, Guinness, Harlow, Hawks, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, K. Hepburn, Lombard, MacMurray, O'Neill, Paulette Goddard, Sondheim
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