Saturday, February 05, 2011
Smile…though your heart is breaking
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
In 1931, motion picture film star Charles Chaplin was undeniably the most famous celebrity on the planet, and his popularity did not wane one iota during an 18-month world tour he undertook that same year: an excursion that exposed him to the crippling economic and social conditions imposed by the Great Depression. Witnessing the Depression’s devastating effects on people in other countries infused in him an obsession to examine and explore how poverty might be eradicated. He pored though endless texts on economics and economic theory and ultimately devised an alternative system that centered on utopian idealism; a distribution of not only wealth but work, with a special emphasis on attacking the menace of unemployment. Chaplin was convinced that industrialization could actually benefit mankind provided that it be utilized in a far different fashion that maximizing a company’s profits and exploiting its workers.
Such overtly political sentiments would later get Chaplin into trouble with the likes of the House Un-American Activities Committee, who were somehow convinced that respect for an individual’s dignity and a concern that people shouldn’t go hungry made Charlie some sort of Commie. The proof was even in the pudding (so to speak): many of the comedian’s beliefs were on display in his motion picture classic Modern Times, which premiered at New York’s Rivoli Theater 75 years ago on this date. It would be his last silent film, and the final film of what film critic J. Hoberman once dubbed “the world’s most famous homeless person”: the silver screen vagabond known as the Little Tramp.
His success in motion pictures allowed Chaplin an independence few other artists enjoyed, and nowhere was that more apparent than his 1931 masterpiece City Lights — a film that disdained Hollywood’s “talking picture” revolution by steadfastly remaining silent (with the exception of sound effects and a short sequence in which the “speech” of several characters is simulated with kazoo-like sounds). Lights had been a tremendous success, but Charlie gave serious consideration to making his next release with sound — and even prepared both a script with dialogue and sound test experiments as early as 1934. He could not, however, reconcile having his famous cinematic creation speak onscreen (believing the Little Tramp would lose his universal appeal) and decided that Modern Times would be a silent film with synchronized sound effects. There are a few sound sequences in Times but they originate mostly from mechanical devices (a phonograph record, a radio, etc.); the only exception being a musical number performed by Chaplin near the film’s end…the only time the Little Tramp would be heard onscreen.
Chaplin plays the Tramp in Modern Times even though he’s identified as “a factory worker” in the film’s opening credits, and as the movie gets underway we find this worker in a precarious mental state due to the effects of his monotonous assembly line job (not to mention the fact that he is used as a guinea pig in a disastrous demonstration of a mechanized “feeding machine”). He snaps from the stress and is placed in a sanitarium for a little R&R but upon his release finds himself the guest of another institution — the county jail, because he has been arrested as an “instigator” during a demonstration (this sequence has some verisimilitude in light of Charlie’s later troubles with the U.S. government). Inside the Grey Bar Hotel, he unwittingly quells a jailbreak (thanks to a generous sampling of cocaine, a sequence that was a bit daring for its time in light of the Motion Picture Production Code) and for his “heroic” efforts is released…much to his disappointment, as he was starting to enjoy life in the joint.
While the Little Tramp is doing his boardin’ with the warden, Times’ other major character is introduced — a young girl (Paulette Goddard) referred to as “the gamin” (though with the aid of modern DVD freeze-frame technology you can see on an arrest warrant her actual name is “Ellen Peterson”) and who resorts to a little Jean Valjean-like thieving to provide food for her family, made up of two younger sisters and a father who’s out of work. Papa Gamin is later killed in a labor-related riot and when officials from the county come by to take all three sisters to an orphanage, the Gamin escapes from their clutches and strikes out on her own.
The Gamin’s and the Tramp’s paths cross when she is caught stealing a loaf of bread from a bakery wagon — but our hero confesses to her “crime” since it means returning to his comfortable jail existence. The couple meets up again in the back of a paddy wagon (an amusing sequence where the Tramp stands up and offers her his seat as if they were on a bus or streetcar) and manages to elude the specter of incarceration when the vehicle crashes en route to the jug. After imagining a life where the two of them set up house (in a purely innocent and platonic fashion, of course) the Tramp gets a job as a night watchman in a department store…but his employment there doesn’t last long before he is once again arrested; it seems that no sooner do the Tramp and the Gamin reach a point in their lives where he is gainfully employed and both are content and happy when circumstances conspire to put him behind bars time and again.
It is then up to the Gamin to find work — which she does, dancing at a café, and upon the Tramp’s release from prison she gets him a job at the same establishment as a singing waiter. During his performance he is forced to improvise singing mock French-Italian gibberish because the cuffs on which he’s written the song lyrics have been lost during his “warm-up.” His act is a hit with the customers and with the café’s manager, who offers him steady work but just as it appears that the couple’s troubles are over she is picked up by the child welfare officials she eluded earlier. The Tramp helps her escape a second time, and at the film’s conclusion the two of them, bloodied but not bowed, head off uncertainly arm-in-arm toward the horizon.
In many of the endings to Charlie Chaplin’s films the audience often finds the Little Tramp shuffling off by his lonesome to points unknown…so because Modern Times marks the final appearance of the “little fellow,” it seems only fitting that he be allowed to make his graceful exit with someone strolling by his side. This optimistic ending almost didn’t happen; Chaplin’s original plan for concluding the film found the Tramp recuperating in another sanitarium and being visited one last time by the Gamin, who had become a nun during his convalescence. This sequence was filmed (a few stills do exist) but was ultimately shelved in favor of the now-iconic shot of the two characters.
My favorite Charlie Chaplin film remains City Lights but I’ve always retained a great deal of affection for Modern Times because of its simple human message that can best be summed up by a line of dialogue from one of the characters in The Big Chill (1983): “We’re all alone out there and tomorrow we’re going out there again.” Times isn’t quite that pessimistic (since our hero is accompanied by his lady friend) but it does demonstrate how the Little Tramp determinedly survives in a world that seemingly has no place for him. Our hero and the Gamin are really the only endearing figures in a society that has become dehumanized as a result of a fast-paced, mechanized industrial age.
Another facet of Times that has stayed with me these many years is its recurring motif of hunger and food; something that recurs quite frequently in Chaplin’s work but never with the ferocity on display here. Food and the need to obtain same is so prevalent in this film that it’s almost a secondary character: the Tramp is humiliated by a machine that promises to eliminate the lunch hour; the two main characters meet when one is in search of sustenance (and the other runs up a huge bill in a cafeteria in hopes of being picked up by the police); the “burglars” who confront the Tramp in the department store aren’t really thieves at all but are “just hungry.” (At the risk of sounding facetious, I’ve often had to venture out to the kitchen in search of a snack on many occasions after revisiting this movie.)
Modern Times may come across as a bit dated since its original release — in a time when many industrial jobs have fallen by the wayside, it would probably be more fitting for Chaplin’s Tramp to suffer a nervous breakdown as a telemarketer or some other menial 9-to-5 job in the service industry — but there’s a reason why it remains one of the great comedian’s most popular films. The chemistry between Chaplin and Goddard (a relationship that not only took place in real-life but would surface again in 1940's The Great Dictator) is positively charming, and there are so many wonderful set pieces throughout the film: Chaplin roller skating in the department store, his reunion with former Keystone compadre Chester Conklin (Charlie “assists” Chester in a sequence that finds Conklin trapped in some machine works and Chaplin helping him eat his lunch), that wonderful song-and-dance routine in the café, etc. Beyond the satire and physical comedy, however, is a simple plea for retaining one’s humanity in the face of adversity — so astutely alluded to by the Tramp himself when he tells his companion: “Buck up — never say die! We’ll get along!” It’s a sentiment that prevails even in these more modern “modern times” today.
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Labels: 30s, Chaplin, Movie Tributes, Paulette Goddard, Silents
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Thursday, June 03, 2010
Centennial Tributes: Paulette Goddard
By Josh R
Depending upon which account you believe, there may have been a point at which Paulette Goddard was but a hair’s breadth away from landing the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara. On paper, it made sense; she was the
right age, she looked the part, and already was an established name with a few notable credits under her belt. Moreover, she had the right combination of kittenish sex appeal and dramatic presence that the role required. Very early on during the long, tortuous process of casting the most iconic character in all of American literature, it was abundantly clear that Paulette Goddard was more than just a pretty face. With talent, wit and beauty to spare, she was not only a credible seducer of men — she had the stubborn, willful insolence of a girl headstrong enough to think she could fight The Civil War all by herself, and enough in the way of fiery sexual bravado to reduce Atlanta to a pile of ashes without even striking a match. David O. Selznick, the impresario responsible for bringing the best-selling novel to the screen, tested her extensively for the part over a period of several months; by time she had made her final test, he was almost convinced that she could do it. Before long, the gossip columnists had already begin referring to her as “Scarlett O’Goddard.” While Wall Street had yet to recover from The Crash of `29, by 1937 Paulette Goddard had all the markings of a blue chip stock. Sure things have a way of falling through, and there are plenty of theories as to why Goddard’s promising forward march, with the magnolia-crested lawns of Tara well within her sight, ended just a few miles shy of glory. The publicity department was not in her corner; Paulette was known as a good-time girl, and was not particularly discreet about it. Her early life story makes for a colorful read — she began her career as a
frolicsome teenage adventuress bound and determined to have as much fun as possible, without worrying too much about what sort of names she was called along the way. She started as a Ziegfeld chorine — probably lying about her age to get the gig — and by the time she was 17, she had married a middle-age lumber tycoon and set her sights West. By the time prep work had begun on Gone With the Wind, she was living with Charlie Chaplin in the Hollywood hills — the status of their relationship remained, at best, ambiguous (there were some farfetched stories circulated by anxious publicists about an impromptu wedding at sea, or perhaps even in China, but the confirming paperwork remained curiously absent). She was popular and well-liked within the Hollywood community, but did not fight as hard as she might have to get to the front of the line. As a result, the starmakers — studio chiefs, agents, publicists - were slightly wary of her. It’s not that she was problematic — a consummate professional, she showed up on time, got along well with others and did her work without causing any trouble — but she may have lacked something in terms of drive and ambition. Often, it seemed as though she was more interested in having a good time than in hunkering down and putting career first. If the press had paid closer attention and conducted its research a little more thoroughly, they would have discovered that the All-American beauty with the frilly Gallic moniker — “Paulette Goddard” could have just as easily suited a countess as courtesan –— was actually Marion Levy from Queens, New York. In the 1930s, it was one thing for a Jew to run a studio; if you aimed to be a movie star, certain things were best left unacknowledged. It is possible — even probable — that one or more of these factors contributed to the failure of Paulette Goddard’s candidacy for the most coveted acting assignment of the 20th century. Ultimately, they do not fully account for why she came up short. Simply put, Scarlett O’Hara was not a role that Paulette Goddard was ever meant to play. Certain things can be chalked up to exigent circumstances, bad timing, the vagaries of subjective taste. The casting of Scarlett O’Hara was not determined by any of those things; as ridiculous as it sounds, it was quite simply a matter of heavenly design. While Paulette Goddard had so many wonderful qualities working in her favor — beauty, talent, and a good head start on rest of the competition — the hand of divine providence had made its own selection. That’s what David O. Selznick saw in the screen tests of an unknown Englishwoman — who pursued the part not merely because she wanted it, but believed that it was hers by right — and what brought the impresario to the conclusion that there were greater forces at work than could be neatly attributed to luck and chance.
The loss of Scarlett was surely a huge professional disappointment, not least because of what came after — if destiny’s plans for Vivien Leigh were awesome in scope, they were much more modestly scaled for the second-place finisher. While there were hits aplenty — Goddard’s track record at the box office was, for a brief period, inspired — the great, career-defining role never materialized. The closest she came was Modern Times for Chaplin; while she played the sprightly gamine to perfection, it was not an assignment which utilized her full capabilities, or showed her for what she truly was — a fun-loving dame and an unpretentious sexpot. Chaplin liked her energy and pluck, but as a matter of personal vanity, insisted on keeping her wholesome; some men would prefer to believe their wives came to them as virgins (the same held true in The Great Dictator, in which Chaplin kept her light even more firmly under the bushel). At her best, Goddard could be slinky, sexy and sharp in the best sense of the word; she could land a
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zinger with the best of them, and was naturally funny without resorting to aggressive tactics. She had a special knack for portraying worldliness in a way that seemed playful and fun — no mean feat at a time when girls who’d been around the block were usually depicted as tawdry and sad. The best Goddard performances are built around the pleasures of foreplay — she’s not just a flirt, she’s a flirt who likes sex and the banter leading up to it, and can dish it out without feeling ashamed or sacrificing one ounce of self-respect; there are few actresses of the 1940s who portrayed so many smart-talking dames with such lightness of touch. In The Women and Hold Back the Dawn, she was a merry golddigger without a mean bone in her body, quick with a quip and entertaining enough to build an entire film around; but these were supporting roles, not leads. She would have been ideally cast in either The Lady Eve or Ball of Fire, both which went to Barbara Stanwyck — but Baby Stan had more variety as a performer and was the superior technician. Goddard might have played those parts for straight-up carnal humor, and would have done it brilliantly — Stanwyck had a great feel for comedy, but also understood complexity of characterization in a way Goddard may never fully have grasped. Sugarpuss O'Shea is Stanwyck's greatest comic creation, but there are occasional glimpses of hardness, cheapness and self-loathing in the mix as well. Goddard was great as a broad on the make, but she wasn't suited to noir — was she too expensive to play cheap? 
The lack of a great lead kept her from entering the pantheon of legends, but a handful of supporting parts kept her in play and gave her opportunities to shine. In addition to The Women and Hold Back the Dawn, there was her Oscar-nominated turn as the navy nurse in So Proudly We Hail, shuttling from Pearl Harbor to battle-scarred outposts of The Pacific theater while pausing just long enough for saucy interplay with appreciative servicemen. She was once again in her element as the kind of libidinous minx who keeps a lacy black negligee in her tack kit while the rest of the girls in the unit shuffle around in shapeless regulation uniforms, but was able to step out of the mold just long enough for some finely observed moments of toughness and tenderness — it was a more fully-defined character than she was generally allowed to play, and she rose to the occasion.
Part of the problem for Goddard was the fact that, after parting ways with Chaplin and Selznick, she ultimately landed at Paramount, a shop that did not do particularly well by actresses; this was the studio that ran out of things to do with that hyper-animated sparkplug Betty Hutton in five years, Veronica Lake in less than two, and never thought to do anything at all with Dorothy Lamour beyond sandwiching her between Crosby and Hope when she wasn’t on sarong duty (of all the major female contact players at The Mountain, only Claudette Colbert flourished for an extended period of time). Goddard did better than most of her stablemates — for starters, she avoided the type of poverty and obscurity that befell both Hutton or Lake in later years — but she never plucked any plums from the Paramount orchards on the order of Sullivan’s Travels or Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. The comedy leads that did come her way — in Pot O’Gold with Jimmy Stewart and Standing Room Only with Fred MacMurray — were not at the level of Preston Sturges, who might have made fantastic use of her if given the chance.
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She was bolstered by a series of huge box office hits that have about as much of a claim on posterity as Demi Moore’s money-makers of the early 1990s. In fairness, nothing she did was as bad as Indecent Proposal or Disclosure; at least two were comparable in terms of frivolity. For Cecil B. DeMille she was photographed in gorgeous technicolor and wasted as The Girl — just The Girl, and nothing more — in two big-budget action-adventure films that were less concerned with drama than with spectacle. The first, 1942’s Reap the Wild Wind, played almost like a parody of Gone With the Wind, and at least permitted her some flashes of spirit as a Southern belle salvaging ships off the Florida Keys (she wasn’t responsible for that blockbuster status of that film; audiences came to see John Wayne wrestle a giant squid.) The pre-Revolutionary war epic Unconquered, in which her flame-haired ingénue was deported to the colonies, sold into indentured servitude, harassed by savage Indians, steered over a waterfall and repeatedly groped by Gary Cooper, was the top-grossing film of 1947, and really only served to illustrate how little DeMille’s concept of directing actors had evolved since the end of the silent era. Between the two behemoths was another, much better top-grossing outing, 1945’s Kitty, a dirty-minded reworking of Pygmalion in which the heroine not only learns to refine her vowel sounds, but dispenses sexual favors frequently and liberally in her ascent to titled nobility. Goddard enjoyed herself more as a rambunctious, barefooted cockney pickpocket than as a corseted duchess in cumbersome powdered wigs — the film had a cheekiness that suited her, but in its second act the performance got smothered in a swath of lavish costuming.
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The decline of the film career was less a precipitous tumble than a slow fade-out; Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out what to do with sexpots of the '40s when they were nearing their 40s. Two ambitious projects,
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Renoir’s Diary of a Chambermaid and Korda’s An Ideal Husband, were well-received but never quite connected with audiences, while the infamous Lucretia Borgia biopic, Bride of Vengeance, was hailed as an unqualified fiasco. She married and divorced Burgess Meredith, and the 1950s brought some B-grade films whose scripts were not commensurate with her talent. She wisely opted for retirement in favor of career rebirth in Grand Guignol; with a personality as light as a champagne cocktail, there was no sense in entering anything as heavy-handed as the Baby Jane sweepstakes. In the late '50s, she married her fourth husband, the novelist Erich Maria Remarque, amassed a modern art collection to rival J. Paul Getty’s, and wound up with more money than she really knew what to do with. She remained the life of the party well into her 60s and 70s. As a jet-setting socialite bedecked in jewels, she was just as likely to be seen on the arm of Andy Warhol at Studio 54 as she would be dining with French President Francois Mitterand on the eve of the Cannes Film Festival. Upon her death, she willed an unseemly amount of money to New York University; Goddard Hall in Washington Square is named in her honor. David Hinton’s documentary on the making of Gone With the Wind features footage of Goddard’s screen tests for the role of Scarlett O’Hara, as well as Vivien Leigh’s. These brief snippets bear out that fact that Selznick was right to entertain serious thoughts of casting Paulette Goddard. She read well for it, better even
than her other performances might lead one to suspect. She was more than beautiful enough, and had enough spark and energy to serve the major demands of the role, if not to embody its contradictions as effortlessly as Leigh did. The biggest difference between the two women observed in the test footage can be summed up very succinctly: one is playing Scarlett O’Hara, and playing her well; the other is living and breathing the part — she is Scarlett. It is obvious that Paulette Goddard wanted very badly to play the role; it is equally clear that Vivien Leigh refused to be denied it. It’s that intensity and conviction that brought the novice Englishwoman to America on her own dime, before it had even occurred to anyone to offer her an audition; she recognized the character on the page as one created specifically for her, the role that she was born to play. The challenger was hopeful; the chosen one was certain. Certainty can be a form of madness — the voices whispering in Leigh’s ear may not have been so different from those heard by Joan of Arc. Fate’s blessing can bring it with a curse; the same type of madness that spurred Leigh on, that anointed her as the only person in the world who could possibly play that particular role in that particular film, overtook her in the end. It’s worth questioning who was the luckier of the two. The blessings that brought Leigh to Scarlett O’Hara also led her into darkness. Paulette Goddard always headed toward the light. Tweet
Labels: Burgess Meredith, Chaplin, Cooper, Demi, J. Stewart, MacMurray, Oscars, P. Sturges, Paulette Goddard, Renoir, Selznick, Stanwyck, V. Leigh, Wayne
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Saturday, August 30, 2008
Centennial Tributes: Fred MacMurray
By Josh R
For the first decade of his career, Fred MacMurray was a model of gentlemanly comportment. Pleasant in manner and appearance, he provided a strong shoulder for Hollywood’s top female stars to lean and occasionally weep on in a series of films in which his function was clearly secondary. Not that MacMurray seemed to register any of the supposed indignity of playing second fiddle; he understood that his job was to show up promptly and well-pressed, corsage in hand, and execute the duties of a conscientious escort without diverting too much attention from his leading lady.
In film after film from the mid-'30s to the early '40s, MacMurray was attractive without being conspicuously so, charmingly low-key, and dutifully observant of the Boy Scout’s honor code as pertaining to relations with the opposite sex. Consider that painful dinner party sequence in Alice Adams — just one of a series of humiliations Katharine Hepburn must endure throughout the course of that film — in which, as the guest of honor, MacMurray spares the heroine’s feelings by pretending not to notice that the soup is cold, the room is sweltering and the company is decidedly bourgeois. If there had been a merit badge for chivalry, he would have won it several times over.
You can earn medals for good behavior in certain walks of life, but not many prizes are awarded for being a good team player in the film business. While a very fine actor, MacMurray may never have been a distinctive enough presence to grab the spotlight for himself. His masculinity was of the casual, nonthreatening variety; he was good-looking, without being exactly handsome; he could be very funny, but not in such a way as to give the great comic clowns of the age any reason for concern. His seeming averageness consigned him to leading man duties in light comedies and tearjerkers, the kind of films frequently referred to as “women’s pictures.” The ladies were the main attraction, and good boy scout that he was, MacMurray graciously allowed himself to be consistently upstaged by Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Jean Arthur, Paulette Goddard and gallery of others. Perhaps all that modesty and nobility — being a nice guy in a woman’s world — began to wear on him after a while, eroding his confidence and breeding a sense of dissatisfaction. For if MacMurray’s early outings never betrayed a whiff of danger — he had trained his preternaturally deep, gruff voice to speak in the hush, dulcet tones of a sympathetic Boy Friday, while his features remained frozen in a perpetual mask of wholesome credulity while comforting all those chiffon-swathed damsels in distress — he did manage to veer off course on a few occasions, forsaking the straight and narrow path just long enough to create room for doubt as to whether all that clean conduct may have little more than a put-on.
The dominant-submissive dynamic in most of his early pictures — which really made notably few demands of him as an actor — probably made him impatient for something
more challenging, less emasculating. Consider Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff, a character defined very much by a spirit of restlessness. A moral weakling who falls prey to the machinations of yet another dominant female (in this case, a genuine sociopath with metal anklets that cut into her reptilian skin without drawing blood), what makes Walter so eminently corruptible is how bored he’s become in playing by the rules. He goes from a passive observer to an active participant, and effect is just intoxicating enough to give him the false illusion of being the one in charge. The fear of getting caught becomes as much of a turn-on as the breaking of the social compact, and murder becomes the ultimate sexual act — if planning a murder may be the ultimate form of foreplay, enacting it is the ultimate form of release. Once again, a woman is really the one calling the shots — only this time, the man finally gets disgusted enough to do something about it. The shifty anxiety and bitter fatalism MacMurray brought to his performance in the Billy Wilder film were astonishing, and not the least by virtue of their coming from such an unexpected source. It was a role he had been reticent to play, but ultimately the one in which he seemed the most thoroughly at home. Double Indemnity was the first film to show the darker side of MacMurray — happily, it wouldn’t be the last. Pushover, The Caine Mutiny, and especially The Apartment — as the embodiment of smooth-talking corporate disingenuousness — showed how effortlessly he could peel back the layers of surface geniality
to reveal cowardice, ruthlessness or just plain rottenness. Occasional forays into villainy may have given the chance to stretch, but niceness remained his stock in trade. For MacMurray, the 1960s meant paydirt. My Three Sons stayed on the air so long they started filming it in color, while a series of films for Disney established him as favorite of family audiences. He seemed to enjoy himself in his outings for Disney — most notably as the sane-mad-scientist who whips up an electro-magnetically charged form of silly putty in The Absent-Minded Professor — but his most popular successes didn’t really represent his best work. MacMurray was a whiz at doing comfort food, but his meatiest roles — especially the two for Billy Wilder — were ultimately his most satisfying. The actor wisely decided to retire after The Swarm…so many bees packing so much less sting than Stanwyck in a blonde wig and trashy heels. It is tempting to consider his a minor career — tempting, that is, until one considers that unforgettable moment when love and hate converge with the firing of a gun, the final showdown between partners in crime bound together in deed and consequence “straight down the line”. It’s a testament to the power and clarity of MacMurray’s performance the pulling of that trigger seems not so much a sordid crime of passion as the ultimate act of self-loathing punishment. As Walter Neff ruefully recounts in his recorded confession, “I didn’t get the money…and I didn’t get the woman.” MacMurray never really got the rewards, nor the recognition of the type usually accorded a major star…but then, MacMurray was the type of actor who seemingly always gave more than he got. His co-stars, directors and audiences were the chief beneficiaries. Tweet
Labels: Disney, Jean Arthur, K. Hepburn, Lombard, MacMurray, Paulette Goddard, Roz Russell, Stanwyck, Television, Wilder
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Tuesday, December 04, 2007
A story of industry
By Edward Copeland
It's a misnomer really to called 1936's Modern Times the last silent film that Charlie Chaplin made since the movie itself is really a hybrid. It has a score, sound effects galore, a song and even dialogue. What can't be mistaken though is that whatever you classify Modern Times as, it's one of the greats.
Set during the Great Depression, Modern Times offers one of the clearest glimpses at Chaplin's more political side, equating those slaving away on factory assembly lines as sheep. Of course, the Little Tramp (in his last screen appearance) is one of those sheep, pushed so hard at his job that his body literally has work spasms when he's on break, looking to continue tightening anything with his wrenches that would appear to need tightening (even a woman's nipples in one implied sequence). The factory is run by a man who would seem to foretell Orwell's Big Brother, even though the movie came out 12 years before 1984 was published. The unfeeling man even uses Chaplin as a guinea pig for an idea designed to eliminate the lunch break so more work can be done (and giving us a twist on the old pie-in-the-face gag as well).
While there are lots of laughs to be found in Modern Times, it's hard to escape the grim underpinnings as the Little Tramp ricochets through the system of the Great Depression, finding himself in jail, becoming an unwitting protest leader and facing unemployment when the factory shuts down. He also encounters another down on her luck, the luminous Paulette Goddard on the run from a planned life in the orphanage after her father dies. The two become a pair, with the Little Tramp even taking the blame for a crime Goddard commits so he can return to the "comfort" of jail. One of the film's comic highlights comes as Chaplin and Goddard are hired on by a restaurant as singing and dancing waitpersons. It provides the great sequence of Chaplin trying to deliver a tray of food to a customer through a sea of dancers.
Of course the crown jewel of this sequence is when the Little Tramp can't remember the words to the song he's supposed to sing and improvises one in pure gibberish, with exaggerated motions that let the audience create their own dirty jokes out of his nonsensical words. Many Chaplin fans prefer City Lights and while I love that film as well (and that's really a true silent offer), my heart always has belonged to Modern Times, with its hysterical sound effects (as when a minister's wife drinks tea) as well as its more pointed commentary. It also gives us the perfect, iconic image for a sendoff of the Little Tramp, one of the most important characters and figures in film history.
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Labels: 30s, Chaplin, Movie Tributes, Paulette Goddard, Silents
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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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Thursday, March 01, 2007
Directing as Defensive Screenwriting
By Josh R
It was a career spanning six decades, featuring some of the most cherished examples of the filmmaker’s craft in the annals of Hollywood history. The Wilder canon is stunning, not only for the number of classics it produced, but for the variety of genres it encompassed; who else, apart from Howard Hawks, ran the gamut from screwball comedy to film noir, taking pause to explore all of the ground in between?
And — in a twist worthy of a Wilder screenplay — it all might never have been if not for a cockroach.
Billy Wilder began his Hollywood career as a screenwriter in the 1930s, churning out made-to-order scripts with his longtime collaborator Charles Brackett. They had successes both modest and major, earning Academy Award nominations for their work on Ninotchka, the classic Lubitsch comedy cheekily advertised under the banner “Garbo Laughs!” and again for Hold Back the Dawn, a romantic melodrama for Paramount. The pair might happily have remained engaged in this pursuit if not for a single event — involving said fateful insect — that forever altered the course of Wilder’s career and by extension, the history of the cinematic medium.
The story goes that Wilder and Brackett had written some dialogue for Hold Back the Dawn that paired Charles Boyer, the embodiment of continental elegance and Gallic mystique, with an unusual scene partner of the non-mammalian variety. The Great French Lover was to play a Romanian refugee of dubious character waiting to gain entry into the United States. Unable to obtain his visa by honest means, he finds himself stranded in a fleabag hotel in a Mexican border town, flat broke and growing increasingly despondent at his reduced circumstances. There was nothing overtly comical built into the premise, and yet — as evidenced by Sunset Blvd. — this particular writing team had an almost perverse knack for locating elements of black humor in even the bleakest of scenarios. Boyer was to be lying in bed, fully dressed and unshaven, listlessly observing a cockroach crawling up the wall. Every time the insect tried to advance, Boyer was to impede its progress with his cane. In bitter imitation of a border guard, he was to say “Where are you going? What is the purpose of your trip?…Let’s see your papers….What, no visa? You can’t travel without a visa…”
Wilder was proud of the scene, which perfectly encapsulated what would become one of his guiding aesthetics — the inherent potential for absurdity in pathos, and the inversion of that equation. Wilder described events that followed to Cameron Crowe, who conducted a series of interviews with the director in the late 1990s:
The Mr. Leisen referred to in this bitter recollection was Mitchell Leisen, the film’s director. Wilder and Brackett collaborated with Leisen on three films during the team’s tenure as contract writers for Paramount — the other two being Midnight, for which they were the credited screenwriters, and Arise, My Love, on which they provided some behind-the-scenes doctoring.
For Wilder and Leisen, unwillingly yoked together for three successive projects over three successive years, it was a match made in hell. Despising each other with a passion that bordered on irrationality, the two men had a notoriously stormy working relationship — which reputedly came to blows on at least one occasion. Still, if not for this unhappy coupling, the name of Wilder might have fallen into obscurity just as surely as that of his nemesis. Many of Wilder’s ambitions took root in his frustrations with Leisen’s dismissive attitude toward writers in general, and with him in particular — the cockroach episode (in many ways, the straw that broke the camel’s back, but hardly the first time they’d clashed) provided the impetus for Wilder to strike out on his own, directing his own scripts rather than, as he saw it, being at the mercy of an unreceptive autocrat. He fought hard to position himself behind the camera, not so much from a desire to change course, but as a means of protecting his work; Wilder had resolved never again to submit to the perceived tyrannies of men like Leisen, or see his vision butchered by those who couldn’t recognize its value.
The Crowe interviews, contained in a collection titled Conversations with Wilder, is but one of several published works devoted to the legendary director and his storied career. There are at least seven major biographies of Wilder, and most of them could be found on the shelves of any public library. To the best of my knowledge, there is but one book written about Mitchell Leisen, credited to a film scholar named David Chierichietti. As it was listed as being available in the online catalog for The State University of New York at Albany’s library — the only place it could be found in the area — I immediately sought it out. Not only was it not to be found on the shelf, but the librarian judged it to have been missing for a period of several years. It was still cataloged as an active item due to the fact that within the duration, no one had realized it was gone — no one had ever requested it. That, in a nutshell, illustrates the degree to which one man’s legacy has eclipsed the other’s — an ironic twist of fate which was lost on neither man in the years to follow. The underappreciated writer, who had found himself involuntarily exiled from Leisen’s sets after being labeled a distraction and a nuisance, would go on to win six Academy Awards. Leisen, despite helming other successful films such as To Each His Own and The Mating Season, by the early 1950s would find himself reduced to directing episodic television. It was undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow for a man who at one point was considered the equal of Lubitsch.
This much is known without the benefit of Chierichietti’s insights: Mitchell Leisen began his career as an art director, known for his opulent tastes and overweening attention to detail. He designed sets and costumes for Cecil B. DeMille before advancing to the rank of director, and consolidated his status with a run of commercial successes. Flamboyantly homosexual, he was generally entrusted with “women’s pictures” — usually melodramas — and light-hearted screwball comedies. He made several good films during the 1930s, including the Carole Lombard vehicle Hands Across the Table and the Preston Sturges-scripted Easy Living, and was given preference on projects which required an element of stylishness and an airy touch. He was, in Wilder’s estimation, “a glorified window dresser.” To his biographer Maurice Zolotow, Wilder related some of his less charitable impressions:
If Wilder’s comments seem unusually harsh, it should be noted that they were given in direct response to those made by Leisen to David Chierchetti, who tracked the old man down in Motion Picture Country Home in 1972.
Wilder biographer Edward Sikov provides a further sampling of some of the jabs made by Leisen at his enemy’s expense:
This rancorous back-and-forth, alternately fueled and refereed by various writers relating Leisen’s cranky diatribes back to Wilder, is amusing in and of itself, but also provides a revealing glimpse into the frightening disconnect that can occur when artistic values and temperaments clash. Wilder had the last word:
In this assertion, Wilder was undoubtedly correct. Hailed by critic Pauline Kael as “rapturous fun” and “one of the authentic delights of the 1930s,” Midnight is a film to rank alongside Ninotchka as one of the best comedies of its era, and proof that even the most contentious of partnerships can produce a classic. Featuring Claudette Colbert in one of her best performances, the plot concerns an opportunistic American showgirl masquerading as a Hungarian baroness, and the hijinks that ensue — the actress often cited the film as her personal favorite, no small compliment given her participation in more widely heralded films such as The Palm Beach Story and It Happened One Night. As far as his unhappy history with Leisen was concerned, Wilder had at least won Round One. Fighting tooth and nail to preserve the integrity of his script undoubtedly paid off — abounding with signature Wilder & Brackett touches, their work on Midnight stands today as a supreme example of the writer’s craft.
As for Hold Back the Dawn, the “damage” of Leisen’s interference with the script is perhaps somewhat more apparent, although the final draft still featured enough in the way of deftly written, idiosyncratic set pieces to qualify the finished product as an above-average effort. Certainly, it stands apart from other examples of the romantic melodrama oeuvre given its unexpected flashes of humor. When Paulette Goddard, as a hard-edged vixen who seduced an American jockey to obtain her green card (and just as quickly discarded him as soon as her citizenship was finalized), remarks of her ex-husband’s height, “A woman wants a man, not a radiator cap,” the cadence is unmistakably Wildean.
The film is by no means great, and in some places not even particularly good (a fact of which Wilder was painfully aware and blamed Leisen for), but it has a sharp streak of wit running through its more successful passages, no more evidenced than in the conspiratorial relationship between the smarmy cad and trampy tart played by Boyer and Goddard. A professional gigolo by trade, Boyer resolves to follow his cohort's example, circumventing the difficulties of securing his visa via marriage to an American — an automatic guarantee of citizenship. With tourist Olivia de Havilland as his unsuspecting quarry, he sets about putting his plan in motion.
If Leisen ran afoul of Wilder by capitulating to the vanity of Boyer, the actor himself suffered more by positioning himself squarely on the receiving end of the screenwriter’s wrath. After the dust-up involving the cockroach, Wilder made good on his threat that if the Frenchman wasn’t talking to an insect, he wasn’t talking to anyone. As he related to Sikov, he and Brackett “went back and finished the third act, and we gave everything to Olivia de Havilland.” Indeed, the part of a guileless woman being ruthlessly manipulated by an opportunistic suitor (echoes of the actress’s later triumph in The Heiress) was built up to give the actress ample opportunity to shine in what had originally been conceived as a lesser role in a star vehicle for Boyer — in many sequences, the actor was reduced to a spectator. Largely due to the late additions of Wilder and Brackett, who fashioned some very dramatic material for her to work with, de Havilland received the first of her four Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. When told of the events that precipitated the rewrites by Zolotow in 1976, she wrote “I had no idea that I owed that Academy nomination to a cockroach spurned by Boyer and championed by Wilder, but I’m grateful, very grateful.”
Certainly, Hold Back the Dawn was a pivotal film in Wilder’s career, as it bolstered his resolve to step out of other filmmakers’ shadows and take the reins for himself. For that, Leisen deserves no small portion of the credit. The success of Preston Sturges, who also cited Leisen’s botching of his work (specifically the Jean Arthur comedy Easy Living) as the motivating factor in his switch to directing, undoubtedly influenced Wilder’s decision to make his move. As he related to Crowe, “You could get to be an old man writing just Mitch Leisen pictures…He got tired of me, because I contradicted him, and he wrote something entirely different. Very often he didn’t shoot it, or shot something entirely different.” Perhaps, in the end, there was some subconscious measure of gratitude in his attitude towards Leisen — it required the obstacles encountered in dealing with an antagonist to make Wilder’s true destiny apparent to himself. For Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd. and Some Like It Hot, to name just a few, I suspect we all may owe Mitchell Leisen a debt of gratitude...and, of course, to the fortuitous cockroach who made all the trouble to begin with.
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It was a career spanning six decades, featuring some of the most cherished examples of the filmmaker’s craft in the annals of Hollywood history. The Wilder canon is stunning, not only for the number of classics it produced, but for the variety of genres it encompassed; who else, apart from Howard Hawks, ran the gamut from screwball comedy to film noir, taking pause to explore all of the ground in between?
And — in a twist worthy of a Wilder screenplay — it all might never have been if not for a cockroach.
Billy Wilder began his Hollywood career as a screenwriter in the 1930s, churning out made-to-order scripts with his longtime collaborator Charles Brackett. They had successes both modest and major, earning Academy Award nominations for their work on Ninotchka, the classic Lubitsch comedy cheekily advertised under the banner “Garbo Laughs!” and again for Hold Back the Dawn, a romantic melodrama for Paramount. The pair might happily have remained engaged in this pursuit if not for a single event — involving said fateful insect — that forever altered the course of Wilder’s career and by extension, the history of the cinematic medium.
The story goes that Wilder and Brackett had written some dialogue for Hold Back the Dawn that paired Charles Boyer, the embodiment of continental elegance and Gallic mystique, with an unusual scene partner of the non-mammalian variety. The Great French Lover was to play a Romanian refugee of dubious character waiting to gain entry into the United States. Unable to obtain his visa by honest means, he finds himself stranded in a fleabag hotel in a Mexican border town, flat broke and growing increasingly despondent at his reduced circumstances. There was nothing overtly comical built into the premise, and yet — as evidenced by Sunset Blvd. — this particular writing team had an almost perverse knack for locating elements of black humor in even the bleakest of scenarios. Boyer was to be lying in bed, fully dressed and unshaven, listlessly observing a cockroach crawling up the wall. Every time the insect tried to advance, Boyer was to impede its progress with his cane. In bitter imitation of a border guard, he was to say “Where are you going? What is the purpose of your trip?…Let’s see your papers….What, no visa? You can’t travel without a visa…”
Wilder was proud of the scene, which perfectly encapsulated what would become one of his guiding aesthetics — the inherent potential for absurdity in pathos, and the inversion of that equation. Wilder described events that followed to Cameron Crowe, who conducted a series of interviews with the director in the late 1990s:
They are shooting the picture, and Brackett and I were going for lunch to Lucy's — that was the restaurant across the street from Paramount. Now we are finished with lunch, and we passed a table where Mr. Boyer had a nice French lunch with the napkin tucked in here, and a little bottle of red wine. “Hi, Charles, how are you?” “How are you boys?” “What are you shooting today?” “We are shooting the scene with the cockroach.” “Oh, yeah, that's a good scene, isn't it?” He says, “We changed it a little bit.” “What do you mean, you changed it?” He says, “We changed it because it's idiotic — why would I talk to a cockroach if a cockroach can't answer me?” I say, “Yeah yeah yeah, but just the same, we would like you to do it.” “No no no,” says Boyer, “we talked and I convinced Mr. Leisen, I'm not talking to a cockroach.” So it was nothing. The scene became flat, nothing. So now we were upstairs writing the end to this picture, Hold Back the Dawn, the last ten pages. I say to Brackett, “If that son of a bitch doesn't talk to a cockroach, he ain't talking to nobody! Cross out his dialogue!” We won ... kind of. We should have had the whole script filmed ...
The Mr. Leisen referred to in this bitter recollection was Mitchell Leisen, the film’s director. Wilder and Brackett collaborated with Leisen on three films during the team’s tenure as contract writers for Paramount — the other two being Midnight, for which they were the credited screenwriters, and Arise, My Love, on which they provided some behind-the-scenes doctoring.
For Wilder and Leisen, unwillingly yoked together for three successive projects over three successive years, it was a match made in hell. Despising each other with a passion that bordered on irrationality, the two men had a notoriously stormy working relationship — which reputedly came to blows on at least one occasion. Still, if not for this unhappy coupling, the name of Wilder might have fallen into obscurity just as surely as that of his nemesis. Many of Wilder’s ambitions took root in his frustrations with Leisen’s dismissive attitude toward writers in general, and with him in particular — the cockroach episode (in many ways, the straw that broke the camel’s back, but hardly the first time they’d clashed) provided the impetus for Wilder to strike out on his own, directing his own scripts rather than, as he saw it, being at the mercy of an unreceptive autocrat. He fought hard to position himself behind the camera, not so much from a desire to change course, but as a means of protecting his work; Wilder had resolved never again to submit to the perceived tyrannies of men like Leisen, or see his vision butchered by those who couldn’t recognize its value.
The Crowe interviews, contained in a collection titled Conversations with Wilder, is but one of several published works devoted to the legendary director and his storied career. There are at least seven major biographies of Wilder, and most of them could be found on the shelves of any public library. To the best of my knowledge, there is but one book written about Mitchell Leisen, credited to a film scholar named David Chierichietti. As it was listed as being available in the online catalog for The State University of New York at Albany’s library — the only place it could be found in the area — I immediately sought it out. Not only was it not to be found on the shelf, but the librarian judged it to have been missing for a period of several years. It was still cataloged as an active item due to the fact that within the duration, no one had realized it was gone — no one had ever requested it. That, in a nutshell, illustrates the degree to which one man’s legacy has eclipsed the other’s — an ironic twist of fate which was lost on neither man in the years to follow. The underappreciated writer, who had found himself involuntarily exiled from Leisen’s sets after being labeled a distraction and a nuisance, would go on to win six Academy Awards. Leisen, despite helming other successful films such as To Each His Own and The Mating Season, by the early 1950s would find himself reduced to directing episodic television. It was undoubtedly a bitter pill to swallow for a man who at one point was considered the equal of Lubitsch.
This much is known without the benefit of Chierichietti’s insights: Mitchell Leisen began his career as an art director, known for his opulent tastes and overweening attention to detail. He designed sets and costumes for Cecil B. DeMille before advancing to the rank of director, and consolidated his status with a run of commercial successes. Flamboyantly homosexual, he was generally entrusted with “women’s pictures” — usually melodramas — and light-hearted screwball comedies. He made several good films during the 1930s, including the Carole Lombard vehicle Hands Across the Table and the Preston Sturges-scripted Easy Living, and was given preference on projects which required an element of stylishness and an airy touch. He was, in Wilder’s estimation, “a glorified window dresser.” To his biographer Maurice Zolotow, Wilder related some of his less charitable impressions:
Leisen spent more time with Edith Head worrying about the pleats on a skirt than he did with us on the script. He didn't argue over scenes. He didn't know shit about construction. And he didn't care. All he did was he fuck up the script and our scripts were damn near perfection, let me tell you. He didn't have the brains to see that if Charlie and me, if we put in a line, we had a goddamn reason for putting in that line and not a different line, and you don't just go and cut a line or a piece of action to please some actress, at least without putting another line or action in its place. I ask you, is that so difficult to understand? And Charlie hated him as much as I did. Because if we gave in to him, there would be holes in the script which he shot. What can you do with a director that comes on the set at 7 a.m. and puts exact marks where everybody must stand and who'll stop a camera which is rolling to fix the hem of a dress? He didn't know what was a plot. Charlie and I could always give him twenty alternative lines, but to him — cut, cut, cut, it didn't matter. Leisen wasn't the only director who didn't know what a script was. He was more arrogant and more ignorant than the average. He thinks he's smart when he cuts this, cuts that, this isn't necessary, that's extraneous. I tell you, in a good script, everything is necessary or it ain't good. And if you take out one piece, you better replace it with a different piece, or you got trouble.
If Wilder’s comments seem unusually harsh, it should be noted that they were given in direct response to those made by Leisen to David Chierchetti, who tracked the old man down in Motion Picture Country Home in 1972.
Billy Wilder was a middle European fresh from the old country, and most of my fights were with him. Having done eight years of psychoanalysis, I knew that a character had to follow a certain emotional pattern. I'd say, 'Billy, you have this guy doing something that is completely inconsistent. You suddenly introduce a completely different emotional setup for this character, and it can't be. It has to follow a definite emotional pattern.' Well, Billy couldn't figure this one out, but Brackett could. Brackett was sort of a leveling influence. He would referee my quarrels with Billy.
Wilder biographer Edward Sikov provides a further sampling of some of the jabs made by Leisen at his enemy’s expense:
Billy would scream if you changed one line of his dialogue. I used to say, 'Listen, this isn't Racine, it's not Shakespeare. If the actors we have can't say it, we must give them something they can say.'….Wilder's the one with whom we had the most difficult discussions, because he comes from Central Europe and he was stubborn as a mule when anyone touched his words.
This rancorous back-and-forth, alternately fueled and refereed by various writers relating Leisen’s cranky diatribes back to Wilder, is amusing in and of itself, but also provides a revealing glimpse into the frightening disconnect that can occur when artistic values and temperaments clash. Wilder had the last word:
And about this Shakespeare — well, I didn't think our lines were the Ten Commandments chiseled with a platinum hammer out of Carrara marble. It was just — oh, hell, there were these voids in most of his films where any screenwriter could see Leisen has been chopping. Midnight is perfect because I fought him every inch of the way.
In this assertion, Wilder was undoubtedly correct. Hailed by critic Pauline Kael as “rapturous fun” and “one of the authentic delights of the 1930s,” Midnight is a film to rank alongside Ninotchka as one of the best comedies of its era, and proof that even the most contentious of partnerships can produce a classic. Featuring Claudette Colbert in one of her best performances, the plot concerns an opportunistic American showgirl masquerading as a Hungarian baroness, and the hijinks that ensue — the actress often cited the film as her personal favorite, no small compliment given her participation in more widely heralded films such as The Palm Beach Story and It Happened One Night. As far as his unhappy history with Leisen was concerned, Wilder had at least won Round One. Fighting tooth and nail to preserve the integrity of his script undoubtedly paid off — abounding with signature Wilder & Brackett touches, their work on Midnight stands today as a supreme example of the writer’s craft.
As for Hold Back the Dawn, the “damage” of Leisen’s interference with the script is perhaps somewhat more apparent, although the final draft still featured enough in the way of deftly written, idiosyncratic set pieces to qualify the finished product as an above-average effort. Certainly, it stands apart from other examples of the romantic melodrama oeuvre given its unexpected flashes of humor. When Paulette Goddard, as a hard-edged vixen who seduced an American jockey to obtain her green card (and just as quickly discarded him as soon as her citizenship was finalized), remarks of her ex-husband’s height, “A woman wants a man, not a radiator cap,” the cadence is unmistakably Wildean.
The film is by no means great, and in some places not even particularly good (a fact of which Wilder was painfully aware and blamed Leisen for), but it has a sharp streak of wit running through its more successful passages, no more evidenced than in the conspiratorial relationship between the smarmy cad and trampy tart played by Boyer and Goddard. A professional gigolo by trade, Boyer resolves to follow his cohort's example, circumventing the difficulties of securing his visa via marriage to an American — an automatic guarantee of citizenship. With tourist Olivia de Havilland as his unsuspecting quarry, he sets about putting his plan in motion.
If Leisen ran afoul of Wilder by capitulating to the vanity of Boyer, the actor himself suffered more by positioning himself squarely on the receiving end of the screenwriter’s wrath. After the dust-up involving the cockroach, Wilder made good on his threat that if the Frenchman wasn’t talking to an insect, he wasn’t talking to anyone. As he related to Sikov, he and Brackett “went back and finished the third act, and we gave everything to Olivia de Havilland.” Indeed, the part of a guileless woman being ruthlessly manipulated by an opportunistic suitor (echoes of the actress’s later triumph in The Heiress) was built up to give the actress ample opportunity to shine in what had originally been conceived as a lesser role in a star vehicle for Boyer — in many sequences, the actor was reduced to a spectator. Largely due to the late additions of Wilder and Brackett, who fashioned some very dramatic material for her to work with, de Havilland received the first of her four Academy Award nominations for Best Actress. When told of the events that precipitated the rewrites by Zolotow in 1976, she wrote “I had no idea that I owed that Academy nomination to a cockroach spurned by Boyer and championed by Wilder, but I’m grateful, very grateful.”
Certainly, Hold Back the Dawn was a pivotal film in Wilder’s career, as it bolstered his resolve to step out of other filmmakers’ shadows and take the reins for himself. For that, Leisen deserves no small portion of the credit. The success of Preston Sturges, who also cited Leisen’s botching of his work (specifically the Jean Arthur comedy Easy Living) as the motivating factor in his switch to directing, undoubtedly influenced Wilder’s decision to make his move. As he related to Crowe, “You could get to be an old man writing just Mitch Leisen pictures…He got tired of me, because I contradicted him, and he wrote something entirely different. Very often he didn’t shoot it, or shot something entirely different.” Perhaps, in the end, there was some subconscious measure of gratitude in his attitude towards Leisen — it required the obstacles encountered in dealing with an antagonist to make Wilder’s true destiny apparent to himself. For Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd. and Some Like It Hot, to name just a few, I suspect we all may owe Mitchell Leisen a debt of gratitude...and, of course, to the fortuitous cockroach who made all the trouble to begin with.
CAMERON CROWE: Over the years, it appears you’ve upgraded your estimation of Leisen.
BILLY WILDER: Sure, the anger gets washed away, gets watery. You know, you forget about it…I cannot forgive Mr. Hitler, but certainly I can forgive Mr. Leisen.
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Labels: 30s, 40s, de Havilland, Garbo, Hawks, Kael, Lombard, Lubitsch, P. Sturges, Paulette Goddard, Shakespeare, Wilder
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