Thursday, July 07, 2011

 

"If You Want to See the Girl Next Door, Go Next Door"


By Eddie Selover
More than anything else, it was a book that turned me into a movie buff: David Shipman’s The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years. This was the first comprehensive set of star biographies, and in those pre-video days of the early '70s, it told tantalizing tales of films I had no hope of seeing unless they turned up on the late show. Shipman wrote marvelously about many actors and actresses, but maybe too well — his opinions had a way of soaking in. The actors he cared about (Judy Garland, Buster Keaton, Greta Garbo, Deanna Durbin) got love letters, while those he didn’t were pretty much excoriated.

Joan Crawford was one of the latter. The entry on Crawford starts with a putdown by Humphrey Bogart, and Shipman goes on to call her “not much of an actress…as tough as old boots” and to conclude that “she achieved little…her repertory of gestures and expressions was severely limited…(her shoulders) were always so much more eloquent than her face.” And that’s just the introduction. His survey of her career is peppered with words like “artificial,” “heavy,” “monotonous” and “hysterical.” So even before I’d seen most of her work, I was a bit prejudiced against Crawford.

When I finally did, she made it hard to disagree. Her appearance, for one thing. Increasingly through her career, she covered her face in grotesque Kabuki makeup — huge outsized lips, big Groucho eyebrows, piles of dead-looking hair. Her body language was stiff and somewhat mannish, and she did throw her shoulders around a lot. She was especially fond of squaring them off when confronting some hapless male — often a weakling such as Van Heflin, Zachary Scott or Wendell Corey. Although, to be fair, she made most men look weak, even big macho guys such as Jeff Chandler, Jack Palance or Sterling Hayden. When she turned her huge, furious, reproachful eyes on them, they all seemed to shrivel. So did I. If a movie star is someone you idly daydream about making out with, Miss Crawford did not do it for me.

Maybe I just needed to grow up, because sometime in my 40s, I started to change my mind. By then I’d seen some of her best work: Possessed, Grand Hotel, The Women, Strange Cargo, Mildred Pierce. Of course, in these movies she had vivid co-stars and wasn’t the whole show; I still didn’t think she was a very good actress, or even particularly attractive. What finally turned me around was Humoresque. It’s a big, thundering '40s soap opera about a struggling young violin prodigy from the New York ghetto (John Garfield) who is taken up socially, artistically and sexually by a rich older married woman. This role is a field day for Crawford, who gets to fling diamond-hard insults (written by Clifford Odets), ride a horse passionately, have an orgasm during a violin concerto, smash martini glasses against the paneling of swanky bars, and walk into the surf in full evening wear. Ridiculous. And yet she’s gorgeous to look at and completely persuasive as an actor. At every moment, she makes you aware that this is a woman who doesn’t like herself, whose loveless marriage for money has left her bitter and empty. Her awakening from cynicism into love, and her desperate awareness that it’s come too late to help her, is finally quite heartbreaking.

She was a hard woman, no doubt about it. She had a terrible childhood — abandoned by her father, carted around the slums of El Paso by her impoverished mother, learning much too early that men were a meal ticket and what the price of that ticket was. She was rumored to have made a stag film, to have been a stripper and a hooker. When she arrived in Hollywood in her early 20s, one observer remembered her as “an obvious strumpet.” Show people can be terrible snobs and the unconcealed disdain of her colleagues must have marked her deeply. Her whole life seems to have been an effort to scour off the dirt of West Texas and make a lady of herself. More than most performers, she kept reinventing herself and assuming new identities. Born Lucille LeSueur, she became Billie Cassin and then Joan Arden before the studio ran a contest to come up with Joan Crawford. She often spoke of how the movie industry educated her about virtually everything. When you watch her, you can feel the untold hours of effort she has put into her appearance, her diction, and her carriage, to covering up her dark, freckled skin. Much of her falseness comes from this fierce determination to be someone else — someone better.

But it’s also where her power comes from. For example, in Strange Cargo, she plays a prostitute in everything but name (the Production Code was in full force). Although she was at the height of her stardom, and working with Clark Gable in his first movie after Gone With the Wind, she gives absolutely no quarter. Whatever her own experiences, she makes a mighty convincing whore — cold and hardened on the surface, bitter and hurt underneath, and deeply wounded and desperate at the core. She has a great moment where she tries to pretty herself up a little bit after days of crawling through the jungle, and Gable laughs at her in the cruelest and most disrespectful way. She maintains her toughness with him, but lets you see the immensity of her shame and self-loathing. She handles the character’s eventual transformation into a sweet and hopeful woman very subtly and convincingly as well. At no point does she signal that she’s a big star, or a lady pretending. She doesn’t ask for sympathy — she earns it.

Crawford didn’t act in many comedies, and when she did she was often grimly unfunny (They All Kissed the Bride, a misogynistic screwball farce intended for Carole Lombard, is Exhibit A). She did have a sense of humor, but it was too black and caustic to work in the frothy nonsense of her era. However, just once she was awesomely funny: in The Women, playing a comic version of her own tough persona. She plays Crystal Allen (a wonderful name for a hard, glittering woman). In her first scene, she’s on the phone with her married lover, who is trying to cancel his date with her to be with his family. On the phone, she’s a parody of a sweet innocent young thing. But fending off the interjections and insults of her disbelieving co-workers, she’s matter-of-factly rapacious and cynical. When she finally gets him to cancel on his wife and come to her place instead, she does a silent little shoulder-shaking fist pump of victory…the kind of moment that makes you fall in love with a performer. “How do you like that guy?” she snaps, and then spitting out the last word: “He wanted to stand me up for his wife!”

And, of course, there’s Mildred Pierce, her famous Academy Award-winning role. Earlier this year, in HBO’s epic miniseries, Kate Winslet played Mildred exactly as written by James M. Cain — a mixture of likable and dislikable qualities. Mildred is plucky, determined, indomitable and cunning but also naïve, clueless, misguided and weak. This is not the woman Joan Crawford played. Her Mildred may be determined, but she has only the noblest intentions. The drama of the movie is the series of betrayals and humiliations Mildred undergoes at the hands of virtually everyone she trusts. Many commentators over the years have pointed out the obvious irony of Crawford, the abusive mom-from-hell of Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest, winning an Oscar for playing an over-indulgent mother whose only sin is loving and spoiling her daughter to excess. But clearly it was more complicated than that — Joan and Christina’s relationship seems to have been a pitched battle of wills that extended beyond the grave. Something many of us can relate to, in fact.

But Joan Crawford didn’t want complexity. Life, as she knew better than most, is a messy, dirty, terrifying business. Her response was to envision something better, and go after it with laser-like intensity. In 1931’s Possessed (the first of two movies she made with this title), she plays a poor girl in a working class town who can’t reconcile herself to marriage to a cloddish boyfriend and a life of drudgery. One evening, a train pulls into town. She stands there in her cheap dress, looking at the train windows as they pass slowly by, revealing a series of elegant tableaux: rich passengers dressing up, dancing, drinking cocktails, being attended to by servants. Her longing is palpable. She’s still years away from becoming the implacable survivor staring down the world. She’s young and full of hope, and you’re with her all the way when the train stops and she impulsively hops on board, leaving her squalid life behind.

Of course, we don’t leave ourselves or our demons behind when we try to move onward and upward — that’s only in the movies. Shipman’s book includes a famous put-down of Crawford’s unnuanced acting by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote screenplays for her during the '30s. He missed the larger truth about her, the larger performance that her life was all about. He’d have recognized her if he’d looked more deeply, because in her unwavering faith that beauty, money, and class can erase all the compromises necessary to achieve them, Joan Crawford was as quintessentially American as Jay Gatsby.

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Sunday, December 26, 2010

 

The course of true love gathers no moss

NOTE: Ranked No. 95 on my all-time top 100 of 2007


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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Monday, December 13, 2010

 

Centennial Tributes: Van Heflin


By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
In 1984, despite my father’s strenuous objections that a VCR was a “luxury and not a necessity” I purchased my very first VHS videocassette recorder with a bonus I received from my place of employment. As a movie buff, I was pretty jazzed at the thought of being able to record films for the purpose of building a library so that I wouldn’t have to wait until the next time a favorite came on — I had even purchased several dozen videocassettes from the public domain bins at our local Wal-Mart in anticipation of eventually investing in a VCR.

One of the first movies I taped was one of my all-time favorite Westerns — 1957’s 3:10 to Yuma, in which a notorious outlaw played by Glenn Ford is kept under guard by a man who’s so desperate for the $200 he’s being paid (he plans to use the money to buy water for his drought-stricken ranch) that he vows nothing will keep him from making sure Ford is put on a train that will take the two of them to the titular city…even though Ford’s gang outnumbers him and is planning to gun him down the minute he sticks his head out of the hotel in which they’ve hid. The actor playing this man who remains courageous in the face of overwhelming odds was born on this date 100 years ago today, and would not only become one of finest stage and screen actors of his generation but gain an enthusiastic fan of his work in myself long after his death in 1971: Van Heflin.

Emmett Evan “Van” Heflin, Jr. was born in Walters, Okla., in 1910 to Fannie and Dr. Emmett Heflin, Sr. — the senior Heflin being a dentist. Schooled in Oklahoma in his formative years, Heflin relocated in California after his parents separated and upon graduating from high school, answered the siren song of the sea by shipping out on a tramp steamer for a year of nautical adventure. He returned to Oklahoma in pursuit of a law degree but two years into his studies found himself yearning for salt air and sea spray once more — a pastime that would remain with him for the rest of his life.

Since childhood, Van also expressed an interest in acting, and made his stage debut in the late 1920s in a performance of Channing Pollock’s Mister Moneypenny. When that play folded after 61 performances, Heflin returned to his lady love, spending the next three years sailing up down the Pacific. After that, it was back to the footlights for a series of various short-lived stage productions until he finally landed a plum assignment in S.N. Behrmann’s End of Summer in 1936. That was also the year he made his film debut alongside Katharine Hepburn in A Woman Rebels; a job that won him a contract with RKO and led to roles in such B-pictures as The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1937), Flight from Glory (1937), Annapolis Salute (1937) and Saturday’s Heroes (1937).

Heflin’s Woman co-star Katharine Hepburn requested that he play the part of reporter Macaulay Connor in her successful stage triumph of The Philadelphia Story — but unfortunately, MGM cast Van aside in favor of James Stewart in the 1940 film version. It wasn’t a total loss for the actor, however; he got a contract with the studio out of it and began to make more movie appearances along the lines of The Feminine Touch (1941) and H.M. Pulham’s Esq. (1941). His third assignment for Leo the Lion cast him as the alcoholic, Shakespeare-spouting buddy of gangster Robert Taylor in Johnny Eager, which received a December 1941 premiere but didn't get wide release until the following year and ended up nabbing him the 1942 best supporting actor Oscar. His film career, however, did not end up suffering beneath the “Oscar curse”; although he was still making appearances in B-pictures such as Kid Glove Killer (1942) and Grand Central Murder (1942), MGM began grooming him for leading man roles — notably Tennessee Johnson (1942), an entertaining (if wildly inaccurate) biopic of the 17th president of the United States, Andrew Johnson.

Heflin’s career on the big screen took a brief hiatus during World War II to allow him to “do his bit” — though he didn’t completely stray from the business; he served as a combat cameraman with the Motion Picture Unit and also the Ninth Air Force in Europe. But he returned to pictures in 1946 with The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, a crime melodrama that featured Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott and, in his film debut, Kirk Douglas. In Ivers, Van played the part of Sam Masterson, a vagabond whose return to his home town threatens to expose a hidden secret kept between old flame Babs and her D.A. husband Kirk (this time it was his turn to play the drunk). Ivers would establish Heflin as a frequent participant in the film style labeled by the French as “film noir”; his other films in this vein included Possessed(1947), Act of Violence (1948) and The Prowler (1951). The latter two would feature two of the actor’s most memorable performances: Violence cast him as an ex-GI-turned-successful-businessman who finds himself being stalked by a slightly unhinged Robert Ryan (also an ex-GI). In Prowler, Heflin is an ambitious cop who kills the husband of a wealthy woman (Evelyn Keyes) and then marries her in a twisted pursuit of the American Dream. Heflin’s noir credentials would even stretch over to radio; he played Raymond Chandler’s famous shamus Philip Marlowe in a summer series over NBC Radio in 1947 that, as a lifetime OTR fan, I think was superior to the better-known 1948-51 CBS version with Gerald Mohr.

As an actor, Van Heflin displayed a tremendous range and versatility — he demonstrated an ease and comfort in musicals (Presenting Lily Mars, Till the Clouds Roll By), costume pieces (The Three Musketeers, Madame Bovary) and dramas (B.F.’s Daughter, East Side, West Side).

In 1953, he would appear in what probably remains his best-known film, the classic Western Shane — Heflin plays Joe Starrett, a simple homesteader whose battle against a powerful cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) is joined by the titular gunfighter, played by Alan Ladd. Shane becomes Starrett’s farmhand and the idol of Joe’s young son (Brandon de Wilde)…and is also drawn to Starrett’s wife Marian, played by actress Jean Arthur in her final theatrical film appearance. One of my favorite moments in Shane occurs during a rousing fistfight between Starrett, Shane and Ryker’s hired goons — at one point during the ruckus, Starrett and Shane look at one another and grin in solidarity and then go back to punching out the lights of the villains. A similar sequence occurs earlier in the film when Shane helps Starrett remove a large stump from his property; it’s been suggested that there’s a hidden attraction between Marian and Shane but I find the camaraderie exhibited by Shane and Starrett to be every bit as interesting as well.

Shane is no doubt Helfin’s best-recognized cinematic showcase but my favorite of his film performances is in the movie I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. I’ve always been a huge fan of Van’s character, Dan Evans, and how he insists on carrying out his volunteered duty of escorting Glenn Ford’s outlaw Ben Wade to that 3:10 locomotive despite the overwhelming evidence that it’s a suicidal mission at best. It’s not about the money; Ford offers him a bribe that dwarfs the piddly two hundred clams Heflin’s signed up for — it’s all about principle and doing the right thing. The Western movie would serve Heflin’s amazing acting versatility well; among the memorable oaters he also graced include The Raid (1954), an underrated tale about a group of escaped Confederate prisoners who plan to rob a bank and set fire to a town during the Civil War; Count Three and Pray (1955), in which Heflin plays a reformed wastrel-turned-pastor who encounters trouble in the small town he’s chosen to preach; and Gunman’s Walk (1958), in which his rancher must mediate the conflict between his two strong-willed sons (Tab Hunter, James Darren).

Other outstanding performances in Heflin’s catalog include the films Battle Cry (1955), Patterns (1956), They Came to Cordura (1959), Stagecoach (1966), The Ruthless Four (1968) and his final feature film, Airport (1970) — in which he played the sympathetic but nevertheless twisted antagonist whose on-board bomb sets the film’s plot in motion. In between his film assignments, Van continued to distinguish himself onstage in productions of A Memory of Two Mondays, A View from the Bridge and A Case of Libel. He reprised his role from this last production for television in 1968 and was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Single Performance in a Drama; in fact, his last show business project was an appearance in a 1971 television drama entitled The Last Child. He succumbed to a heart attack (while enjoying a dip in his pool) not long afterward at the age of 61.

Heflin once memorably remarked in an interview: “Louis B. Mayer once looked at me and said, ‘You will never get the girl at the end.’ So I worked on my acting.” And fans of this remarkably talented actor are all the richer for it; Van Heflin may not have been a conventional handsome leading man by Hollywood standards — but he left behind a legacy of film performances that would make any “pretty boy” green with envy. I’m proud to call myself a fan.

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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

 

Centennial Tributes: Robert Ryan

By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
(Warning: Spoilers contained herein…)

Robert Bushnell Ryan was born 100 years ago on this date and he’s one of only a handful of actors who I’ll take the time to watch in anything. But since confession is good for the soul, I thought I’d start this essay out with an admission of guilt…

I used to get actors Robert Ryan and Sterling Hayden confused.

Thankfully, I don’t do that anymore. They’re both still favorites of mine, of course, but I’ve probably seen more Ryan films than those of Hayden’s. My preference for Ryan is due to the fact that the celebrated actor — a man who, off screen, was a pacifist, a tireless campaigner for civil rights and a dedicated foe of McCarthyism — excelled at portraying sadistic villains who were more often than not thoroughly despicable, possessing not the slightest shred of human decency.

And what’s more — he did these roles in such a way that made these “bad guys” oddly endearing…

Born to Timothy and Mabel Bushnell Ryan in 1909, young Robert’s dream was to become a playwright — but since that noble profession can sometimes lead to starvation, he decided to study acting in order to support himself. He had attended and graduated from Dartmouth in 1932, distinguishing himself as the school’s heavyweight boxing champion during all four years of his attendance. He then latched onto a series of odd jobs, including ship’s stoker, ranch hand (in Montana) and a stint with the WPA before signing up to study alongside the great Max Reinhardt. It was during his time with Reinhardt that he met his future wife Jessica Cadwalader, whom he wed in March of 1939 and stayed married until her death in 1972 (he died a year later).

Ryan’s big break on stage came when he was appearing alongside “Viennese Teardrop” Luise Rainer in A Kiss for Cinderella in 1941; her ex-husband Clifford Odets offered him the juvenile role of Joe Doyle alongside Tallulah Bankhead in Odets’ Clash by Night. (In 1952, Ryan would appear in the film version but because of his age was cast in the lead role of Earl Pfeiffer.) It was at this juncture that Ryan began getting small parts in films like The Ghost Breakers (1940) and Queen of the Mob (1940); he received his first screen credit in a B-quickie entitled Golden Gloves (1940), which capitalized on his boxing prowess. From then on, he began to get noticed for his roles in North West Mounted Police (1940), Bombardier (1943), The Sky's the Limit (1943) and Tender Comrade (1943). Upon signing a secure contract with R-K-O in January 1944, Ryan enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as a drill instructor there until 1947. It was while he was in the Corps that he took up painting and, hearkening back to his halcyon college days, won a boxing championship as well.

While in the Marines, Ryan befriended a writer (and future director) named Richard Brooks, who had written a novel that the actor very much admired entitled The Brick Foxhole. Back in Hollywood, R-K-O adapted Brooks’ novel into Crossfire (1947), a down-and-dirty film noir directed by Edward Dmytryk and produced by Adrian Scott (with an adapted screenplay by John Paxton). Ryan portrayed Montgomery, a recently demobilized American soldier who kills a fellow G.I. named Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene) simply because Samuels is Jewish; two other soldiers, Keeley (Robert Mitchum) and Finlay (Robert Young) investigate the murder and ultimately bring Montgomery to justice. Ryan’s portrayal of the anti-Semitic Montgomery was nothing short of astonishing; he literally oozed hatred and intolerance from every pore. The role earned him the only Oscar nomination he would ever receive (for best supporting actor) — but unfortunately typecast him as the silver screen’s resident bigot; he would play similar parts in films like Bad Day at Black Rock (1954) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).

Because roles like Black Rock’s Reno Smith and Odds’ Earle Slater were completely at odds with his real-life persona, Ryan accepted the fact that these parts presented to him as an actor a real challenge — but not one with which he was necessarily happy; he was quite reluctant to discuss Crossfire in later years because he thoroughly detested the Montgomery character. Indeed, Crossfire sort of scarred his film career — though he would get an occasion to be a “good guy” every now and then (Berlin Express [1948], The Boy with Green Hair [1948]), he continued to play the reliable “heavy” in films like Caught (1949), The Racket (1951), Beware, My Lovely (1952), House of Bamboo (1955), Billy Budd (1962) and The Dirty Dozen (1967). When he was once complimented on being one of the silver screen’s best heavies, Ryan remarked: “I guess they never saw me in most of my pictures. Still, I've never stopped working so I can't complain.”

But Ryan’s talent was such that even when he was required to be the "baddie" he was able to add subtle nuances to each character that made them three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human beings. A good example of this is his portrayal of ex-POW Joe Parkson in Act of Violence (1949) — from the moment the movie gets underway he menacingly stalks his former commanding officer Frank Enley (Van Heflin), a seemingly nice middle-class businessman who’s completely flummoxed as to why the embittered Parkson is obsessed with meting out revenge. As the story unfolds, however, we learn that while Parkson’s elevator may not go all the way to the top it’s entirely the fault of Enley, who sold out his fellow soldiers during their internment in the POW camp.

In The Woman on Pier 13 (1950, a.k.a. I Married a Communist), Ryan plays a former stevedore who’s just starting to make good in his company when his past comes back to haunt him in the form of Communist agitators eager to exploit his former affiliation with the Party. Though the film presents the Commies as little more than “gangsters,” Ryan’s Brad Collins character is actually played in a sympathetic fashion; a tragic noir hero whose fate cannot be altered because of his youthful indiscretion. Another noir from that period, On Dangerous Ground (1952), features Ryan on the right side of the law — but as big city cop Jim Wilson, he’s often no better than the “garbage” he deals with on a day-to-day basis…roughing up suspects and seeming on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Assigned by his commander (Ed Begley) to assist locals in a murder investigation in a small town upstate, he comes face-to-face with his doppelganger (Ward Bond) and is redeemed by the love of the murderer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino).

As I stated in the opening lines of this essay, I am such a huge fan of Robert Ryan that I’ll watch anything he’s in…and admittedly, there are a large number of his movies that I can easily pick out as favorites. But the film I keep coming back to — and the one that I personally feel contains his finest performance onscreen — is The Set-Up (1949); a short-and-sweet boxing saga (written by Art Cohn and directed by Robert Wise) that stars Ryan as a worn and faded pugilist named “Stoker” Thompson who’s scheduled for just another bout in his thirty-five years participating in “the sweet science.” Stoker is washed up, a has-been — and his crooked manager Tiny (George Tobias) is so certain that Stoker is going to tank that he takes money from mobster Little Boy (Alan Curtis) for his man to “take a dive”…but decides not to clue Stoker in on the deal, in order to keep more of the kitty for himself.

Stoker is definitely mismatched: he’s fighting the much younger and heavily favored “Tiger” Nelson (Hal Baylor), but somehow has a feeling that he’s “just one punch away” from reversing his misfortune in the ring. His ever-patient wife Julie (Audrey Totter) has heard this all before, and vows to herself that she won’t be at his bout that evening because she can’t bear to see him take another beating. (She later changes her mind.) But the angel who looks after fools, drunks and children is in Stoker’s corner that evening; Stoker’s actually giving Nelson a good scrap — and even when Tiny finally tells him about the fix, he refuses to give up. He soundly beats Nelson to a pulp, and emerges victorious — but Little Boy has the final say when his goons break Stoker’s right hand, taking him out of the fight game forever.

The Set-Up runs a total of 72 minutes and takes place in “real time” — and Ryan is nothing short of sensational. His early career as a boxer no doubt helped in this role, but Ryan clearly has the chops to convince the viewer that he is that washed-up pug who daydreams of a comeback and gets that one-in-a-million opportunity to show that he “could have been a contendah.” The haunting finale of the film — where an anguished Stoker cries out to Julie “I can’t fight no more” — is both heart-breaking and bittersweet; Totter’s performance as the supportive spouse will convince you that although Stoker’s career has ended due to tragedy, she is just the woman who can inspire him to carry on.

One thing that has always fascinated me about Robert Ryan is how he managed to emerge unscathed from the period of paranoia prevalent in the 1950s despite his defiant liberalism; when the House Un-American Activities Committee was discovering “subversives” under every bush and many actors and actress who had even the tiniest tinge of “pink” (read liberal) in their politics found themselves out of work. Ryan once commented: “I was involved in the things he [McCarthy] was throwing rocks at but I was never a target. Looking back, I suspect my Irish name, my being a Catholic and an ex-Marine sort of softened the blow.” Ryan walked the walk and talked the talk (he intensely disliked his Flying Leathernecks co-star John Wayne because the Duke was in favor of the blacklist): he was an extremely vocal supporter of the group known as “The Hollywood Ten” and donated his time and money to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee, and United World Federalists. He also founded the Hollywood chapter (along with entertainer Steve Allen) of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy in September of 1959. In the 1960s, he volunteered to serve in the cultural division of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and with other actors like Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, founded the short-lived Artists Help All Blacks. He even became a vociferous supporter for Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic Presidential campaign in 1968.

Toward the end of his life, Ryan continued to do outstanding work in films, including The Professionals (1966), The Wild Bunch (1969), Lawman (1971) — he even went out with a winner in his last film, The Iceman Cometh (1973), in which he played the terminally ill political activist Larry Slade. Ironically, Ryan was himself was diagnosed at the same time with lung cancer, a condition that he publicly denounced (in the manner of actor William Talman) as being caused by his heavy use of cigarettes. He died on July 11, 1973.

(Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, where Robert Ryan is often referred to as “one of the most delectable rat bastards of the silver screen”…and in all honesty is meant to be a compliment.)


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# posted by Ivan G Shreve Jr @ 9:30 AM 2 comments

Friday, May 15, 2009

 

Centennial Tributes: James Mason


By Edward Copeland
When an artist is called prolific, it is usually an adjective being attached to a writer or if it's in the film medium, perhaps a director, but there probably is no better word to describe the amount of film and television work churned out by James Mason as an actor. Check out his filmography at IMDb. Even if all his work were available on DVD, I doubt anyone would have time to watch it all. Hell, I doubt Mason himself, who was born 100 years ago today, could have even been able to view everything he was in. He was too damn busy. His first credited film role dates to 1935 in a mystery titled Late Extra and it seems as if he never stopped working after that in films originating in all parts of the world. Mason turned in one of his best performances for director Carol Reed in 1947's Odd Man Out, which tragically is not available on Region 1 DVD. Mason turns in a superb outing as an Irish nationalist who tries to evade police after a robbery, despite the fact that he's been seriously wounded. As I mentioned, Mason's filmography is so extensive, there is no way I could be comprehensive, even if I wanted to be, so I'm sticking to the films I've seen or that I recognize as being notable. There were several more I'd hoped to catch, but an unexpected hospitalization interferred with my plans. In 1949, Mason co-starred with Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Ava Gardner and Cyd Charisse in Mervyn LeRoy's odd but watchable hybrid of soap opera melodrama, romance and noir in East Side, West Side. Mason plays Stanwyck's husband, who truly loves his wife but can't bring an end to his caddish playboy ways. 1951 brought two distinctive roles for Mason. He played Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in The Desert Fox, making the man a sympathetic soldier who had no use for Hitler's lunacy and politics. He even reprised the role in a cameo in 1953's The Desert Rats, which focused on Richard Burton as a Scottish army officer. His other 1951 offering had the look of a Powell-Pressburger production thanks to the great color cinematography of Jack Cardiff, but Albert Lewin directed Pandora and the Flying Dutchman which reunited Mason and Gardner in a modern interpretation of the mythical tale. 1952 brought another of Mason's greatest roles and yet another film frustratingly not found on Region 1 DVD: Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 5 Fingers. Mason excels as the valet for the British ambassador to Turkey during World War II who envisions a cushy existence for himself, one he intends to finance by becoming a spy for Germany. It's another example of what Mason brought to all his greatest roles: a certain gravity that tethered him to the ground and made almost all his roles seem real even in the most questionable of films. In 1953, he teamed with Mankiewicz again and while Marlon Brando garnered most of the attention as Antony in Julius Caesar, Mason was no slouch as Brutus either. The following year brought two of Mason's most recognizable roles: His first Oscar nomination as Norman Maine in the remake of A Star is Born opposite Judy Garland and as the legendary Captain Nemo in the adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea opposite Kirk Douglas. Mason made an odd choice in 1956 when he appeared opposite Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Forever, Darling. In their second feature film during the run of I Love Lucy, Desi and Lucy played a couple with a struggling marriage and Lucy starts being visited by her guardian angel who wants to help her save her marriage, the main joke of the film being that her angel is a dead ringer for James Mason, her favorite movie star, which does lead to a funny sequence where they go to see a positively awful looking James Mason movie. Three years later, he starred in one of his time capsule candidates: playing the suave bad guy mistakenly chasing Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest. That same year, he returned to Jules Verne as a professor who becomes obsessed with the idea of finding his way to the earth's core in Journey to the Center of the Earth. I can only assume his descent into partial madness was sped along by having to endure Pat Boone's attempt at a Scottish accent and frequent slips into lip-synching pop songs. Throughout the late 1950s period, the ever-busy Mason started being seen with more frequency on the various theater anthology series on television, work on the small screen he continued in the 1960s while still appearing on the big screen. When 1962 arrived, Mason took on the character of Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita. Once again, while he was surrounded by some silliness around him (provided mainly by Peter Sellers), Mason kept Humbert grounded in the real world even as he obsessed about the young teen (Sue Lyons). Throughout the 1960s, Mason continued to appear in film productions around the world as well as on television, including a four-episode run on TV's medical drama Ben Casey. In 1966, he scored his second Oscar nomination, this time in supporting, as the older London businessman obsessed with making a carefree, somewhat homely teacher his mistress (Lynn Redgrave) in Georgy Girl. Be careful what you wish for. Mason continued to balance classics with potboilers and paychecks, such as a film of The Sea Gull or exploitation classics such as Mandingo. Sometimes, the stars aligned and a little gem sprang force such as The Last of Sheila. Written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, it's a mystery disguised as Hollywood satire featuring Mason, Raquel Welch, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, Richard Benjamin, Joan Hackett and none other than young Ian McShane long before we ever met Al Swearengen. He returned to the Nazi military for Sam Peckinpah for Cross of Iron and returned to a heavenly guise, this time trying to guide Warren Beatty in an afterlife screwup in Heaven Can Wait, the 1978 remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan. The story requires more than just a little suspension of belief but like most of Mason's roles, he manages to sell it somehow even if others in a production descend to camp. The next year he got to spar lovingly as Dr. Watson to Christopher Plummer's Sherlock Holmes in Murder By Decree, making the most out of a night at the theater or a meal's last pea. He worked for another monster, a vampire, (see comments) when TV adapted Stephen King's Salem's Lot in 1979 and he earned a final Oscar nomination as supporting actor as the wily defense attorney of a crooked hospital in The Verdict in 1982. Mason never managed to nab the golden guy, but he sure knew how to put on a good show.



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# posted by Edward Copeland @ 1:23 PM 4 comments

Thursday, January 17, 2008

 

Two trips to Yuma

By Edward Copeland
My general rule is to avoid remakes of good movies, but when 3:10 to Yuma was opening last year, it was a case of a remake where I hadn't seen the original. So I waited. I finally caught up with the 1957 version and while it was good enough, I saw room for improvement and watched the 2007 edition. Now that I've seen both, I can say that each film does some things better than its cinematic sibling.

The things I liked better in Delmer Daves' 1957 3:10 to Yuma is its stark black-and-white cinematography and great use of shadows. It also happens to contain what may be the best Glenn Ford performance I've ever seen as the bad guy Ben Wade. He's smooth and though Ford was cast against type as the villain, his Wade doesn't chew the scenery in a sinister way as you might expect. He's charming and seductive and you can really see how the underlying bond of mutual respect develops between him and the rancher Dan Evans (Van Heflin).

In the 2007 version, while Russell Crowe is very good as Ben Wade, his rendering of the character actually pales a bit when compared to Ford's. On the other hand, Christian Bale's Dan Evans does develop better and shows more shadings than Heflin's model.

Daves' 1957 version also is great in its efficiency. It runs less than 90 minutes and doesn't seem to suffer for it. In contrast, director James Mangold's 2007 version, while paced very well and more than a half-hour longer, seems to skimp on some of the details that the 1957 version had the time to explore.

What 2007's version has going for it, in addition to filmmaking advances, is just the sheer Western spectacle of it all. It sacrifices the intimacy of the 1957 film, but adds the scope. Also, Ben Foster makes a much bigger impression as Wade's main henchman Charlie Prince than Richard Jaeckel did in the earlier movie.

I haven't read the Elmore Leonard story upon which both films were based, but I've heard the 2007 3:10 to Yuma adheres more closely to its source in terms of its ending.

Of course, the surprise element was lost on me in the 2007 version since I'd seen the 1957 one first, but I think the darker ending of Mangold's version actually doesn't work as well as Daves' film.

Both versions end up being good, but of the two films, I prefer the 1957 film.


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# posted by Edward Copeland @ 7:04 AM 2 comments

Monday, July 16, 2007

 

Centennial Tributes: Barbara Stanwyck


By Edward Copeland
The tributes to Barbara Stanwyck this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the year of her birth, started early and frequently. Dammit, she deserves it. Still, I saved my salute until today, the actual 100th anniversary of her birth. Stanwyck was nominated four times for best actress Oscars, but never won, though she did receive an honorary Oscar in 1981. If I controlled the Oscars, she would have four statuettes, though interestingly not for two of the films she was nominated for where she played more victimized characters. Stanwyck was too strong a presence to make those roles convincing to me.

STANWYCK IN THE 1930s


Some of Stanwyck's most interesting work came early in her career with a pair of 1931 films, which couldn't be more different. Neither really portrayed her as a truly malevolent schemer as many of her best roles would, but they were fascinating. The Miracle Woman was fascinating, not only because of its early introduction to Stanwyck, but because it was one of Frank Capra's most un-Capra outings. Florence Fallon starts as a bit of plotter, but is sparked by vengeance. When her preacher is fired from the church where he's preached for years, she teams up with a con man (Sam Hardy) to become a fake faith healer. Of course, this is Capra after all, so when she meets a decent blind man (David Manners) she soon recovers her lost faith and reforms. Regardless, The Miracle Woman remains a fine piece of work with Stanwyck's great performance as its crucial center.

Her other 1931 offering, William Wellman's Night Nurse, gives Stanwyck a more heroic role as she's assigned to care for two ailing children and begins to think that someone is trying to let the kids die for nefarious reasons (among the bad guys, Clark Gable), so she teams with a man of shady origins himself (Ben Lyon) to get to the bottom of the plot and save the young ones' lives. Night Nurse also offers great work from Joan Blondell as one of Stanwyck's pals. 1933 brought Stanwyck her first truly great femme fatale role as well as a part in yet another odd entry in the Capra filmmography. The first was the very odd Capra film The Bitter Tea of General Yen, where Stanwyck played a young woman coming to Shanghai, China during the middle of its civil war to marry a missionary. Once there though, she gets separated from her fiance and becomes involved with a a Chinese general (Nils Asther). Is she prisoner? Is she there willingly? Will there be romance? The film hedges around all these issues, but it is a curious artifact both of old Hollywood stereotypes and pre-Code filmmaking. According to IMDb, this film was the very first to play at Radio City Music Hall.

Stanwyck's other 1933 offering certainly pushed the pre-Code boundaries and it manages to still induce some shocks today. Baby Face concerns Lily Powers (Stanwyck), who literally sleeps her way from floor to floor in a New York office building, leaving many damaged men in her wake. Of course, Lily will have to pay a bit before the movie's end, but her maneuvering and single-mindedness is breathtaking, especially in the hands of Stanwyck. You can see a little of Phyllis Dietrichson being born in Baby Face. One other note of interest: The movie also has John Wayne in a small role. In 1935, Stanwyck got to have a little bit of fun starring as the title character in George Stevens' Annie Oakley. Of course, it's not the musical telling like Annie Get Your Gun, but it is nearly as romanticized, but Stanwyck has fun with it.

Two years later, Stanwyck finally landed her first Oscar nomination for the landmark weepie Stella Dallas. I'm not a big fan of this one, whose most positive attribute I find is that it makes Bette Midler's 1990 remake look even shittier. King Vidor's melodrama tries its best and Stanwyck is good, but I like my Stanwyck to be strong. It doesn't help that the then 30-year-old Stanwyck is eventually supposed to be the mother of the awful Anne Shirley, who was 19 at the time. Still, Stanwyck was better than the winner, Luise Rainer pretending to be Chinese in The Good Earth. Still, if the Academy would have opted for a melodramatic tearjerker that year, they should have picked Greta Garbo for Camille, though I imagine I would have voted for Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth. The final Stanwyck offering from this decade that I got to see was Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific, an overlong but still entertaining account of the railroad race to the West Coast. Stanwyck even does a half-decent Irish accent in a cast whose every member seemed destined to become a Preston Sturges regular (Joel McCrea, Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff). She's torn between her love for two men — McCrea and Robert Preston, but there is never much doubt who will get her in the end or even how they will get her.

STANWYCK IN THE 1940s



Preston Sturges. Howard Hawks. Frank Capra. Billy Wilder. All in one year to boot. That's a helluva run for anyone and 1941's triple Stanwyck feature truly astounds to this day. The weakest of the three, Meet John Doe, is a more conventional Capra, especially given her previous work with the director, and it's also a lesser Capra when compared to his classics such as It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life. Still, Stanwyck is great fun as the Janet Cook of her day, who concocts a suicidal, jobless man for a newspaper story then has to rush to find someone to pretend to be him, which she finds in the form of a man hard up for cash (Gary Cooper). The charade ends up launching a political movement that even Stanwyck's reporter comes to believe in. However, Meet John Doe wasn't the best Cooper-Stanwyck teaming of 1941. That honor goes to the sublime Ball of Fire, which earned her a much deserved Oscar nomination that she lost to Joan Fontaine for Suspicion. Directed by Hawks with a script by Wilder and Brackett from a story by Wilder and Thomas Monroe, Ball of Fire is a hilarious twist on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, only Snow White (Stanwyck) is a gangster's moll named Sugarpuss O'Shea and the dwarfs are cloistered professors out to create a dictionary of slang. Stanwyck's other comic gem from 1941 put her to work with Preston Sturges opposite Henry Fonda and the inimitable Charles Coburn as Stanwyck's con artist father who travels with his daughter, bilking the gullible on cruise ships until Stanwyck makes the mistake of falling for their latest mark (Fonda).

Of course, 1944 brought Stanwyck her third Oscar nomination and the one she was robbed the most for, perhaps her greatest role: Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder's classic Double Indemnity. The sultriness and seductive powers she wields as Phyllis really set the mold for all femme fatales to come. It's easy to see how Fred MacMurray would get suckered into her trap: The web she weaves is so sticky, I doubt any human no matter how smart or strong-willed would be able to avoid it. Phyllis truly is a wonder to behold, as is the movie itself, which is a must-see to this day. Ingrid Bergman was good in Gaslight, but she had nothing on Stanwyck's performance here and the film's loss of best picture to Going My Way and the lack of nominations for MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson are some of Oscar's biggest all-time blunders. Two years later, she had the title role in an odd little noirish tale, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. The tale is almost too complicated for its own good as Martha's former lover (Van Heflin) returns to town after many years to find Martha wed to a powerful D.A. (Kirk Douglas) and tortured by her past — or is she? Stanwyck's final Oscar nomination came from Anatole Litvak's adaptation of the radio play Sorry, Wrong Number and it plays as if it was meant for the radio, since it's practically a one-woman show as Stanwyck plays an ailing woman alone in a house who overhears a murder plot on the phone and becomes convinced that she is the intended victim and that her missing husband (Burt Lancaster) may be involved. Stanwyck does what she can, but being the victim was never what she did best, even when flashbacks start to make the case that perhaps she's more manipulative than helpless. Still, the entire enterprise really ends up being so murky, it's hard to find a solid character for her to grab a hold of in there.

STANWYCK IN THE 1950s



The Hollywood of old is not unlike the Hollywood of today and as Stanwyck reached her 40s, her roles became either smaller or in far less important works. Still, she managed to find a gem still now and then, such as in Fritz Lang's 1952 film Clash By Night, which would seem to be noirish but really is more of a straight-forward romantic triangle with Stanwyck playing a woman returning to her home in a fishing village and marrying, almost on a whim, the decent Paul Douglas, while being tempted by the devilish Robert Ryan. The following year, she played a commoner turned socialite who wed Clifton Webb and ends up on the Titanic. Their relationship is even chillier than the iceberg the ship is headed for, but this still is the second-best film telling of the story after A Night to Remember and though nearly as melodramatic as James Cameron's version, it seems positively profound in comparison and does it in half the time.

1954 brought two roles: A smallish turn as the daughter of a corporation's largest shareholder and founder who is wooed by competing interests in Executive Suite and a venture into the West she soon will seem trapped in opposite Ronald Reagan in the programmer Cattle Queen of Montana, which manages to show both positive portrayals and negative sterotypes of Native Americans at the same time. Thankfully, her next trip out of West gave her a role more in tune with her greatest works. 1955's The Violent Men cast her as Martha Wilkinson, the Lady MacBeth of the prairie, only without the guilt or loyalty to her husband. With Edward G. Robinson as her crippled husband and Glenn Ford as the good-hearted rancher out for revenge, The Violent Men is quite an underrated find. Her 1957 Western proved to be even odder as she took the role of Jessica Drummond in Samuel Fuller's Forty Guns. It's almost a Western noir as Jessica runs roughshod over an Arizona county with the help of hired guns, though the ending seems to want to have it both ways with her longing for the good guy. It's an interesting movie but one that would have been better if the actors surrounding Stanwyck weren't such a collection of stiffs.

STANWYCK IN THE 1960s AND BEYOND



Once the 1960s arrived, Stanwyck's film work was less and less frequent, especially once she took on the role as the Western matriarch Victoria Barkley on television's The Big Valley from 1965-69. Among those playing her children on the show were Lee Majors and Linda Evans, whose path she would cross again in 1985 in her final role on the Dynasty spinoff The Colbys. Before she was primarily relegated to television though, she did get one last great role in the villainous vein in 1962's Walk on the Wild Side as Jo Courtney, the vindictive New Orleans madam who may have had more than a passing interest in one of her best call girls (Capucine), who intends to leave. Of course, Jo's husband also didn't have any legs and was forced to roll around on a little board with wheels that seem better suited for Tod Browning's Freaks. She also had one more lark of a roll, playing the matriarch of a traveling carnival who crosses paths with Elvis Presley in Roustabout. Television though gave Stanwyck her final triumph (and an Emmy) when she played the manipulative Mary Carson in the miniseries The Thorn Birds in 1983, once again getting to play the type of role of women you should not mess with that Stanwyck did better than anyone else.



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