John DiLeo's Blog

Oscar Hustle

If you want to stop reading this right now, well, I totally understand.  I, too, feel worn out by this year’s Oscar season, more out of boredom than anything else.  Not one of the nine Best Picture nominees is currently among the top ten movies in America.  Aren’t these nominations intended to generate big box-office returns during the pre-awards weeks?  Ideally, yes, but this year the major contenders are either big hits that are all played out, or smaller films seemingly playing nowhere.  So far, the big stories of the 2014 Oscar season are the emergence of Kevin Hart as a major draw and The Lego Movie as the must-see of a blizzard-heavy February.  It seems America doesn’t care much about Oscar.

Then there’s the bad news of all the “special” things the Oscar producers are planning for the telecast, all kinds of meaningless filler, the type of stuff that devours valuable time and invariably leads to, say, Cate Blanchett having to race through names before she’s played off the stage.  Do Oscar producers ever look at previous telecasts?  That’s where all the lessons are, learned the hard way but destined to go unheeded.

Best Picture/Best Actor:  The only nominee that I hated was The Wolf of Wall Street.  Never mind the question of its morality, the one about whether it criticized or condoned its orgy of bad behavior.  I was actually too bored even to consider moral issues.  My problem is primarily with its bad moviemaking, particularly its unjustifiable, punishing length and agonizingly paced storytelling.  But because the director is Martin Scorsese, then, for some, the movie is automatically great.  It’s filled with scenes that make their point, then continue for another ten useless minutes, followed by a scene seemingly identical to the one I couldn’t endure in the first place.  At three hours, Wolf is, I guess, an excessive and overindulgent movie about excess and overindulgence.  Okay, fine, but tedium and repetitiveness are not effective dramatic tools.  Leo DiCaprio snorts coke and frolics with hookers in an endless, shapeless movie, the merits of which clearly elude me.  And talented as Leo is, he hits the same few notes over and over, an uninteresting performance going nowhere.

12 Years a Slave is a promising film that, despite a mesmerizing opening half hour, quickly disintegrates and never recovers.  The most powerful moments come in the shock of matter-of-fact details, such as when a white Southern lady tells a sobbing black woman that she’ll soon forget about the children recently torn from her.  The casualness of such sub-human treatment is shattering, but it’s soon replaced by Paul Dano and Michael Fassbender in an overacting contest designed to see who can be the craziest, most repellent white guy ever.  Suddenly it’s a movie about recognizable actors self-consciously supporting the film’s worthiness while inadvertently ruining it, as we all wait patiently for Brad Pitt to show up and save the day.  There was a great movie to made from this story but this isn’t it.

Dallas Buyers Club is one of those unlikely-hero movies in which the most unexpected person is suddenly politicized, in this case to save his own life.  As a redneck rodeo guy stricken with AIDS, Matthew McConaughey is the propulsive force of this movie.  His ferocious performance is nothing less than sensational.  Yes, his physical deterioration is astonishing but it’s secondary to his total immersion into this wily, fevered fellow with an unstoppable drive.  A win for McConaughey will do wonders for my Oscar apathy.  Plus, he also happens to be in The Wolf of Wall Street (and actually the best thing in it), having helped Leo to his own Best Actor nomination.

The gay-friendly Philomena is, admittedly, right up my alley, so I didn’t mind its use of tried-and-true devices, which perhaps allow you to describe it as an odd-couple road movie.  However, it turns out to be so much more than that, filled with emotional surprises and anchored by two marvelous performances from Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.  As a woman searching for the son taken from her 50 years ago, Dench continues to astound, never doing anything predictable, always digging deeper, always unearthing something truer, richer, and simpler as she brings her character closer to us.  I’ll be rooting for her on Oscar night but no one seems to think she can win this time around.

Gravity is technically wondrous but far less satisfying dramatically.  Captain Phillips is a terrific action thriller, with a superb Tom Hanks performance that, yes, deserved to be nominated.  I liked Her, too, especially the way Spike Jonze brought his unconventional love story to an unexpected but utterly logical conclusion.  If I could change one thing, it would be Scarlett Johansson, not because she wasn’t good as the voice with whom Joaquin Phoenix falls in love.  I just wish it had been an unknown voice so that I, like Phoenix’s character, had to imagine what a “Samantha” might look like if she had a body.  With a big star like Johansson, I naturally pictured her, which seemed to dissipate some of the magic of this unusual, gently yearning love story.

Nebraska represents a return of the Alexander Payne I don’t like, the guy who made About Schmidt (2002), rather than the Payne I do like, the guy who made all his other movies, from Citizen Ruth (1996) to The Descendants (2011).  While Bruce Dern, in an uncompromisingly crusty performance, is the main event, I was not amused by Payne’s condescension toward a state he supposedly loves.  And June Squibb’s acting seems to be a cautionary example of what can happen when you allow an underused octogenarian character actress to explode with all she’s got inside her, which turns out to be too much.  The whole movie feels self-conscious, forced in its quirkiness, trapped in a kind of drab whimsy.

At last, I come to the movie I liked best, the one I believe deserves the Best Picture Oscar.  American Hustle is often called a mess by those who don’t like it, and I would agree that it gets off to a rocky start.  However, while most movies start well and systematically go to pieces, American Hustle is the rare film that gets better and better, richer and more complex, taking all of its seemingly messy strands and fusing them into a movie with more vitality than any other of 2013.  Its exploration of what it means to be real—especially in a landscape populated by politicians, scam artists, and cheaters—addresses not just the characters’ actions but their internal lives.  Scammers Christian Bale and Amy Adams initially bond over their genuine love of Duke Ellington, something still meaningful for them at the end of the movie.  Despite their screwy, thrilling ride in a world of show, they know a pure, honest moment when they see one, and, at the end, they can truly appreciate it.  

The characters in American Hustle are not exactly likable but they’re compelling as ambitious scroungers chasing their desires.  (In Wolf of Wall St. DiCaprio has everything he could ever want in the first hour, so then we just watch him spend an inexhaustible supply of money.)  Each of the main characters has at least one humanizing vulnerability, something we can all recognize and relate to, some flaw that might be their undoing, all of which makes the movie as intriguing in its characters and relationships as it is in its big sting operation.  Who can forget Christian Bale’s loving attachment to his stepson, or Bradley Cooper’s blinding career ambitions, or Amy Adams’ cool plot of sexual revenge on Bale?  An actor I often dislike, Bale has never seemed smarter or shrewder than he does here, while Cooper was never so complicated or multi-faceted.  Then there’s Jennifer Lawrence, as Bale’s wife, whose neediness is camouflaged by her bravado.  Sometimes brashly hilarious, other times heartbreakingly exposed, Lawrence represents what is best about writer-director David O. Russell’s grand tapestry of politics, sex, and crime in the 1970s:  she mixes gutsy comedy with tender longing.  With its pleasurably intricate plotting, crackling dialogue, well-earned laughs, and wrenchingly compromised relationships, American Hustle turns out to be the best “Scorsese” movie since Goodfellas (1990).  

Best Actress:  Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is as close to a shoo-in as there is in the major categories.  My preference for Dench as Best Actress has more to do with Woody Allen than it does with Blanchett.  No, not the scandal, the screenplay.  Blue Jasmine feels like a first draft of something not ready for the cameras, with an unconvincing second half and consistently cardboard male characters.  Despite Blanchett’s all-out commitment and intensity, the film is a miss.  I believed everything about Dench as Philomena, but, even with her fiercest effort, I couldn’t quite accept Blanchett’s Jasmine.

Best Supporting Actor/Actress:  The supporting-actor favorite, Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club, is indeed a fine choice.  So accustomed do we become to him in women’s clothes that, in an immensely poignant scene, we actually cringe with discomfort when he wears a man’s suit to visit his conservative father.  (But my top choice in this category, Sam Rockwell in The Way Way Back, unfortunately didn’t even make the cut.)  As for supporting actress, I’d be fine with Lupita Nyong’o winning for 12 Years a Slave.  Hers was the film’s strongest, most haunting performance.  I assume the Academy will choose Nyong’o over Jennifer Lawrence, which will actually be good for Lawrence’s career.  If she wins this year, right after winning Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook, how long before people start turning on her and all she’s accomplished at only 23?  Besides, it’s not like she won’t be back at the Oscars.  And people like me, despite our annual protests, will eagerly be watching to see what happens.

Shirley, Take a Bow

In 1935, ’36, ’37, and ’38, little Shirley Temple was America’s number one box-office attraction, beating not only Astaire and Rogers but Clark Gable, the King himself.  During this peak of her career, from age seven to ten, Temple gave Depression audiences some of their happiest moments at the movies, notably her showstopping tap dance, up and down stairs, with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in The Little Colonel (1935), or when singing “Animal Crackers (in My Soup)” in Curly Top (1935).  Temple became the pipsqueak queen of the Fox lot, the adorable tot who could do it all, not just sing and dance but generate laughter and tears.  (Her singing and acting now look merely adequate, while her tapping can still knock you out.)

It was in 1934 when stardom struck, thanks to a string of hits including Little Miss Marker, Baby Take a Bow, and Bright Eyes (in which she introduced “On the Good Ship Lollipop”).  While Gable was offering moviegoers his sexual sizzle, and Fred and Ginger were spinning glamorous fantasies, sunny yet spunky Shirley was triumphantly beaming optimism, all in the name of escapism during troubled times.  When Temple died at 85 on February 10th, she hadn’t been that Shirley Temple for about 75 years.  However, America’s favorite little girl, forever frozen in childhood, never really stopped casting her joyous spell.

One of her best films is the picturesque Heidi (1937), made when the Temple formula was already well-honed and strictly obeyed.  Shameless yet irresistible, Heidi milks every emotion, while apparently in complete control of its intended effects.  You can pick at its flaws—an icky wooden-shoes fantasy number, a slapstick scene with a small monkey, an overelaborate chase by cops—all the while succumbing to Shirley’s melodramatic battle with some baddies in the Alps.  She is, of course, indomitably good, kind, and resourceful.  And she can do it all:  yodel, milk a goat, sing a church hymn, you name it!  Does anyone doubt that this orphan will melt the heart of her gruff, unwelcoming grandfather (Jean Hersholt)?  Temple, at times, can be a bit sickening, with her too-cute matchmaking, her pouting when she ought to be acting, and her forced laughter.  Yet she’s also at her best here, with her appealing feistiness arising to counteract the sugar content.

Heidi is an ideal Temple role because the character is a life force, a child with the power to change people’s lives for the better, a miniature Miss Fix-it.  She rejuvenates grandpa, who comes to adore her, then helps wealthy wheelchair-bound Marcia Mae Jones to walk again.  Not everyone is charmed.  The movie has two villainesses:  Mary Nash, as Jones’ governess, and Mady Christians, as Temple’s aunt.  (Nash is named Fraulein Rottenmeier.)  Who can resist Temple’s victories, particularly the scene of Jones walking into the arms of her father (Sidney Blackmer)?  Savor Arthur Treacher, too, as the butler.  His wry comic delivery is a delight, and he’s to be liked even more for having the good sense to become Temple’s ally in the plot.  All in all, Heidi is a very satisfying piece of emotional, suspenseful, and well-mounted storybook filmmaking.

The Little Princess (1939) is another of Temple’s better and more enduring pictures, but it was released just as her popularity was starting to wane, a trend worsened thanks to The Blue Bird (1940), Fox’s oddball, cloying, and positively grotesque attempt to outdo The Wizard of Oz.  Temple’s in-between years included a brief stay at MGM, which resulted in Kathleen (1941), a movie that clung too closely to the tired 1930s Temple formula.  But it was a sweet-sixteen Temple who was in a big hit, the homefront drama Since You Went Away (1944), playing Claudette Colbert’s daughter and Jennifers Jones’ kid-sis.  A lovely teenager, Temple unfortunately didn’t shown any signs of development as an actress, still suggesting the mechanical responses of a child player.  It’s obvious she wasn’t headed for an Elizabeth Taylor- or Natalie Wood-style transition to adult stardom.

Another hit arrived with The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), with Temple as another kid-sister, this time Myrna Loy’s.  Temple plays a self-dramatizing high-schooler who stalks Cary Grant.  It’s a conventional and mostly witless comedy, despite Grant and Loy’s breezy teamwork, with Temple showing no signs of a comedic flair.  Then, in John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), she got to play Henry Fonda’s daughter.  Following such a prestigious Ford-Fonda venture (though it’s a movie I dislike intensely), Temple concluded her movie career with four minor 1949 films.  She retired at only 21.  I suspect she realized that she and the movies had been done with each other for a while, essentially finished when the 1930s came to a close.  She and 1940s Hollywood never found their groove, while her impact as a ’30s icon was secure.  She remains the child star of child stars, the one who made a nation happy like no other ever had, or ever will.

The Juliet and Magnolia Teasers

Classic-film buffs know that Norma Shearer starred as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (1936) and that it was Kathryn Grayson who played Magnolia in Show Boat (1951), two lavish MGM productions from the studio’s glory days.  Fewer fans will remember that both stars had already played their respective roles in earlier MGM movies, with Shearer’s first Juliet appearing in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Grayson’s Magnolia debuting in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946).  These initial appearances consisted of excerpts from the famed properties, mere snippets used as contributions to all-star extravaganzas.  Neither star could have known that within a few years she’d play her role in its entirety, though perhaps each was thinking that an ideal audition situation had come her way.  After all, don’t these early, brief appearances somehow qualify as screen tests?  Yes, they do, but screen tests of a most unusual kind, those actually shared with the moviegoing public.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929, a Best Picture Oscar nominee, was MGM’s attempt to assure audiences that, don’t worry, not only could Metro’s stable of stars talk but they could sing and dance, too!  Though the film in fact proves the opposite, contemporary ticket buyers (apparently still in awe of the sound phenomenon) were sufficiently impressed.  The Hollywood Revue is undeniably priceless as film history, but unfortunately deadly as entertainment.  It’s like watching an MGM musical before the talent arrived, before Mickey and Judy, Jeanette and Nelson, and Eleanor Powell.  But, hey, they were all inventing the wheel as far as movie musicals go, so it’s pretty easy to forgive what now plays like a tacky third-rate vaudeville show:  there’s more marching than dancing; the camera hardly moves; and the movie feels endless.  This has to be the only Best Picture nominee that actually mentions the film (The Broadway Melody) which beat it for the Oscar.  There are admittedly a few moments to treasure (the introduction of “Singin’ in the Rain”; the radiant youth and beauty, if not the gracefulness, of Joan Crawford; Buster Keaton’s dance in drag), but Shearer’s Juliet is not among them.

In a sequence shot in an early Technicolor process, Shearer and John Gilbert perform the balcony scene from Shakespeare’s play.  Shearer is confidently terrible, stealing the scene with amateurish bravado and dominating the more restrained Gilbert.  Lionel Barrymore is present as himself, directing them.  With Barrymore’s instructions to transform the scene into The Neckers, modernizing the dialogue into late-20s slang, the scene is set for a clever and potentially hilarious sketch.  At best you might call it slightly amusing, with its use of “baby” and “gaga” and a bit of pig Latin, but it’s mostly a missed opportunity.  And no one could have been clamoring for more of Shearer as Juliet.  However, in 1936, when she was MGM’s reigning Oscar-winning First Lady, and coming off a big success in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), Shearer played Juliet to Oscar-nominated acclaim, opposite the Romeo of Leslie Howard.

The 1936 Shearer was a far more seasoned player than she’d been at the dawn of talking pictures.  Her dramatic limitations are still apparent, but her natural warmth shines through, resulting in a Juliet far more effective than anyone had the right to expect.  Shearer clearly gives it her all, and she’s certainly more affecting than the strangely cold-blooded Mr. Howard.  There’s, of course, the obvious problem of having a Juliet in her thirties, a Romeo in his forties, and a Mercutio (hammy, though energized, John Barrymore) in his fifties.  I’d describe the result as an honorable prestige picture made with meticulous care, even though it’s unmoving and overproduced to almost spectacle proportions (with all kinds of lavish filler).  If the taste level varies, at least the black and white continually shimmers.  Under George Cukor’s delicate guidance, Shearer was respectable, hardly inspired but light years ahead of her self-conscious awfulness back in 1929.

Till the Clouds Roll By is supposedly a musical biography of Broadway and Hollywood composer Jerome Kern.  Most of the songwriter biopics of the ’40s and ’50s have hopelessly phony and ridiculously fictionalized screenplays, with this particular movie possibly the worst of them all.  As Kern, poor Robert Walker is saddled with a ponderously dull arc to play, while not one moment of the surrounding melodrama is to be believed.  But, as variety shows go, MGM was by now capable of delivering a real humdinger of a program, offering supremely gifted singers and dancers seen to blissful advantage.

The picture begins on opening night of Kern’s triumphant Show Boat, complete with a 15-minute recreation of that landmark 1927 stage performance.  Tony Martin is Gaylord, Lena Horne is Julie, and, yes, Ms. Grayson is Magnolia.  She and Martin perform the classic “Make Believe” quite ably.  But what nearly sinks the number is the distraction of Grayson’s garish overglamorization.  Magnolia is a dreamy innocent, a soprano ingenue, a romantic virgin.  With Grayson’s ample bosom quite fleshily exposed, the sequence becomes absurd.  The costume is simply a disaster:  a white gown, possibly bridal, complete with a short veil and red-blue-green flowery details.  It’s an insult to the material, though, overall, this Show Boat opening is one of the film’s highlights.  Others include Judy Garland’s heartfelt “Look for the Silver Lining” and Mr. Martin’s sublime rendition of “All the Things You Are.”

The 1951 Show Boat, which paired Grayson’s Magnolia with the Gaylord of Howard Keel, was an enormous popular success (and not just because Grayson was appropriately, and far more modestly, costumed in the “Make Believe” duet).  In the first of their three musicals together, it’s immediately clear that Grayson and Keel have chemistry, initially evident in their charming coming-together during the course of “Make Believe.”  Keel sings some of the song to a hanging costume, careful not to scare Grayson away by forcing his virility upon her.  This helps her ease her way into joining him.  This “Make Believe” is smartly thought-out and exceedingly well done.  There’s much more to like here:  Ava Gardner’s increasingly touching performance as Julie; the superb dancing of Marge and Gower Champion; the haunting “Ol’ Man River” of William Warfield; and Keel’s simple, touching “Who Cares If My Boat Goes Upstream?”

And yet this Show Boat is a most uneven movie musical.  Sometimes it’s beautiful and buoyant, other times it’s hideous-looking and dramatically anemic (succumbing to second-act sagging).  Magnolia is certainly the role for which Grayson is best remembered, which has more than a little to do with her aforementioned chemistry with Keel.  He’s an ideal Gaylord, in looks, voice, and manner, so it’s no surprise that Grayson engages most fully in his presence.  However, it must be said that the film’s worst scene occurs when she tells him off (right before he walks out on her) and calls him “weak!”  Despite further hokum, soapiness, and masochism, this version improved some aspects of the original show and the celebrated 1936 film version, notably in its sensible decision to bring Julie back into the story after her usual exit, plus the satisfying choice to end the film with Magnolia and Gaylord still youthful, rather than senior citizens.  I also love Julie’s new Stella Dallas-style fadeout.

Grayson’s performance is overshadowed by Keel’s and Gardner’s, but, like Norma Shearer in 1936, she gives a wholly respectable performance, not only a professional and creditable job but a decided improvement on her earlier brief encounter with her inevitable role.

The Talented Mr. Hoffman

Last December we said goodbye to two movie legends, Peter O’Toole and Joan Fontaine, on the same weekend.  Now, on another weekend, we lost two Best Actor Oscar winners, one (Maximilian Schell, 83) who had a full life and a long career, and another (Philip Seymour Hoffman, 46) in the prime of both his life and his career.  One of the things most surprising and impressive about Hoffman is just how much he accomplished in so short a time:  a dozen or so extraordinary screen performances in a little over twenty years.  With his ordinary-fellow looks and less-than-Greek physique, Hoffman never appeared headed for the Best Actor Oscar, seeming more likely to be one of those great “character actors,” the kind of supporting player who, by his mere presence, helps big movie stars look like better actors.  Or, if he wanted to, he could just steal a scene away from them through the sheer force of his imaginative, risk-taking commitment to acting.

I remember first taking notice of him in Scent of a Woman (1992), then being truly struck by his depth and range in Boogie Nights (1997) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), despite all the formidable actors in much larger roles in both movies.  His promise was more than fulfilled with his Oscar-winning triumph as the title role in Capote (2005).  Though I think the film is deeply flawed and highly overrated, I can’t fault a moment of Hoffman’s work.  Not only is he eerily accurate in capturing Truman Capote’s speech and manner but he’s so alive in the mannerisms, never an impersonator, always a living-breathing thinking-feeling Truman.  The quintessential supporting-actor Hoffman was suddenly an Oscar-winning lead.  How sadly ironic that his main Oscar competition that year, Heath Ledger (for Brokeback Mountain), was another prodigious young talent who became a casualty of drugs.

Two post-Oscar films, both from 2007, are among Hoffman’s best yet haven’t been as widely seen as they deserve.  Both were directed by giants—Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols—who were directing great films even before Hoffman was born.  Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead feels like the work of some young hotshot just out of film school.  In reality Lumet was an 83-year-old celebrating the 50th anniversary of 12 Angry Men, his first feature.  (Before the Devil turned out to be his final film, a most excellent swan song, and his best since The Verdict in 1982.)  Lumet’s direction is so charged, both visually inventive and emotionally alert, turning this film into a satisfying cross between a juicy pulp fiction (featuring crime, lust, betrayal, and revenge) and a ferocious Lear-like family tragedy.  Its tricky time structure—the flipping backward to cover other characters’ perspectives—is reminiscent of the noir classic The Killing (1956), as is the nastily entertaining tone.  Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are brothers who plan to rob the jewelry store owned by their parents (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris), but—no surprise—things don’t go as planned.

Hoffman gives a sly, strong performance as a messed-up man in pain, which includes drug use.  He’s sometimes feverish, sometimes controlled, a bruised child trapped in a grown-man’s body, forever hating his father for making him feel so unloved.  Hoffman plays a real-estate accountant with a life increasingly exciting and dangerous and shocking; this is no ho-hum day at the realty office.  The film’s nearly operatic intensity is anchored by Hoffman’s deep immersion into his troubled, reckless character.

Charlie Wilson’s War is one of the smartest, funniest adult comedies of recent years, an end-of-the-Cold-War movie that’s so much more pleasurable and playful than it sounds.  What might have been a Lions for Lambs type of political dirge was instead fashioned into a witty yet lowdown screwball comedy.  It still has potency, certainly more than it would have if it weren’t such an enjoyable movie.  The outrageous true story of a Texas congressman, played so superbly by a rascally charming Tom Hanks, follows this boozy, womanizing wreck, a politician who genuinely wants to do some good (fighting the Commies, specifically the Russians brutalizing Afghanistan).  As a C.I.A. operative, Hoffman is hilariously caustic and shrewd, with a great under-his-breath line delivery.  He is a terrific foil for Hanks; they become a prime comic team.  At its best, and it’s never better than when Hoffman and Hanks share the screen, Charlie Wilson’s War feels like a contemporary Preston Sturges movie, about as high a compliment I can think to bestow upon it.  Slick yet uncompromising, weighty yet seemingly weightless, Charlie Wilson’s War contains one of Hoffman’s top performances, nabbing him a supporting-actor Oscar nomination.

His third Oscar nomination (for 2008′s Doubt) and his fourth (for 2012′s The Master) were in the supporting category, even though both were earned for essentially leading roles.  Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master may ultimately have been unsatisfying, even perplexing, but Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix are both sensational in it.  Hoffman is utterly believable as a man building a so-called spiritual empire.  In public he’s charming, elegant, and humorous, but he has an occasional angry streak.  He also has some homosexual yearnings aimed directly at Phoenix, which include his vocal rendition of ”(I’d Like to Get You on a) Slow Boat to China.”  He’s a charlatan with immense personality, a man with a gift for communication and persuasion.  The Master is, after all, about power.  And there’s Philip Seymour Hoffman as the title character, wielding his power.  But there’s also the actor himself, at the peak of his own powers, a man who clearly has so very much more to offer American movies.

Tawdry Audrey

Poor Audrey Totter, always getting pushed around.  When she died last December (at age 95) I began writing this tribute, then suddenly gave my attention to the deaths of superstars Peter O’Toole and Joan Fontaine.  After those memorial pieces were posted, my blog was hacked, meaning that the half-written Totter piece was floating in cyber-limbo, yet another example of hard-knocks Audrey getting little respect.  So, here I am, back where I was, trying to right a wrong and give Ms. Totter a fitting, if belated, farewell.

Audrey Totter was the last-remaining of the three screen actresses who constituted Hollywood’s Trashy Trinity.  Marie Windsor died at 80 in 2000, and Jan Sterling left us at 82 in 2004.  I use the term “trashy” most affectionately.  After all, I’m beyond grateful to this trio for bringing plain-talking directness, teasing sexuality, streetwise guts, sarcastic wit, and, oh yes, unbridled nastiness to movies of the 1940s and ’50s.  Though they were rarely on the A list, this trio often made B pictures the cooler place to be, not to mention the more ideal place for gals like them to thrive.  Their bruised glamour often looks better than the more manufactured assets of many a perfect-looking leading lady.  Windsor always looked to me like Joan Crawford’s scheming kid sister, while Sterling and Totter specialized in peroxide blondes.  Totter never gave a performance as brilliant as Sterling’s rotten wife in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), or one as picture-stealing as Windsor’s rotten wife in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), but she usually, at the very least, made her presence known, whether as a rotten wife or not.

Here’s a rundown of some typical Totter roles:  John Garfield’s rebound girl in the noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); a cool magazine editor (and seeming femme fatale) in Lady in the Lake (1946); Claude Rains’ bitchy, slutty niece in The Unsuspected (1947); Richard Basehart’s cheating wife in Tension (1949); a mother who abandons her son in The Blue Veil (1951); a heart-of-gold floozie and lounge performer in The Sellout (1951); a fashion editor, on hand for wisecracks and cocktails, in Assignment—Paris (1952); a greedy, trampy ex-wife (of Richard Widmark) who returns for dough in My Pal Gus (1952); a hooker in The Carpetbaggers (1964).  Totter could sometimes go over the top, often a perk but sometimes a handicap when playing roles like these.  But, hey, who wants “ordinary” when you can get some flashy excitement?

Totter did get some good opportunities beyond the bounds of her typecasting.  In High Wall (1947), MGM’s answer to Spellbound (1945), she’s in Ingrid Bergman territory as a psychiatrist who falls in love with her patient (Robert Taylor) and helps prove him innocent of murder.  It’s somewhat farfetched and overly convenient in its plotting, but it’s also a highly effective and exceedingly stylish film noir (directed by Curtis Bernhardt), a pleasurably tangled mix of pulpy and high-minded elements.  If the film had been a big hit, MGM probably would have given Totter more of a push, teaming her with additional A-list male stars.

The peak film for Totter was another atypical assignment:  Robert Wise’s boxing picture The Set-Up (1949).  Unlike Body and Soul (1947), with its penchant for moralizing, and Champion (1949), with its hyped-up melodramatics, The Set-Up might be called a “pure” boxing film.  It plays like a short story, a distilled bare-boned representative of the boxing genre.  At just 72 concentrated minutes, it’s tight, fluid filmmaking, essentially a seamy, primal piece of film noir.  It follows the lead-up to Robert Ryan’s final fight, a grim climax to a career.  This is an ugly two-bit world fueled only by pipe dreams.  The Set-Up feels like the second half of a boxing movie, the part about the protagonist’s decline and his last-stand chance at redemption.

Totter plays Ryan’s long-suffering wife, yearning for him to quit, unable to watch him get beat one more time.  She walks the streets during the match, with Ryan staring down from the ring at her empty seat.  If you’re expecting Totter to two-time Ryan or poison him or bet against him or punch him out herself, well, you’ve come to the wrong movie.  As in High Wall, we see glimmers of her potential as a dramatic leading lady, though it must be said that she indulges her temptation to overact.  This doesn’t matter too much because, after all, it’s Ryan’s movie all the way.

No one could have been surprised to see Totter turn up as an inmate in Women’s Prison (1955), actually sharing a cell with Jan Sterling herself!  Totter is in for gun possession (though she’s innocent) and Sterling for forgery.  Following her recent parole, Sterling says she’s back for a “post-graduate course.”  I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again:  Women’s Prison makes Caged (1950) look like a documentary.  (Sterling was serving time in Caged, too.)  This is absolute junk enlivened by a cast of mostly likable “dames.”  The great but undeniably slumming Ida Lupino is the evil superintendent, even though she looks and acts more like the fashion editor at Vogue.  She’s a stylish glam-bitch, making life miserable for her girls, including sweet-young-thing Phyllis Thaxter (in the Eleanor Parker role).

Totter manages to get pregnant behind bars when her criminal husband—a prisoner on the men’s side of the facility—sneaks over for a laundry-room conjugal visit.  Harassed and slapped around by Lupino, Totter meets a bad end, resulting in a riot led by her pal Sterling.  Saved from marauding inmates, Lupino promptly goes insane.  It does seem appropriate when one of the matrons says, “They never get things right in prison pictures.”  I do have to say it’s disappointing that Totter is playing such a victim.  Sterling, also playing an honest and good-natured young woman, at least gets to be fun and cut loose with some wisecracks.

Yes, it was nice for Totter that she got some variety in her assignments, but I still prefer my Audrey Totter hard and calculating, cheap and lowdown, and completely unredeemable.  That would make Tension, The Unsuspected, and My Pal Gus prime candidates for the quintessential Totter picture.  All I can say is that Hell just got a little more heavenly, now that Audrey Totter has crossed to the other side.  I hope Jan Sterling and Marie Windsor are looking for a roommate.

“I am Mrs. de Winter now.”

It’s over, the morbid suspense concerning which movie-star sister—Olivia de Havilland, age 97, or Joan Fontaine, age 96—would be the first to die.  Their famously long, long feud made it clear that neither of them intended to be first to go, seeming to turn even mortality into an issue of sibling rivalry.  (I guess they have reached a truce, at least until Olivia makes her way to “the other side.”)  So, Olivia has outlived Joan, besting her baby sister yet again, as she notably had done by winning two Oscars while Joan had a measly one.  But even a pair of Oscars couldn’t erase the sting of Joan’s single Oscar victory of 1941:  when Joan won for Suspicion, among the four losers was none other than Olivia for Hold Back the Dawn.  Pardon me, sis, while I make my way to the podium. 

The saddest thing about Fontaine’s death for me has been the relatively scant attention it has received.  True, the timing wasn’t good, coming immediately after Peter O’Toole’s death (his on December 14, hers on the 15th).  But the depressing part is how quickly the famous and the revered become unknowns.  The extensive coverage surrounding O’Toole’s death has much to do with the fact that his biggest decade was the 1960s, which means that boomers everywhere remember him and his most high-profile movies.  Fontaine’s peak was the 1940s, and there just aren’t enough people around anymore (outside of classic-film lovers) who remember just how major a star she was.

I’ve always felt that Olivia de Havilland was the superior talent in the family, the more relaxed, perceptive, and probing actress.  Acting always seemed vitally important to de Havilland, while Fontaine’s work often looked less committed than her sister’s, as if acting were something she could take or leave.  And yet I do feel that Fontaine gave three great screen performances.  Within that trio, I would not include her Oscar-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, a rather uninteresting performance that I have described elsewhere as ”constipated.”  Nor would I include her lackluster work in Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), which has recently become, in critical circles, the most celebrated of all Fontaine performances.

But she is rather astonishing—not just credible but vibrant—as the soulful, spirited teenager with a heart condition in Edmund Goulding’s The Constant Nymph (1943), for which she received her third and final Oscar nomination.  And she’s shocking in her composure and also intoxicatingly manipulative as the amoral murderess in Sam Wood’s Ivy (1947).  Both of these are award-caliber performances.  (I’ve already written about her work in The Constant Nymph elsewhere on this blog, and examined her title role in Ivy in my book Screen Savers II.)  Then, of course, there’s Rebecca (1940), the film that made Fontaine a star after her late-1930s stretch as a not-too-promising starlet unlikely to match the success of her rapidly rising sister.  She wasn’t seen to advantage dancing with Fred Astaire in A Damsel in Distress (1937), but she finally revealed genuine potential under George Cukor’s careful guidance in The Women (1939).

You could still call Fontaine a virtually untried commodity when David O. Selznick entrusted her with the coveted role of the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca, a risk that paid off handsomely for everyone involved.  Fontaine herself achieved not just stardom but her first Best Actress Oscar nomination.  (She lost to a far less deserving Ginger Rogers for Kitty Foyle, then got a consolation-prize Oscar the next year for Suspicion, which was similar but inferior to Rebecca.)  Selznick’s instinct about Fontaine was nearly as inspired as his gut feeling about casting Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind the year before.  Both films have endured thanks to these actresses and our utter belief in them as being their characters.

Relatively green as an actress, Fontaine was placed in a high-pressure situation, carrying not just a major Selznick production but the first American film helmed by British Alfred Hitchcock.  Her circumstances were fairly close to those of the character she was playing, a woman also inexperienced and thrust into an intimidating world.  As the film opens (in Monte Carlo), she’s a sweet, naive young thing, a paid companion suddenly whisked away from her employer (wonderfully horrid Florence Bates) by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier).  He marries her, which instantly makes her the unexpected (and ill-equipped) mistress of Manderley, his English estate.  In her autobiography, No Bed of Roses, Fontaine speaks about Hitchcock fueling her sense of alienation from the rest of the cast, hoping this would inform her performance.  However his tactics affected the end result—consciously, subconsciously, or both—hers was (and is) an irresistibly effective and appealing performance.  Audiences fell in love with her.  After all, she’s the heartbeat of the movie.

Fontaine was able to make her famously nameless character someone with whom the audience felt enormous sympathy.  By being so open and honest in her reactions and interactions, she made it easy for viewers to feel her aching insecurity and her fears, all that shyness and the ensuing embarrassments.  Hitchcock helped her immensely by using the camera to emphasize just how insignificant a creature she was in a place like Manderley.  He put us right into her shoes, sharing her sense of isolation, like being lost in a maze.  Hitch and his star seem perfectly synchronized, jointly creating the intensely personal point of view by which we experience the first two-thirds of this movie.

It’s lovely to watch Fontaine fall in love with Olivier and experience a schoolgirl fantasy of courtship, even though he’ll continue to be a figure of mystery.  She’s the kind of beautiful girl who doesn’t know she’s beautiful, so fresh and natural.  She’s even occasionally funny.  But now she’ll have to deal with Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), the forbidding housekeeper who has turned Manderley into the haunted shrine of Rebecca, Maxim’s deceased wife to whom Danvers remains twistedly devoted, refusing to accept this little nobody as Rebecca’s replacement.  By icily browbeating Fontaine into quivering aspic, Ms. Anderson became an icon of villainy.  But, despite the fragility and uncertainty Fontaine brings to her role, she knows she isn’t playing a weakling.  If you’ve seen Rebecca with an audience, there’s a moment that invariably elicits cheers, when Fontaine finally stands up to Anderson and proclaims, “I am Mrs. de Winter now.”

Great scenes abound:  Fontaine stunned by Anderson’s creepy guided tour of Rebecca’s immaculately unspoiled bedroom; the troubling unpleasantness between Olivier and Fontaine while their happy-honeymoon home movies play bittersweetly in the background; Fontaine’s almost giddy, then humiliating, staircase descent at the costume ball, engineered so flawlessly by Anderson; the scene at the open window, with Anderson quietly trying to convince a temporarily shattered Fontaine that suicide is the best option left for her.

But for all the charm, poignancy, and exposed vulnerabilities in Fontaine’s performance, there is one element that elevates it beyond the merely excellent.  For most of the movie she has doubted Maxim’s love for her, still believing he’s obsessed with Rebecca, whom she also believes was her superior in every way.  At the film’s 90-minute mark, Maxim blurts out that he hated Rebecca.  This comes right after her body has been found, which will turn Maxim into a murder suspect.  Suddenly seeing her thrust into a situation in which she might lose her husband, you could expect this Mrs. de Winter to be completely undone by worry.  But she has just found out that her husband loves her deeply, and that he has never loved her perceived rival.  And so, Fontaine, while stalwartly supporting Olivier, is carried aloft by this revelation.  She imbues the character with a new confidence and an overriding happiness.  Whatever challenges and miseries come their way, she’s ready for them because she now has a sturdy core of strength.  And her newfound joy is not something that can be concealed.  Yes, it’s all there in the writing, but it could easily have been understressed, or missed altogether, by an actress with a less intuitive connection to the role.

Maxim’s admission about despising Rebecca, and his subsequent suspicion of murder, effectively end the second Mrs. de Winter’s position at the center of the plot.  And yet it’s here where Fontaine’s performance displays its richest subtext, bringing emotional resonance to the least imaginative section of the movie.  The once-frightened girl is now a woman who knows who she is, empowered by love.  It’s a subtle, pleasing transformation that brings warmth to this talkiest part of the plot (including the inquest).  Fontaine was certainly given a lovely arc to play, from total innocent to challenged novice to mature young woman.  And she didn’t miss a beat.

Rebecca has always been a favorite film of mine.  It may not be in Hitchcock’s top-five all-time best, but it’s still pretty terrific, a thoroughly enthralling and atmospheric romantic mystery, a perfect melding of Selznick’s splendor and Hitchcock’s ingenuity.  And it’s blessed with one of those supporting casts you dream about, some of them blissfully typecast to do whatever it was they had already patented to perfection:  Ms. Anderson (who goes so pleasurably over the top), George Sanders, Gladys Cooper, Florence Bates, Leo G. Carroll, C. Aubrey Smith, Nigel Bruce, etc.  The fact that Fontaine was able to emerge as a new star under these circumstances—negotiating the scene-stealing skills of her seasoned co-players—makes her achievement that much more impressive.

When Olivia de Havilland’s time comes, she is sure to get GWTW-sized obituaries, especially because she’s currently the last major survivor of that mega-classic’s cast.  I wish Rebecca had been deemed classic enough to warrant a fitting farewell to Fontaine, but, alas, it seems that when Olivia dies she will best her sister one final time.

My Favorite O’Toole

It’s not a record that anyone is dying to beat:  Peter O’Toole’s eight Oscar nominations for acting, without a single win.  Even his honorary Oscar of 2003 doesn’t quite remedy the impact of those snubs.  O’Toole, who died over the weekend at 81, got his octet of Best Actor nominations for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Becket (1964), The Lion in Winter (1968), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), The Ruling Class (1972), The Stunt Man (1980), My Favorite Year (1982), and Venus (2006).  He certainly lost to some all-time heavy hitters:  Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Marlon Brando in The Godfather (1972), and Robert De Niro in Raging Bull (1980).  And there was no fighting the seeming inevitability of Rex Harrison’s win for My Fair Lady (1964) and clearly no way to topple sentimental favorite John Wayne in True Grit (1969).  The Oscar that seemed destined to be O’Toole’s was the one he eventually lost to Cliff Robertson for Charly (1968).  As The Lion in Winter‘s Henry II (the same character he had played in Becket), O’Toole gave a robustly theatrical performance, filling this showy role with the kind of power and magnetism that wins Oscars.  It was inarguably wrong to award Robertson’s unimpressive turn (in the Oscar-bait role of a mentally-challenged fellow) in a very bad movie.  With O’Toole unfairly slighted, and he and Oscar missing their perfectly aligned moment, they simply never got their groove back.

Actually I would have liked to see that 1968 Oscar go to un-nominated Anthony Perkins for Pretty Poison.  However, if I were to play Oscar god, I would hand O’Toole the 1982 prize for his performance in Richard Benjamin’s My Favorite Year, a seemingly slight comedy that offered the actor one of the richest opportunities of his career.  (Nothing against Oscar’s admirable choice—Ben Kingsley as Gandhi—but I’d still go with O’Toole.)  Set in 1954, My Favorite Year is a clever, well-constructed, and delightfully nostalgic comedy that uses the Golden Age of Television as its background, specifically a behind-the-scenes account of a fictionalized Your Show of Shows-type sketch-comedy show (with Joseph Bologna doing a bang-up version of Sid Caesar).  The fish out of water in this fast-paced NYC milieu is O’Toole’s Alan Swann, an Errol Flynn-ish matinee idol—star of pictures like Captain from Tortuga—now past his prime.  He is the guest star on this week’s program, and Mark Linn-Baker, the show’s youngest writer, is assigned to be O’Toole’s keeper, which mostly means trying to keep him sober.  Of course, despite the challenges ahead, a friendship between them will eventually take hold.

O’Toole is simply sensational playing comedy, remarkably adept at the more slapstick requirements, while inflecting his lines with a pricelessly sharp wit.  He also manages to be extremely touching within the comic confines, exposing the man who has made such a regretful mess of his life.  His genuine sadness and private fears are plainly visible, whenever he weakens his guard.  The actor and the role challenge each other, each proving to be expansive enough to accommodate a three-dimensional portrait of a movie star, mixing laughs and melancholy, grandeur and its broken-down flip side.  (Much of the character’s enduring pain derives from his estrangement from his twelve-year-old daughter.)  Perhaps like many a great star, Swann is prone to being both a nightmare and a source of wonder.  His more lucid moments reveal intelligence, even wisdom.  O’Toole’s bravado, unpredictability, and occasional staccato line readings remind me of Charles Laughton at his absolute best.  This is a tour de force performance of a falling star not quite down for the count, and it ultimately ranks with the screen’s more insightful and credible portraits of stardom, in all its fluctuations.

One of the film’s high points is O’Toole’s visit to Linn-Baker’s family in Brooklyn, featuring delicious Lainie Kazan as his garish, outspoken mother.  While we take pleasure in the family’s affectionately rendered excesses, O’Toole cannily plays the scene without any condescension, displaying honest warmth and comfort in the family’s presence.  As O’Toole adopts a respectful demeanor, it’s Linn-Baker who is appropriately mortified (such as when his aunt shows up in her wedding dress).  Without a trace of superiority or haughtiness, O’Toole further humanizes Swann, and it’s becoming easier and easier to truly like this guy.

Another peak moment comes when O’Toole learns, just before airtime, that the show is performed “live,” which leads to his most memorable line, when he shouts, “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!”  But he’ll find unexpected redemption on this silly TV program, not just fulfilling his contractual responsibilities but actually living up to his heroic image.  This romantic notion—a star living up to his onscreen persona—comes through even stronger, if more subtlely, in a lovely earlier sequence in a restaurant.  At a man’s request, O’Toole approaches the guy’s wife and asks her to dance.  The occasion is the couple’s 40th wedding anniversary.  (The woman is Titanic‘s Gloria Stuart.)  As Alan Swann himself glides her away, giving her a never-to-be-forgotten thrill, he is using the full force of his stardom to make fantasy come true.  It’s a gift he carries effortlessly, something ever at his disposal.  O’Toole plays the scene beautifully, so keenly yet quietly aware of a movie star’s enviable ability to make people happy.  This restaurant scene, and My Favorite Year in its entirety, is a celebration of movie-star magic.  The reason that it works so marvelously is the singular movie-star magic of Peter O’Toole.

Give My Regards to Broadway (1948)

In the 1930s, ’40s, and even the ’50s, Hollywood made countless backstage musicals, movies that sold us the dream that there was nothing better in this world than singing and dancing your way to all-out stardom.  Whether or not moviegoers had a musical bone in their bodies, they apparently couldn’t get enough of the vicarious glories associated with “making good” on an opening night.  But imagine if golden-era Hollywood had made a myth-crushing, anti-backstage musical, something about performers coming to the conclusion that there’s life and happiness away from the footlights.  That’s exactly what Give My Regards to Broadway happens to be.  Perhaps its somewhat shockingly alternative message is the reason that the movie garnered no special attention in 1948.  After all, it’s a showbiz musical that ends not in onstage triumph but in a garage.

What the film offers is a rare (and extremely fresh) flip side to just about every other backstage musical you can recall.  It tells us that it’s okay, even sensible, to leave showbiz behind and choose a so-called ordinary life.  Within the world of the 1940s movie musical, I’d go so far as to say that its message makes Give My Regards to Broadway a radical musical.  It opens familiarly, with the death of vaudeville.  Charles Winninger and Fay Bainter retire their family act and get a house in New Jersey.  He gets a job at an appliance plant and wins several promotions throughout the years.  She raises their three kids, who eventually become Dan Dailey, Barbara Lawrence, and Jane Nigh.  But Winninger never stops dreaming of his, and the entire family’s, comeback.  It’s only a matter of time before vaudeville comes back, right?  ”Albert the Great and Family” can start “knocking ‘em dead” all over again.

Winninger is a male version of Gypsy‘s Mama Rose, a stage father doing it all for himself while trying to convince everyone else (himself included) that he’s doing it for all of them.  He has raised his kids in a world of ongoing rehearsals, ever ready for the elusive phone call that will change everything.  The act, as conceived by Winninger, is of course hopelessly dated, combining song and dance with juggling.  His two daughters will eventually opt for marriage, and Dailey, despite his obvious stageworthy gifts, finds himself drawn to baseball, an engineering scholarship, and pretty Nancy Guild.  Winninger’s offspring find their own kind of spotlights, and the old fellow has to find a way of letting go.  He must give himself permission to be happy without clinging to his long-held fantasy.  Showbiz success is a pipe dream in this movie, which is an almost unheard-of notion in a backstage musical.

If the movie is unromantic about showbiz, it’s certainly warm and cuddly about suburbia, domesticity, and post-war American prosperity, all of which are stressed to make the point that you can be content and fulfilled without applause.  Most of the musical numbers are set in the family’s garage, and they are the perfect blend of skillful and embarrassing, just like Winninger himself.  Cast to type, he had already played variations of this life-or-death trouper in films such as Ziegfeld Girl (1941) and Broadway Rhythm (1944).  Winninger is typically obnoxious and delusional, browbeating his family until finally wising up.  Ms. Bainter helps enormously, grounding the film with her seasoned, sensible acting style.  (She and Winninger had already scored together as the parents in the 1945 State Fair.)

With his recent stardom opposite Betty Grable in Mother Wore Tights (1947), Dan Dailey was suddenly (and deservedly) Fox’s top male musical star.  Give My Regards to Broadway gave him solo billing above the title, even though Winninger has the film’s central role.  Dailey could sing, he could act, and he was one terrific hoofer, an all-around effortless and engaging performer.  However, Give My Regards to Broadway is no lavish Grable-style musical.  In fact, it’s barely a musical, what with those modest garage numbers.  It may be the only Technicolor movie that lives in my memory as being in black and white.  Maybe that’s because the color seems to be making an ironic comment, teasing you into expecting a big finale and a standing ovation, plus large sets and glitzy costumes, none of which will arrive.  It’s as if Winninger’s fevered dreams have colorized a story that’s much plainer than he imagines.  Instead of an ending that includes Broadway, the film opts for simplicity, finishing with Winninger and Dailey back in the garage, performing the title tune for the whole family.  Just for the fun of it.  And that’s okay.

It’s essential to note that Give My Regards to Broadway was directed by Lloyd Bacon, the man who directed 42nd Street (1933).  More than any other backstage musical, 42nd Street established the screen’s showbiz myths, the ones debunked so gracefully in Give My Regards to Broadway.  That’s a double feature I want to see.

Robson Rides “Roughshod” (1949)

It’s not a name that many people—classic-film buffs included—easily remember, even though Canadian-born director Mark Robson made some extremely popular and well-regarded Hollywood films of the mid-20th century.  Robson died at age 64 in 1978 and would have turned 100 this week (on December 4th).  His directing career can be separated into three distinct periods, moving from low-budget horror movies to modestly budgeted black-and-white dramas to expensive and colorful commercial pictures.  The variety in his filmography, representing nearly every genre, means that Robson is hard to pin down as any particular kind of moviemaker.  Maneuvering his way from horror movies to boxing pictures to WWII epics to soap operas, he reinvented himself time and again.  Though versatile, Robson lacked the kind of discernible style, or noticeable interest in recurring themes, that makes people get to know your name.  It would be difficult to describe the typical Robson picture simply because there seems to be no such thing.  Yet he certainly made his share of good ones.

Robson’s big break came at RKO, as the assistant editor on Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).  Not bad, eh?  Working on these two Orson Welles masterpieces had to be awfully good training for any aspiring director.  Robson continued at RKO, promoted to film editor on two Val Lewton-produced horror classics:  Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), both directed by Jacques Tourneur.  Lewton then gave Robson his first directing assignment, The Seventh Victim (1943), another highly esteemed picture in Lewton’s much-admired series of low-budget horror films, all of them noted for their suggestive, rather than explicit, approach to scaring the audience.  Some of these movies had supernatural elements while others explored purely psychological horrors.  And so Robson entered the first phase of his directing career, making literate, shivering B movies, going so far as to direct the arguably greatest work in Lewton’s series:  Isle of the Dead (1945), starring Boris Karloff.  Robson’s The Ghost Ship (1943) and Bedlam (1946) are no slouches either.  These early films declare his gifts for visual imagination, a keen sense of pacing, and a willingness to probe the inner workings of his characters.

With the Lewton series over in 1946, Robson made a comeback with the boxing melodrama Champion (1949), entering the next phase of his directing career, as the maker of intense and reasonably realistic black-and-white dramas.  With Champion, Robson made a major (and Oscar-nominated) star of Kirk Douglas, and with The Harder They Fall (1956), another boxing movie, Robson directed Humphrey Bogart in his final film.  Also from this era in Robson’s work comes the blind-veteran rehabilitation picture Bright Victory (1951), the Korean War-themed domestic drama I Want You (1951), and the Cold War potboiler Trial (1955).  Throughout this period, Robson became a fine director of A-list actors, ultimately guiding ten performances to Oscar nominations.

The final major phase of Robson’s career was about as far from Isle of the Dead and Champion as could be expected, kicking off with the phenomenal success of his Peyton Place (1957).  He was now a maker of glossy, colorful, and trashy soap operas, continuing with From the Terrace (1960) and the camp wonder Valley of the Dolls (1967).  Easily the best of the three, Peyton Place benefits enormously from Robson’s extensive use of New England locations, endowing the film with a palpable sense of place.  Then there are a number of Robson films that don’t quite belong in any of these categories, further preventing him from being typecast as any kind of recognizably specialized director:  My Foolish Heart (1949), far more restrained than his later female-driven soaps; The Little Hut (1957), a rather arch, triangular sex comedy; The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), a lavish war-torn epic; The Prize (1964), his lightweight Hitchcock-like caper; and Earthquake (1974), his disaster movie.  Robson was nominated twice for the Best Director Oscar, in consecutive years, for Peyton Place and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness.  And four of those aforementioned ten acting nominations went to Arthur Kennedy for Champion, Bright Victory, Trial, and Peyton Place.

After speeding through Robson’s career, allow me to get to the task at hand:  to look at one of Robson’s best and, as usual for me, more neglected films.  Made at the beginning of his middle period, RKO’s Roughshod (1949) also happens to be Robson’s only western.  However, it feels connected to his best work because of its attention to character and its atmospheric (black-and-white) cinematography.  (It’s a western with a positively noir-ish look and feel.)  Having honed his style-on-a-budget techniques and deft storytelling skills during his Lewton years, Robson turned Roughshod into an uncommonly smart and satisfying late-forties western.  The plot may be routine but the details and the emotions aren’t.  Killer John Ireland breaks out of prison and seeks revenge on Robert Sterling, the man who captured and wounded him.  Sterling and his kid brother, Claude Jarman, Jr., are traveling to their horse ranch when Ireland and two fellow prisoners make their escape.  To this basic plot comes the addition of four prostitutes booted out of town.  Their wagon breaks down, and they are soon traveling with Sterling and Jarman.

The film charts a fresh, unexpected odyssey for everyone involved, particularly the females.  This quartet consists of Gloria Grahame, Myrna Dell, Jeff Donnell, and a brown-haired Martha Hyer.  There will be joy and misery on the journey, including happy endings for some but not all.  As the central female, Grahame bonds with young Jarman and teaches him to read.  She and Sterling get off to a rocky start, before falling for each other.  The plotting grows richer, as do the characters, while the killers-on-the-loose suspense mounts.  Robson’s hand is sure:  Roughshod is a tight, well-constructed, good-looking movie.

Ms. Grahame, recently of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and her Oscar nomination for Crossfire (1947), is the film’s chief acting asset.  Still in her ’40s blonde phase, she’s an offbeat, interesting presence with her comical voice (a sort of hardened baby-talk) and seemingly numbed upper lip.  And yet she’s to be taken seriously because she’s got brains and a no-nonsense manner, which makes her as likable as can be.  Yep, she’s the classic whore with a heart of gold, meaning that vulnerability is part of the package.  Grahame, as good here as she was in anything, manages to be quite touching.  She and Jarman play especially well together.  Ms. Dell and Ms. Donnell also make strong showings as western whores of three dimensions rather than cliches of the genre.  Meanwhile, good-guy Sterling and bad-guy Ireland make lesser, blander impressions.

We get a shootout climax, of course, and a pleasing fadeout, but what stays with the viewer are the nuances of characters and their relationships, their mistakes and their second chances.  Though a western, Roughshod is actually similar to much of the best of Mark Robson’s work.  Like his ’40s horror movies, it delves inward, moving beyond surfaces.  Like his middle-period pictures, it’s got grit, a pulsing pace, and sensitive acting.  And like his trash spectaculars, it’s got the juice of a page-turning yarn.  Maybe Roughshod is the quintessential Mark Robson movie after all.

Angela Lansbury, Academy Award Winner At Last

At just nineteen years old, Angela Lansbury attended the Academy Awards on March 15, 1945, nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category for Gaslight (1944), her very first film.  This was a rather remarkable achievement for the British teenager, still a fairly recent Hollywood arrival.  She didn’t win that night, nor did she win the following year, at the ripe old age of twenty, when she was nominated in the same category for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).  Clearly on a roll, it had to have seemed that the versatile Lansbury would get an Oscar to call her own before too long.  But this was not to be.  Two weekends ago, on November 16, 2013, the 88-year-old Lansbury finally accepted her first Oscar, an honorary award presented at the annual Governors Awards.  I couldn’t help but think about the 19-year-old Lansbury, hoping that her name would be called on that 1945 evening.  Imagine if someone had told her, “Don’t worry, you’ll get one.  You just have to wait 68 years.”  Kind of unfathomable, no?  Of course, an honorary Oscar isn’t quite the same as winning a statuette on the big night, but it does its part in acknowledging that not all of the great screen performers have the good fortune or career timing that results in Oscars.  What exactly went wrong for Lansbury the three times she was nominated and came home empty?

For MGM’s Gaslight, Ingrid Bergman deservedly won her first Best Actress Oscar.  The film, a highly effective and intensely absorbing murder-and-madness melodrama, was beautifully crafted by director George Cukor, a juicy piece of stagecraft impeccably transferred to the movies.  As greed-driven sociopath Charles Boyer tries to drive wife Bergman mad in their London townhouse (as he searches for her dead aunt’s priceless jewels), there on the sidelines is the utterly self-possessed Lansbury as a Cockney housemaid, a somewhat tacky, slutty, and fresh-mouthed young thing.  She’s also inappropriately flirty with Boyer.  It’s a fun, naughty turn, hardly Oscar caliber but certainly announcing the arrival of an attention-worthy actress.  It’s Bergman’s movie, and it’s thrilling to watch her dig deeply inside her emotionally deteriorating character, finding enormous variety in a role that could easily become tedious.  Instead, she’s luminous, not just achingly vulnerable but truly inventive in her choices as she systematically breaks down.  Lansbury provides a cool, hard contrast to Bergman’s strikingly high-strung work.

Lansbury lost the 1944 Oscar to Ethel Barrymore in the heavy-going and self-consciously “poetic” bore None But the Lonely Heart.  It seems that Barrymore’s Oscar was Hollywood’s way of wooing the stage legend to remain in the movies, and it certainly did kick off her tenure as one of the key character actresses of the remainder of the decade.  (Unlike her brothers Lionel and John, Ethel had never really had a movie career until now.)  None But the Lonely Heart is a turgid, enervating movie, and was an unsurprising box-office failure, which makes Barrymore’s Oscar seem even more like a sentimental gesture.  She is no doubt very good in her role as Cary Grant’s cancer-ridden shopkeeper mother, clearly emotionally available, but why doesn’t she use a Cockney accent as Grant does?  Her speech is a little too great-lady for this particular role.  (Lansbury was the more convincing Cockney that year.)  My choice for the year’s top performance by an actress in a supporting role is un-nominated Josephine Hull (repeating her stage role) as the delightfully lethal aunt (of Cary Grant) in Arsenic and Old Lace.      

Lansbury had a better shot at winning the 1945 Oscar because her role as Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray was more substantial than her servant role in Gaslight.  As an early casualty of Dorian’s move toward depravity, she’s briefly a beam of radiant golden-haired goodness.  Again playing English in a London-set film, Lansbury isn’t onscreen for very long, yet she hovers over the film long after her exit.  With her delicacy and innocence cruelly abused, she’s quite different here than she was as Gaslight‘s tarty, confident maid.  Dorian Gray is another exquisitely mounted period piece from MGM, though it’s not nearly as good as Gaslight, partially hampered by a hollow lead performance from Hurd Hatfield.  He plays Dorian as a stone-faced Dracula, already a lacquered mannequin at the film’s start, seemingly uninterested in debauchery, decadence, lust, or much of anything at all.  Eternal youth seems wasted on this guy.  The film reeks of prestige and high culture, but, aside from Lansbury’s genuine poignancy and startling simplicity, it isn’t very good.  True, it was challenging subject matter for censor-ridden Hollywood, and so it had to be careful to the point of incoherence.  But thankfully it gave us Lansbury’s touching vocal rendition of “Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird.”

Between Gaslight and Dorian Gray, Lansbury made one film, MGM’s marvelous family picture National Velvet.  On the Oscar night when Lansbury was nominated for Dorian Gray, she was ironically up against Anne Revere for her performance as Lansbury’s (not to mention Elizabeth Taylor’s) British mother in National Velvet.  Lansbury lost to Revere, quite undeservedly.  Though Revere was a wonderful actress who gave award-worthy performances in The Song of Bernadette (1943) and Body and Soul (1947), her work in National Velvet is about as British as Ethel Barrymore’s Lonely Heart performance was Cockney.  With no attempt at a British accent, and playing her role in a plain, unaffected, positively Yankee style, Revere is all wrong for the part despite her obvious sincerity as a woman who swam the English Channel and has passed her athleticism on to her horse-riding daughter.  But there’s something off-putting about her tone; she’s so smugly wise and quietly superior.  Lansbury would have been a better Oscar choice, and I think she was the most deserving among that year’s five nominees.  Even so, my top choice would have been another non-nominee:  Joan Blondell as the flashy, goodhearted, and much-married Aunt Sissy in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Lansbury’s third nomination came for what is inarguably her greatest screen performance, as Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), one of the great American films of the 1960s and an all-time classic among both political thrillers and political satires.  In the role of a lifetime, Lansbury gets to be so much more than just the mother of Harvey (a brainwashing victim and programmed assassin) or the wife of James Gregory (a buffoon senator and Harvey’s stepdad).  It’s a part filled with surprises, allowing Lansbury to use the full force of her talent and create a character of fascinating layers.  With seemingly no effort at all, her acting has a presence powerful enough for a Greek tragedy, easily convincing you that she could be Harvey’s mother even though she was only three years his senior.  Quite simply, hers is one of the screen’s greatest portraits of ruthless villainy and a lust for power (with a touch of incest).  Her control is enviable, and she has a quiet command, a cool intellect, and a sly humor.  How could Lansbury have not gotten the Oscar for this towering, crowning performance?

Who could have foreseen that 1962 would also be the year of Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker?  Repeating her stage performance, Duke gave one of the movies’ most impressive performances by a young person.  Usually, I’m against giving competitive Oscars to children, but Duke’s work was so accomplished on so many levels that she truly earned the right to compete with the big girls.  And so, as the young Helen Keller, Duke won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year, and, great as Lansbury was, you can’t really say that she was robbed.  After all, you can’t ever catch Duke “acting,” so completely immersed is she in Helen’s world.  It was a technical tour de force, making us believe that she was blind and deaf, but this was also a completely unsentimentalized and profoundly moving portrayal of the girl inside.  Here was Lansbury, first nominated as a teenager herself, losing to an even younger teenager!  In just about any other year, Lansbury’s performance would have brought home Oscar.  As I said, in Oscar’s world, luck and timing are key.

There were so many other Lansbury highs, performances that showcased her unusually wide range, from the saloon-hall dame of The Harvey Girls (1946) to the ice-bitch of State of the Union (1948), from Orson Welles’ mistress in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) to the small-town hairdresser in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960), and on and on.  Yes, it would be nice to see Lansbury’s face highlighted in those books about the Oscar winners, but it just wasn’t meant to be, just like it wasn’t in the cards for Deborah Kerr, Thelma Ritter, Greta Garbo, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Carole Lombard, and so many other uniquely talented screen actresses.  Perhaps a special Oscar is the kind that suits Lansbury best, honoring decades of exceptional work, rather than the kind of Oscar that would limit its appreciation to just one performance.