John DiLeo's Blog, page 2

So Evil My Love (1948)

If she had never worked again, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald would still be remembered (and beloved) for her two 1939 Hollywood classics: Dark Victory and Wuthering Heights.  In the former, as Bette Davis’ loyal secretary and best friend, she’s unforgettably at the dying Davis’ side when the climactic tearjerking begins its surefire course.  In the latter, Fitzgerald gives a beautifully modulated Oscar-nominated performance as Laurence Olivier’s cruelly neglected wife; it’s an emotionally bare and heartbreaking piece of screen acting.  Her transition from youthful optimism to a shattering hopelessness is almost unbearable to witness.  You probably recall the film’s lovers on their moors, but you may need some reminding that Fitzgerald—crushed by a man she loves yet never really knew—is far and away the best thing about this revered screen adaptation.

Fitzgerald died at age 91 in 2005, and this weekend marks what would have been her 100th birthday (on November 24th).  Though she spent less than a decade in studio-system Hollywood, she did manage to shine beyond 1939, mostly at Warner Brothers and never moreso than in an underrated beauty titled Shining Victory (1941).  She also appeared in two overpraised biggies—Watch on the Rhine (1943) and Wilson (1944)—with both films notably enhanced by her contributions.  Irish-born Fitzgerald was perhaps the thinking man’s Maureen O’Hara, not as beautiful or as glamorous a lass as O’Hara but certainly radiating more sensitivity and intelligence.  (Fitzgerald’s prettiness was of a more delicate variety than O’Hara’s robustly healthy-looking good looks.)  Having scored most strongly when portraying the best in humanity, Fitzgerald seemed all wrong—not just miscast but downright uncomfortable—in Three Strangers (1946), playing an overglamorized, slutty, crazy Ida Lupino-type character.  Audiences rightly preferred the stalwartly kind, loving, and dependable Fitzgerald, that gal from Dark Victory.  

One of Fitzgerald’s best films came at the tail end of her peak movie years.  So Evil My Love is a Paramount feature made in England, a showcase for recent Oscar winner Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend) and new British leading lady Ann Todd.  Though Milland was by far the biggest name involved, this dark drama is actually a vehicle for Ms. Todd, with Milland’s character taking a decided backseat to hers.  So Evil My Love belongs to a sub-genre of film noir: the period noir.  It’s extremely noir-ish in its moody black-and-white cinematography and nefarious goings-on, but it’s set many decades earlier than the quintessential film noir of contemporary post-WWII America.  Other great 19th-century-set examples of period noir include The Suspect (1945), Ivy (1947), So Long at the Fair (1950), and The Tall Target (1951).  The particular chill of So Evil My Love derives from its cautionary depiction of an ordinary person’s shockingly easy slide into treachery.

Impressively constructed as both a thriller and a charater study, this film boasts an especially literate screenplay.  The overall result is an intricate, engrossing, and rather bold dramatization of a character’s previously untapped capacity for evil, in this case the kind unleashed by a sexual awakening.  Expertly handled by director Lewis Allen—who had scored an earlier Milland success with the grown-up ghost movie The Uninvited (1944)—So Evil My Love remains a virtually unknown movie.  It’s not just one of Ms. Fitzgerald’s finest hours but an unusually thought-provoking portrait of a moral downward spiral.  And with its sumptuous mounting of late-19th-century London, So Evil My Love also offers a compelling clash of beauty and ugliness, with the latter often conveniently (and most deliberately) disguised.

Todd plays a missionary’s widow home from Jamaica, numbed from a life of dull service.  Milland, whom Todd meets on the ship home, is an unsuccessful painter who becomes her lodger.  She doesn’t know what a scoundrel (or worse) he is, or that he had fled to Jamaica to escape the authorities.  He immediately senses her susceptibility to his charms.  In love for the first time, Todd becomes consumed with Milland, setting herself up to be used and abused by him.  Of course, Todd doesn’t know about Moira Lister, Milland’s other lover.  Playing a charming cad, Milland is indeed comfortable, hardly taxed at all.  Thanks to him, Todd is no longer emotionally or physically suppressed, literally (and figuratively) taking down her hair for him.

What the film is unable to show (hey, it’s 1948) is the sexual component of what’s going on.  We’re left to assume that what Todd is experiencing is not just first-love but first-time sexual gratification, which keeps her firmly in Milland’s thrall.  We never quite see the requisite passion in the relationship, the power of which allows Todd to do the things she does, all in the so-called name of love (and sex).  When Milland reveals his criminal nature to her, she contemplates bolting from his clutches but then casts all doubts aside, knowingly following him into darkness.  Enter Geraldine Fitzgerald.  She plays Todd’s school chum, now unhappily married to wealthy Raymond Huntley and living quite miserably in their exquisite mansion.  Fitzgerald finds secret comfort in the occasional nip, having become a lovely young alcoholic.  Todd accepts employment as Fitzgerald’s paid companion, with Milland coaching his lover on just how they can get the most out of this fortuitous situation.  Gifts and cash, of course, but there will also be some blackmail and even murder.

So Evil My Love is about preying on the vulnerabilities of others for one’s own gain, with Milland manipulating Todd, who, in turn, manipulates Fitzgerald.  Todd has the most interesting role, as both a victim and a predator, essentially sympathetic until she discovers her own flair for deceit and treachery, plus her appetite for luxury and power.  This stings all the more because of the needy fragility displayed by Fitzgerald, so naively trusting and ineffably sad, trapped in her ivory tower.  She’s the poignant contrast to steely-nerved Todd and the slickly menacing Milland.  The film’s effectiveness is due in part to the fascinating casualness of its evil, a good portion of it committed by a woman who had probably never done a bad thing in her life before now.  Todd’s love is a self-deluding force that sanctions anything she does in its name.  The ease with which she succumbs to Milland’s wishes provides that unnervingly believable chill.  And the characteristically cool hardness in Todd’s acting fits well here, providing an apt veneer, the better to conceal who she really is.

Aside from the lack of appropriate heat in Todd’s life-changing hunger for Milland, the film’s other significant flaw is Milland’s implausible conversion to a man with some shred of decency.  I’m not at all convinced by his sudden discovery of genuine true-love feelings for Todd.  Despite this late-breaking credibility gap, the film climaxes with a memorably fitting and positively operatic flourish.  So Evil My Love is ultimately a neatly plotted warning about the insidious perils of obsessive love and really good sex.

After this movie, Fitzgerald was an occasional screen actress, segueing into middle-aged (and then old-lady) character roles in such titles as Ten North Frederick (1958), The Pawnbroker (1965), Rachel, Rachel (1968), Harry and Tonto (1974), and Arthur (1981).  But for most classic-film lovers, she will forever be the soulful, radiant young woman who valiantly assisted Bette Davis and was pathetically mistreated by Laurence Olivier.  (With their own merciless behavior aimed Fitzgerald’s way, Milland and Todd sort of took up where Olivier left off.)  If Wuthering Heights and So Evil My Love give us masochistic, defeated Geraldine Fitzgeralds, you needn’t feel too sorry for her.  After all, with far less screen time than her bigger-named co-stars, she came through with two fully realized performances.  And that’s a shining victory.

36 Hours (1964)

In honor of Veterans Day, I recommend a solid yet under-seen World War II thriller with a big-name cast, written and directed by A-list member George Seaton (Miracle on 34th Street, The Country Girl).  If you’ve already seen 36 Hours, I suspect you remember it (fondly) because, mingling a mind-game cleverness with slam-bang suspense, it’s kind of irresistible.  Hardly an authentic portrait of the war, it belongs to a sub-genre of WWII movie that might be described as the live-action comic book.  This juicily page-turning approach makes the black-and-white 36 Hours enjoyably reminiscent of dozens of WWII movies made during the war, when the subject was often surprisingly tailored to become surefire escapist entertainment.  Intentionally shielding wartime audiences from the actual horrors, these morale-boosting movies luxuriated in melodramatic intrigues often set on soundstage European capitals populated by particularly glamorous and attractive spies.  Whether set in the U.S. or abroad, in battle or on the domestic front, among the films that treated the war as a comic-book escapade are Saboteur (1942), Desperate Journey (1942), Background to Danger (1943), Above Suspicion (1943), First Comes Courage (1943), and Five Graves to Cairo (1943).  In its gleefully outlandish plotting, its climactic pulse-quickening chase, and its somewhat dimwitted Nazi official, 36 Hours is a pleasing throwback even though it’s far less glamorized than your average war movie of 1942-45.  In 1964, the need to boost morale had long ago faded, and the war’s outcome was part of our history, but, even so, WWII continued to be Hollywood’s war of choice.

Based on a Roald Dahl story, 36 Hours is a WWII picture focused on D-Day.  Starring James Garner, it is in fact Garner’s other D-Day movie of 1964, following the even-better comedy-drama The Americanization of Emily with Julie Andrews.  Like Emily, 36 Hours begins in London (on May 31, 1944, to be exact), with Garner, a U.S. major, off to Lisbon to see if he can find out if the Germans have uncovered the Allies’ plan for the invasion.  After his coffee is drugged, Garner is captured and brought to Germany.  The Nazis’ brilliant, outrageous plot is to wake Garner and convince him that D-Day has already happened and was a great success, hoping this will lead to his casually revealing the supposedly long-ago details of the invasion.  He’s told that the Allies won the war!  And so it becomes a game of whether or not the Germans can extract the information before Garner figures out what’s happened.  With a population of “extras,” the setting is a fake U.S. military hospital, an elaborate construct designed to persuade Garner that he’s convalescing in the Occupied Germany of 1950.  His hair has been grayed a bit, and his vision somewhat blurred, all in the name of six supposed years of aging.  You may be reminded of The Truman Show (1998) as you watch so many people work tirelessly hard to convince one person that an unreal world is completely genuine.

Rod Taylor co-stars as the German doctor in charge of the charade.  He has been given 36 hours to get the necessary information from Garner.  If the doctor fails, the S.S. will take over, presumably with torture.  American-born but a German citizen since age 16, Taylor is a sympathetic “bad guy.”  He intended for his scientific research and carefully honed methods to be of vital use to amnesia and battle-fatigue victims, which is why he’s the film’s good-guy-on-the-wrong-side.  The Germans have used his methods 18 times, achieving minor espionage successes but nothing yet on the scale of the Garner scheme.  Eva Marie Saint plays the concentration camp survivor “cast” in the role of Garner’s nurse.  To reveal more wouldn’t be fair; let’s just say that the plotting continues to be intricate, farfetched, and altogether riveting.  Essentially, the movie sets up an intellectual battle between two extremely smart and evenly matched men.  The reason the film works as well as it does is because Garner and Taylor themselves are unusually intelligent and charismatic actors.  Their subtleties, including their natural tendencies to underplay, actually make the gosh-darn-thing almost plausible.

36 Hours is a thriller of both mind and body, a brain-twister and a physical workout.  Writer-director Seaton manages to combine an atmospheric realism and a fantastic plot into a cohesive movie.  But it’s not helped by a cartoonish Nazi villain (Werner Peters), almost a Hogan’s Heroes kind of bad guy.  And there’s some forced bits in the writing, such as when Ms. Saint tells Garner that she is no longer capable of tears, which signals to us that she’ll be crying at the end of the movie.  Minor carping aside, 36 Hours is a humdinger.  How nice to report that, nearly fifty years after its release, all three of its stars are still with us.  I hope each of them mentions 36 Hours when asked, “Which of your films do you wish more people knew about?”

Burt-Man of Alcatraz

After the dazzling pyrotechnics and flim-flamming showmanship of his deservedly Oscar-winning title-role performance in Elmer Gantry (1960), Burt Lancaster decisively shifted gears, soon accepting two markedly restrained roles.  In Judgment at Nuremburg (1961), he’s one of the defendants, a judge on trial for Nazi war crimes.  Clearly too young (in his late forties) for his 63-year-old role, Lancaster stoically tried to underplay (but couldn’t quite relax enough to do so).  He fared much better in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), all the way to another Best Actor Oscar nomination.  Lancaster has been gone since 1994, dying at age 80, and he would have turned 100 this past weekend (on November 2nd).

Birdman of Alcatraz contains one of Lancaster’s all-time best performances.  And that’s saying something, considering the range and frequent high-quality of the films in which he displayed his skills as a serious-minded actor, a romantic leading man, a magnetic movie star, even an accomplished acrobat.  In the years between his 1946 screen debut and the 1962 Birdman, here’s some of what he was up to:  top-notch film-noir beauties (The Killers, Criss Cross); playful costume romps (The Flame and the Arrow, The Crimson Pirate); groundbreakingly adult dramas (From Here to Eternity, Sweet Smell of Success); colorful Americana (The Rainmaker, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral).  Not to mention films based on works by Arthur Miller (All My Sons), William Inge (Come Back, Little Sheba), Tennessee Williams (The Rose Tattoo), Terence Rattigan (Separate Tables), even George Bernard Shaw (The Devil’s Disciple).  He wasn’t always good, or properly cast, but he was never less than fully committed, always willing to risk looking like a fool.  Who couldn’t respect such daring?  Add the fact that he often was good, or better than good, and, well, you should not only respect but admire him.

A somewhat fictionalized biopic of longtime prison inmate Robert Stroud, Birdman of Alcatraz is a fine drama from director John Frankenheimer, richly photographed in black and white by an Oscar-nominated Burnett Guffey.  But it rests primarily on its central component:  Lancaster’s performance as Stroud.  The actor comes through with an impressively subdued characterization that quietly accumulates into an unsually thoughtful and grounded piece of screen acting.  Yes, he starts off as larger-than-life “Burt Lancaster,” streaked with anger and a flair for violence, sent away for murder, then killing a guard during his imprisonment.  He gets “life” for the guard’s death, after his mother (Oscar-nominated Thelma Ritter) fights successfully to stop his execution.  Stroud will spend more than a half-century in prison, with the majority of the movie set at Leavenworth (in Kansas).

The best section of this movie is its middle, the part about his becoming ”birdman,” which starts from his cell window.  He cares for, and then trains, a baby sparrow.  Canaries soon find their way to him.  The birds humanize him, make him gentler, and, most significantly, give him a purpose.  Soon he’s building cages, tending to more babies, eventually curing diseases.  He creates an aviary, publishes articles, and goes into business with a woman (Betty Field) who sells his remedies as “Stroud’s Specifics.”  Talk about rehabilitation!  He marries his business partner, even though he’ll remain incarcerated.  Though completely self-taught, he becomes an authority on birds, proven by his book about their diseases.  When moved to Alcatraz, at nearly two hours into the movie, he’s not allowed to bring his birds or equipment.  This not only makes the title seem inaccurate—it should be called Birdman of Leavenworth (which admittedly doesn’t have the same zing as “Alcatraz”)—but it means that the movie loses its core.  With no birds, Lancaster is suddenly without his most essential co-stars.  Nothing that follows—Stroud’s book about the prison system, a 1946 riot, his final scenes with the warden—can compare with the compelling simplicity of Lancaster’s scenes with those birds.

Though Frankenheimer’s film is commendably low-key, there’s no question that it’s simply too long, nearly two-and-a-half hours.  Memorable?  Yes.  Absorbing?  Certainly.  But undeniably long.  Also in the cast are Karl Malden as Lancaster’s prison-warden nemesis; Neville Brand, as a friendly guard; Oscar-nominated Telly Savalas, as another inmate (a likable mug); and Edmond O’Brien, overacting as Stroud’s biographer.

Birdman of Alcatraz was one of five Lancaster-Frankenheimer collaborations, with the other two standouts both crackerjack thrillers:  Seven Days in May (1964), in which Lancaster, as a right-wing four-star general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, plots a military takeover of the U.S. government; and The Train (1965), in which he, as part of the French Resistance, tries to protect the artworks of Paris from the Nazis.  (The Train is one of five war films featured in my book Screen Savers.)  These two films used Lancaster in different ways.  In Seven Days, he is the Oscar-winning actor, contained yet still electric as a megalomaniac villain, while in The Train he’s employed for his movie-star services, specifically of the action-star variety (leaving the acting chores to co-star Paul Scofield).

Elmer Gantry and Birdman of Alcatraz would make a perfect Lancaster double bill, especially designed to show off the scope of his acting prowess.  (You’ll be in for a rather long evening, so I’d recommend making it a two-night affair.)  It’s a treat to watch him tear up the screen as con-man evangelist Gantry, so charismatic, so devilishly manipulative, the epitome of an irresistible (both funny and sexy) scoundrel.  With eyes ablaze, a teeth-flashing smile, and that melodious laugh, his energy astounds.  It’s Burt Lancaster at full throttle, gleefully devouring his role, which is why his Robert Stroud is the ideal alternative companion piece.  Lancaster’s concentrated intensity remains intact, but in Birdman it’s tenderly focused on fragile winged creatures rather than aimed beamingly at crowds of Gantry “believers.”  It’s all about knowing your audience, something at which Burt Lancaster excelled for almost five decades.

The Invisible Man (1933)

We’re just a few weeks away from the 80th anniversary of the November release of The Invisible Man, which makes this reliable octogenarian a logical choice for a revisit this Halloween.  A horror classic from those glory days of Universal’s dominance of the genre, The Invisible Man was directed by Englishman James Whale at his moviemaking peak:  after his Frankenstein (1931) and The Old Dark House (1932) but before his Bride of Frankenstein (1935).  It’s a film distinguished not only by its director but its star, who this time around happens not to be Boris Karloff.  Celebrated on both London and New York stages, Claude Rains (like Whale and Karloff, another Englishman) had appeared in one previous film, a 1920 British silent, before playing the invisible scientist known as Jack Griffin.  The role and the film launched his extraordinary Hollywood career, with Rains (1889-1967) soon one of the industry’s most admired and versatile middle-aged character actors.  He would unfortunately become an inexplicably overlooked player at the Oscars, losing four times in the supporting-actor category.  (I wish he’d gotten the award for Hitchcock’s 1946 Notorious.)  But let’s always remember that it was The Invisible Man (based on H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel) that ignited Rains’ remarkable screen career.

Unlike Whale’s two Frankenstein movies, The Invisible Man is not a great film, but it’s nonetheless an enduring gem of the genre.  Something that it does share with Whale’s Frankenstein movies is rare indeed in horror films:  the opportunity for a first-rate actor to showcase and challenge his talent.  Karloff was brilliant in his ability to express a range of piercing emotions from within that hulking mass known as the Monster, while Rains, primarily through his mellifluous voice, provides a showstopping mix of elegance and ferocity.

It’s instantly intriguing that The Invisible Man begins midway in its plot, with Rains already invisible and in search of an antidote.  (Nowhere are all the expected scenes of our madman’s initial failures and eventual “eureka” moment in his laboratory.)  The image of Rains—a man with a face wrapped like a mummy’s and his eyes covered with goggles—is unforgettable.  Later, his surgical bandages are strikingly set off by sunglasses.  And the special effects surrounding his invisibility, including those unraveling stripteases, still look wonderful and remain endlessly amusing, right up to those magical footprints in the snow.

Invisibility has its perks and its drawbacks, but Rains has the additional problem of going mad, a condition directly related to a dangerous drug (from India) he used in his formula.  Considering the inherent limitations of acting a role without the use of one’s face, Rains must have delighted in the significant dramatic boost of his character’s descent into an angry, power-crazed, and murderous madness.  He kills a cop and also develops a penchant for sending people off cliffs.  We see Rains’ face just once, but the power of his presence and the distinctiveness of his voice—with its insinuating modulations and raspy beauty—were enough to cement this performance as a high point in horror.

Also on hand are Whale favorite Una O’Connor, pleasurably screaming her way through her role as an innkeeper, and blondly pretty Gloria Stuart as Rains’ love interest.  (Stuart later had an Oscar-nominated comeback with Titanic, but she was a non-actress starlet in 1933.)  There are also tiny roles for villagers Walter Brennan and John Carradine.

Rains was now on his way to becoming one of the Golden Age’s quintessential sophisticated villains (paving the way for George Sanders) in such films as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), which features his nonchalantly self-amused performance as evil Prince John.  Yet Rains was never really typecast, however much audiences enjoyed him as devious fellows.  He had big successes as the gentle patriarch of Four Daughters (1938) and as the literally angelic title role in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941).  In 1942, he played two psychiatrists:  Robert Cummings’ dark and moody mentor in Kings Row;  and then the doctor who nurtures Bette Davis out of her browbeaten shell in Now, Voyager.  Most famously of all, he was essentially the witty comic relief of Casablanca (1942).

There would be two other major horror films in Rains’ filmography:  The Wolf Man (1941), in which he slums his way through the thankless role of Lon Chaney, Jr.’s father;  and the Technicolored Phantom of the Opera (1943), which, though no real threat to Chaney, Sr.’s version, at least gave Rains an irresistibly showy opportunity.  Whether his face was invisible, or obscured by a phantom’s mask, or completely exposed, nothing got between Claude Rains and his gallery of characters.

 

So Long at the Fair (1950)

It’s always extremely difficult to talk about a movie as consistently surprising as the refined British thriller So Long at the Fair.  I certainly want to convey my admiration and affection for the film, while being careful not to give too much away, or, heaven forbid, ruin it for others.  It is one of those puzzle-solvers with a fascinating mystery at its center, the kind you can never forget.  Even so, it’s still enormously pleasurable on repeat viewings, the big mystery merely one of its achievements.  So Long at the Fair feels awfully fresh, a period thriller (rather than a noir-ish type of suspense film) set in Paris in 1889 during the opening of the Exhibition, which includes the official introduction of the Eiffel Tower.  Against this historical and joyous background, So Long at the Fair becomes what is known as a little jewel of a motion picture, an ingeniously constructed piece of work directed by both Terence Fisher (soon to be a master of British horror films) and Antony Darnborough.

Like any top thriller, it has a whopper of a hook.  Lovely Jean Simmons and her older brother, David Tomlinson, are British tourists.  They are young adults whose parents are dead.  They go out for the evening, then return to their separate rooms in a charming Parisian hotel.  When Simmons wakes the next morning, Tomlinson is not only missing but so is his room.  No one remembers that Simmons had a brother.  No one can recall seeing such a person.  The hotel employees actually deny that there ever was a Room 19 in this establishment.  Room 19, like Mr. Tomlinson, simply no longer exists.  And soon no one believes anything Simmons has to say on the subject.  But she knows she isn’t crazy, and we know she isn’t crazy, even though there is no explanation and seemingly no possible motive for what’s happened.  Instead of succumbing to a complete mental breakdown, Simmons takes action, determined to unravel the circumstances behind her brother’s shocking, baffling disappearance, even if she must do it entirely on her own.

Part of the appeal of the set-up is the engaging rapport between Simmons and Tomlinson (best known to Americans as the father in Mary Poppins) in the brief time we see them together.  Simmons, in all her youthful radiance, starts the film with an infectious enthusiasm to devour all of Paris.  And who can blame her?  The film has marvelous production values and period detail, creating a most enticing (and plausible) 19th-century fairyland.  The film also offers a genuine feeling of strangers in a foreign land.  This isn’t one of those movies in which everyone all-too-conveniently speaks English because they’re in an English-language movie.  The French characters speak French most of the time, and subtitles aren’t even necessary in terms of following the action.  English actress Cathleen Nesbitt does a most convincing job as the French proprietor of the hotel who must deal with the young British woman’s challenges and accusations throughout the movie.

Simmons beautifully delineates her character’s fragility and increasingly fearful isolation, but she balances these qualities with backbone, a steely determination that makes her not just admirable but intensely likable.  She’s much spunkier than her porcelain-doll beauty might suggest.  Enter Dirk Bogarde, a British painter living in Paris, a gentleman with an impressive head of hair.  He borrowed fifty francs from Tomlinson that fateful night, and, when he returns the money, becomes Simmons’ savior.  The emotional climax of the movie is when Simmons absorbs the fact that Bogarde indeed remembers Tomlinson and will now eagerly help her in the search.  At last, there’s someone on her side.  Bogarde, unknown to the staff, plays undercover detective by getting a room at the hotel.  The emerging love story between the two young stars adds yet another welcome component to the film, with Simmons and Bogarde both impossibly charming and attractive.

I find the conclusion and all our answered questions to be satisfying on many levels, but I’ll bite my tongue about all of that and not say another word about the ending, hopefully exiting this post without having inflicted any damage on a movie I care about.  While you’re watching it, you may be reminded of somewhat similarly plotted thrillers such as The Lady Vanishes (1938), The Secret Fury (1950), and Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965).  But, by the time it’s over, it should stick in your memory as a one-of-a-kind picture, remaining there as firmly and securely as, well, the Eiffel Tower.

My Brother Talks to Horses (1946)

Viennese-born Fred Zinnemann (1907-1997), one of the greatest film directors of the twentieth century, was an up-and-comer at MGM in the 1940s until his breakthrough picture The Search (1948), which snagged him his first Oscar nomination as Best Director and put him instantly on the A list.  He’d win Best Director Oscars for From Here to Eternity (1953) and A Man for All Seasons (1966), plus he also directed Marlon Brando’s screen debut in The Men (1950) and the western classic High Noon (1952).  For my money, his two greatest films are two others, The Nun’s Story (1959) and The Sundowners (1960), both in need of renewed attention.  I included Zinnemann’s first major Hollywood effort, the pre-WWII drama The Seventh Cross (1944) starring Spencer Tracy, in my book Screen Savers, making it one of the five underrated pictures I addressed in my war-films chapter.  Bookended by The Seventh Cross and The Search, coincidentally Zinnemann’s looks at a pre- and then post-war Germany, the director made two seemingly unexpected films, both of them starring “Butch” Jenkins, MGM’s mid-decade boy star.

The first, and the better of the two, is My Brother Talks to Horses, a real sleeper and a Zinnemann film that demands inclusion in any retrospective of his work.  It’s something of a small miracle, a genuinely delightful eccentric comedy and an honestly touching film about growing up.  Set in Baltimore around the early part of the twentieth century, My Brother Talks to Horses stars Jenkins as a nine-and-a-half-year-old boy who communicates (silently) with horses, having full conversations with them in which they unload their gripes and worries.  He is also followed by the neighborhood dogs whenever he walks through town.  There’s nothing especially “adorable” in the presentation of this:  it just is.  Jenkins, recently little brother to Elizabeth Taylor in the kids’ horse movie of all time, National Velvet (1944), is a remarkably unaffected child actor.  There’s nothing wind-up about him, nothing showbizzy at all.  Mostly wearing a deadpan expression, he positively beams whenever a smile overtakes him.  It’s truly wonderful that he can sometimes seem so odd and yet so unself-conscious about it.  Like any good actor, he completely believes in what he’s doing, even if that includes talking to, and listening to, horses.

Without a director as sensitive and perceptive as Zinnemann, this picture might have become gooey and overanimated.  Instead, it is delicately suffused with enormous feeling.  Underappreciated Peter Lawford is quite good as Jenkins’ older brother, an unhappy bank teller with big dreams regarding the future of radio.  He also has a pretty fiancee (Beverly Tyler) but he can’t quite afford to marry her.  Lawford and Jenkins share a lovely, winning bond.  Add the always-welcome Spring Byington as their widowed mother and you have a tight family core, a trio there for each other when it counts.  Their warmth feels authentic, as does the detailed and atmospheric production values, making this a film as lovingly rendered as other priceless period “family” pictures as Margie (1946), Stars in My Crown (1950), and, of course, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).

As for the film’s eccentricities, well, Ms. Byington, in a period version of her role in You Can’t Take It With You (1938), believes in “voices” and Ouija boards, yoga breathing exercises before every meal, and adventurous foods like deer tongues and kelp.  She’s a woman ahead of her time, to say the least.  And how can you not love a movie in which the family’s boarder, a crackpot inventor (O. Z. Whitehead), is working on edible beer bottles made of pretzel flour?  “Eat a little, drink a little,” is his marketing slogan, and these bottles are going to be great…if they can just stop sprouting leaks.  These kinds of quirky details, along with the film’s unhurried pace and unforced emotions make this a fresh, pleasingly offbeat comedy with more on its mind than first suspected.  Yet its effects are derived from gently accumulating grace notes.

Jenkins is able to predict the winners at the racetrack because the horses, essentially four-legged gossips, tell him who’s going to win.  But nothing lasts forever.  The death of a particularly beloved horse plunges Jenkins into the darkness of first-time grief, one more step on his path out of boyhood.  Soon Jenkins can’t hear what the horses are saying, and suddenly another (younger) boy is the one being followed by dogs.  One part of life has ended, and it’s simply time for whatever comes next.  This is a children’s movie about leaving childhood behind and learning to accept the concept of change, meaning that its themes are aimed squarely at the adults (who can remember their own variations regarding that transition).  Clearly you’re watching a film in which everyone involved was trying to do something special, something tender and true and charming.  It’s time to appreciate My Brother Talks to Horses as a major Zinnemann work, not an early footnote.  However, I must mention that Zinnemann himself would not agree with my assessment.  In his 1992 autobiography, he writes one short paragraph about his two Jenkins pictures, too embarrassed even to mention them by name.

Zinnemann and Jenkins soon reteamed for Little Mister Jim (1947), which isn’t as good as their first picture though it’s in many ways similar and certainly a worthy follow-up.  It’s the more “serious” film, with Jenkins’ mother (Frances Gifford) dying, which leads to his army-captain father (James Craig) turning to alcohol.  (It’s set in 1938.)  Jenkins bonds with their Chinese servant (Chingwah Lee), and there’s a one-of-a-kind moment when Jenkins recites the Lord’s Prayer in Chinese.  Spring Byington is back, showing up late as a horrid biddy.  As in My Brother Talks to Horses, grief is a major component, but the overall script is uneven, far less cohesive and satisfying than the earlier picture’s.  Still, it’s not routine fare and it does occasionally delve beneath the surface of things, with Zinnemann assuredly probing the material’s limited potential.  And Jenkins is as un-actory as ever.

Zinnemann’s work with Jenkins must have been valuable training for his work on The Search, another film with a child (Ivan Jandl) in the central role, in this case a displaced boy in the aftermath of the war in Europe.  Despite the pleasures of watching relaxed newcomer Montgomery Clift (as an American G.I. who befriends the Czech boy), The Search now seems overrated, a clumsy mix of docudrama and tearjerker.  Despite the astonishing locations of a ravaged Germany, The Search is nonetheless manipulative, condescending, and too bogged down in narration.  Continuing by calling it graceless, overemphatic, and pretentious, I might just as well say that it’s everything My Brother Talks to Horses isn’t.  I’m glad The Search put Zinnemann on the map, but for me he was already there with two better films, The Seventh Cross and the beguiling My Brother Talks to Horses.

Being 15 in 1965: “Billie” and “Inside Daisy Clover”

It was released in the second half of 1965.  It’s sort of a musical, with a title character prone to bursting into song, though it never quite commits itself unashamedly to the musical genre.  Its main character is a spunky scruffy-looking 15-year-old tomboy with an older sister.  Can you name the movie?

Well, there are two correct answers:  Billie and Inside Daisy Clover.  Billie may be a mostly silly (even inane) family sitcom, and Daisy a so-called “serious” drama about soulless Hollywood, but while I was watching Billie I couldn’t stop thinking about Daisy.  One of the reasons is that Billie looks like just the kind of gooey “uplifting” movie that might have starred the fictional Daisy Clover.  And though Daisy is set in the 1930s, its musical numbers look every bit as “1965″ as the contemporary song-and-dance sequences in Billie.

Billie stars Patty Duke, billed solo above the title, in her first feature film since her astonishing Oscar-winning turn as young Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker (1962).  Based on the 1952 Broadway comedy Time Out for Ginger (1952), Billie was refashioned for the youth market of the mid-sixties, making it about as far from being a prestige picture as can be imagined.  Duke plays Billie Carol, torn between perfume and running shoes, a high-schooler who not only becomes a member of the boys’ track team but its undeniable star.  Her special gift is her ability to run to “the beat,” hearing speed-fueling music in her head.  She not only runs fast but excels at the javelin, the hurdles, and the pole vault.  Can any boy stand the competition?  Will any of them want to date a superior athlete?  For a while it looks as though Billie will continue to trailblaze, to topple all competitors, and there are even a few hints that this could turn into a groundbreaking lesbian coming-out story, but, alas, no such luck.  Though equality is much talked about, and Billie is named “Athlete of the Day” at the big meet, the movie nonetheless eventually comes to an inevitable place for Billie:  “Being a girl is so much fun, I’ve decided to give up track.”  (When she says this, she’s wearing her pink party-dress and has a new hairdo.)  Now some less-talented guy can be “Athlete of the Day” and everyone else can sigh with relief.

Billie is a lackluster vehicle for a young woman who had already proven her talent to Oscar voters.  Duke seems distracted in it, as if she, too, knows she is squandering her potential on uninspired froth.  It would have made much more sense if Duke had instead starred in Inside Daisy Clover.  Not because Daisy is a better movie, because it really isn’t;  it’s just bad in a more prestigious way.  However, it would have offered Duke a more challenging role, one that might have allowed her to explore her talent, as well as her persona as a teen star.  Duke’s big post-Oscar career move was her popular TV sitcom The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), which made Duke America’s sweetheart, memorably playing the dual role of identical cousins with opposite personalities.  It was something of a lighthearted tour de force, but also the kind of image shaper that would make a picture like Billie seem to be perfectly appropriate big-screen fare for the nation’s favorite teenager.  It also had the potential to translate Duke’s small-screen popularity into big box-office returns.  A role like Daisy Clover would have been a real departure, and possibly too much of a career risk, though it was certainly more in line with what an Oscar winner would choose.  After all, the odds were slim that another role as choice as Helen Keller was likely to come her way.  (A year after the series ended, Duke starred in Valley of the Dolls, when it was safer for her to bust her squeaky-clean image.) 

Daisy Clover was played by Natalie Wood, an actress on the other side of 25.  Duke may no longer have been 15 but she was still a teen.  An 18-ish actress would have made a far more convincing Daisy, but maybe the movie, with its sexual situations flung Daisy’s way, seemed easier to take (and certainly tamer) with a womanly actress in the role, rather than an actual teenager.  Wood was coming off two recent Oscar nominations (for Splendor in the Grass and Love With the Proper Stranger) and a few box-office blockbusters (such as West Side Story and Sex and the Single Girl), which means that in 1965 she could have had any part she wanted.  Why, at such a career peak, she wanted to play Daisy is a mystery to me, except for her chance to work with director Robert Mulligan (Love With the Proper Stranger) again.

Inside Daisy Clover feels no closer to reality than the forced cheer of Billie‘s sitcom suburbia.  Daisy is a beach urchin who wants to sing (it’s her ticket out), then suddenly doesn’t want to sing from the minute she snags a Hollywood contract.  The movie is a pointless, perplexing drag in which the Hollywood types seem like vampires, or maybe members of a secret cult.  It’s a pretentious attack on the movie business, an assault by filmmakers who seem to have forgotten to pack any ammunition.  This movie doesn’t get inside anything, lurching from one bizarre and uninvolving scene to another.  As Daisy’s bisexual movie-star husband, Robert Redford is the only good thing in it, even though it seems that his bisexuality, only spoken about (by another character), was added after Redford was long gone.

Daisy is a girl with plenty of rebelliousness but little actual character.  There are many big scenes with nothing underneath them, including a terrible, overlong, and “comically” interrupted attempted-suicide climax.  And you’re always aware that Wood is “playing” fifteen.  At least Duke still would have had some vestiges of that awkward age, some genuine uncertainty about the grown-up world, and a more recent connection to the challenges of youthful stardom.

Inside Daisy Clover is a head-scratcher, making its title seem ironic (which I don’t think was the point).  And Billie is, despite a few glimmers of issue-raising, a disposable rehash of countless growing-pains comedies.  Billie did nothing for Duke, and Daisy did nothing for Wood, making it not a good year for very talented 15-year-old female characters.  Even with all my complaints about Inside Daisy Clover, I continue to wish that Duke had played Daisy.  It would still be an awful movie, but it would be of more interest, with the right actress giving it a fair shot.  Yes, it may have offended fans of The Patty Duke Show, and it probably wouldn’t have increased Duke’s box-office prowess, but it would have given her something to wrestle with, something to focus her actorly concentration upon, something at least more serious-minded than Billie in grooming Patty Duke into a possibly important young actress.

Madame X (1937)

It was originally a 1908 French play by Alexandre Bisson.  When it opened on Broadway in 1910, it starred Dorothy Donnelly.  Ms. Donnelly (who would be played by Merle Oberon in the 1954 movie musical Deep in My Heart) then starred in a 1916 silent-film version.  And, well, Madame X was thereafter one of those surefire pieces of screen material, the epitome of the masochistic tearjerker.  For a good long while, audiences seemed never to tire it, all over the world.  Pauline Frederick had a personal success in a 1920 silent version, and even Tuesday Weld, at the late date of 1981, starred in a TV adaptation.  But the three most enduring versions appear to be the American feature films of 1929, 1937, and 1966.

The 1929 Madame X, an early talkie, now looks positively prehistoric.  Lionel Barrymore got an Oscar nomination for directing it, even though it’s awfully slow, creaky, and stagy.  The drama may be flagrant, but the filmmaking is frozen.  Estimable Ruth Chatterton also got a nomination, but, aside from her star presence and the lovely, cultured flutiness of her speaking voice, she’s overly mannered and theatrical, extremely far from her best.  The 1966 version, starring Lana Turner, is perhaps the last “old movie” ever made, a project so out of touch that it was a camp classic midway through its premiere.  (It prompted one of the funniest pans in all of Pauline Kael’s reviews.)  If the manipulations of the plot, and the victimization of its title character, were creaking in 1929, well, imagine how badly oiled they were just one year before The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde were released.  This misguided Madame X was made for an audience that was either dead or had simply stopped going to the movies.

With apologies to the silent and any international versions I haven’t seen, I still suspect that MGM’s 1937 Madame X is the best of the bunch.  Why?  Two words:  Gladys George.  No one was better at boozy broads than Ms. George, and it’s a shame she isn’t better remembered today.  I’d call her a great actress, one who died too young, at only 54 in 1954.  She’s most often seen in two all-time classics in which she has small roles:  The Maltese Falcon (1941), as the wife of Humphrey Bogart’s dead partner, a lady who had an affair with Bogie’s Sam Spade (with George getting third billing, after Bogie and Mary Astor);  and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), as Dana Andrews’ stepmother.  But Ms. George had a more substantive role in The Roaring Twenties (1939), as Panama, a quintessential “goodhearted old broad,” one who gets to utter the film’s classic final line about the dead James Cagney:  “He used to be a big shot.”  But George’s greatest performance is in The Hard Way (1943), even though she’s only in the movie for seven minutes.  Hers is a scalding portrait of a downward spiraling star:  temperamental, touchy, and terrified.  And painfully fragile.  Her drunken rendition of the ironically titled song “Youth Must Have Its Fling,” plus an earlier (and sober) rendition sung while smoking, are both splendidly acted, as is her onstage breakdown.

George got her sole Oscar nomination, as Best Actress, for bringing her no-nonsense smarts and strong likability to Valiant Is the Word for Carrie (1936), just the kind of soapy sludge (about a woman with a past) that might lead to a remake of Madame X, which came exactly one year later (released 76 years ago this week).  Hoary and crude as Madame X is, Ms. George infuses it with her honesty, focusing her formidable talent as if the material deserved her and was a challenge to her abilities.  Neither Ruth Chatterton nor Lana Turner can touch her in this part.  She’s simply ideal.  The film is basically just as ludicrous as the other versions, nearly as shameless in its effects, yet you believe in Gladys George, even if you don’t buy anything around her.

It opens in Paris, on what appears to be the most implausibly tasteful and elegant extra-marital affair of all time, with George on a balcony, while lover Phillip Reed plays the piano.  Just after George ends the affair, in walks a jealous Ruth Hussey who shoots Reed dead (while George escapes unseen).  Warren William, as George’s prominent lawyer husband, throws her out for being an unfit mother to their little boy.  She agrees to leave, to protect her son from her shame.  When William reconsiders, it’s too late:  George cannot be found.  The rest of her life is neverending penance for her affair, moving aimlessly around the globe for the next twenty years.  It’s all plot, all melodrama, all victimization.  She looks like Blanche DuBois by the time she gets to New Orleans.  By Buenos Aires, she’s in full boozy-whore mode.  Crook Henry Daniell brings her back to Paris so he can blackmail William, leading to George shooting Daniell dead and going on trial for his murder.  The lawyer assigned to her is…are you ready…wait for it…her own grown son (John Beal)!  As universal plots go, well, let’s face it, we’ve all been there, right?

If I had to pick the silliest flaw in the writing, I’d go with this whopper:  when Beal meets George for the first time, he doesn’t tell her his name, which means that she doesn’t know it’s her son.  Dramatically speaking, how convenient.  Of course she wants no one to know her identity, but why wouldn’t a polite young lawyer introduce himself to his client, even a wreck such as this?  So, mid-trial, out it comes, ridiculously.  During his plea on her behalf, George fully absorbs the incredible news that this is the son she was forced to abandon, a revelation to which she shouts, “No!  No!” and then “I can’t stand it!”  It sounds as if the actress herself is reacting to the plot, or specifically to the playwright and screenwriter who have inflicted this foolishness upon her.  Yet George manages to ride over every inanity, even this one, keeping her Madame X a sympathetic and touching figure.  Before the verdict is rendered, George asks young Beal to let her give him ”a mother’s kiss,” the story’s get-out-your-hankies moment.  He never figures out who she is, while she has her small victory, briefly back in her son’s embrace.

Director Sam Wood did the best he could with already laughably dated material, but he really hit the jackpot with George’s casting.  There’s not a moment in which she disappoints.  Her descent is, considering the material, as plausible as can be imagined.  She has some terrific drunk scenes, believably numbing herself from the agonizing reality of what her once-privileged life has become.  George proved there was still some life in the old gal, 29 years after the character was first conceived, adding Madame X to the Gladys George gallery of iconic tarts, drunks, madams, has-beens, and any of the other marginalized characters to whom she brought dignity through her intelligence, empathy, warmth, and respect.  Gladys George had the gift for making “losers” the characters who stole our hearts (in addition to being characters who stole a slew of movies).

Trevor Howard: The Heart of the Matter (1953)

The great English screen actor Trevor Howard would have turned 100 this week, on September 29th.  He died 25 years ago, before his 75th birthday.  During his long and varied career, Howard had the rare distinction of being a sometime-leading man with the face of a character actor.  Charm, intelligence, and a subtle sexual charisma sometimes trumped his lack of a pretty face.  That’s actually how Howard became a star, in David Lean’s exquisite Brief Encounter (1945), still the movie about an almost love affair, when two ordinary people find their lives upturned by unexpected and inopportune ardor for someone other than their spouses.  Though Howard was secondary to Celia Johnson (it was, after all, the woman’s story), he is gently irresistible as the doctor who captures Johnson’s heart.  Written by Noel Coward, this chaste brush with adultery (consisting of exactly four kisses) remains a moving, richly felt drama.

Howard appears in another all-time classic, Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller The Third Man, in the rather unshowy role of a British major.  He’s also in a few forgotten and flawed but certainly underrated dramas, including Lean’s The Passionate Friends (1949), in which he’s caught in a triangle with Ann Todd and Claude Rains, and John Huston’s The Roots of Heaven (1958), as an animal activist, specifically a fierce protector of elephants.  Howard got his sole Oscar nomination (as Best Actor) as Dean Stockwell’s miner father, a drunken brute, in Sons and Lovers (1960), giving this admirable but disappointing film some kick, even though his consistently colorful scenes feel like well-placed show pieces.  Howard was never given his due for his Captain Bligh in the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty, a fascinating counterpoint to Charles Laughton’s larger-than-life villainy in the beloved 1935 version.  Howard’s Bligh is human-sized, more of a loathsome loser than Laughton’s, a small person, petty and insecure and remote (though still cruel and sadistic).  Laughton was theatrical, even outrageous, while Howard reached for (and found) greater complexity and depth, refusing to be a man you love to hate.

Another of Howard’s lesser-known (at least in America) dramas is The Heart of The Matter, soon to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its fall release in England (opening in the U.S. in 1954).  Directed by George More O’Ferrall and based on a novel by Graham Greene (who also wrote The Third Man), The Heart of the Matter gave Howard one of his most emotionally turbulent roles, the kind in which he could employ the full breadth of his talent.  Thus the result is one of his very best performances.  The overall film may be slow to get going and rather heavy at times, but it’s a solid piece of work, both a compelling love story and, mostly, a rich character study.  (You might say that it uses Howard in both his leading-man and character-actor modes.)  The setting is British-”owned” Sierra Leone in 1942, with Howard a British policeman who has been passed over for a promotion.  He’s also a conflicted Catholic in an unhappy marriage.  He and his wife (Elizabeth Allan) are still grieving the illness death of a daughter.

This well-shot black-and-white movie takes shape with the arrival of a 19-year-old Austrian woman (Maria Schell), a survivor of the downed ship that made her a widow.  The radiant Schell instantly enlivens the film with her innate warmth and prodigious talent.  It’s over an hour into the movie before Howard and Schell kiss for the first time, in an abrupt but exciting manner.  They become lovers and help to heal each other.  The movie eventually includes attempted suicide, blackmail, diamond smuggling, gang violence, and murder, all of which makes it sound more like a melodrama than a so-called character study.  Even so, Howard impressively sustains our focus on his character’s internal struggles.  Grappling with the guilt of hurting others, while wrestling with the demands of his Catholicism, Howard plays the role with some startling and illuminating outburts of emotion.  There’s also a memorably aching speech in which he recounts the way he learned of his daughter’s death, receiving two telegrams on the same day, but in the wrong order:  the first revealed that she was dead;  the second said she was ill but that there was hope.

O’Ferrall’s direction could use more snap, and Greene’s story feels a little too neatly contructed, with everything seeming to have a definite all-worked-out meaning.  The film does offer an incidental boost of pleasure in the sight of two promising newcomers:  Peter Finch (as a priest) and Denholm Elliott (as a clerk in love with Howard’s wife).  And it is in fact the actors who transcend the film’s deficiencies, making The Heart of the Matter more than worthwhile, most especially in the tortured humanity of Trevor Howard’s performance as a man in search of some kind of peace.

Frances Farmer: Come and Get It (1936)

Subjects of biopics often end up being more famous as movie characters than for having done whatever it was they did to inspire a whole movie.  Cases in point:  all those musical biographies made in the 1950s.  Jane Froman (With a Song in My Heart) and Lillian Roth (I’ll Cry Tomorrow) are now best-known as Susan Hayward roles rather than for their singing careers.  Stage-and-screen actress Frances Farmer is another example, remembered primarily as Jessica Lange’s breakthrough role in Frances (1982).  Ms. Farmer, who died at 56 in 1970, would have turned 100 this week (on September 19th), and, assisted by Lange’s ferocious portrayal, is considered a genuine Hollywood rebel.  Achieving stardom in 1936, her first year in pictures, she soon bolted to New York to star in the Broadway premiere of Golden Boy (1937), creating the role of Lorna Moon in Clifford Odets’ instant classic.  Returning to the west coast, she and Hollywood were increasingly disenchanted with each other, with Farmer soon relegated to undemanding roles in B pictures.  Her downward spiral was well under way.

The onscreen Farmer always looks to be slumming to me, as if thinking herself superior to the medium.  However, she also doesn’t seem quite good enough to be starring in movies, never quite relaxed or comfortable enough just to live and breathe in front of a camera.  Though extremely pretty, in a wholesome “milkmaid” kind of way, Farmer is remote, distant (but not, like Garbo, in the good, exotic way).  She looks more like a snooty society girl, a blonde knockout who isn’t as fun as you hoped she’d be.  Even so, her combination of beauty, a mellifluous speaking voice, and obvious intelligence might have been parlayed into a more lasting stardom:  if she had enjoyed Hollywood’s way of working; if she could have loosened up; if she had committed herself to screen acting.  Frances Farmer was the girl who got it all and then seemingly threw it away.  Her career was over by 1943.

Her fourth movie, Come and Get It, made her a star.  It’s one of those sprawling pieces of Americana from novelist Edna Ferber, this one beginning in 1884 Wisconsin.  In case you missed that this is a big production, the film includes a montage about the lumber business at work, with logs being tossed in the water, swimming to their destiny, not unlike figures in an Esther Williams ballet.  This is a Samuel Goldwyn production of a Howard Hawks movie, an A picture all the way, with newcomer Farmer landing the plum female lead, a dual role no less.  Come and Get It is a good, far-from-great movie, heavier on plot than character, entertaining though undistinguished.  Goldwyn fired Hawks and replaced him with William Wyler, meaning that Farmer, with only three prior pictures to her credit (all of them released in 1936), was suddenly being launched by not one but two of Hollywood’s top moviemakers.

The film stars Edward Arnold, the portly character actor in one of his rare leading roles.  On his way to becoming a timber tycoon, Arnold falls for saloon songstress Farmer (and, for some inexplicable reason, she likes him, too).  But he jilts her for a career-advancing marriage, and so she marries Walter Brennan, Arnold’s best pal.  In a performance that won him the first-ever Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Brennan, a terrific actor with an impressive range, gives one of his least credible performances.  With an overdone Swedish accent, he plays one of those incessantly cheerful, selflessly kind fellows, a role lacking any character development.  The implication is that Farmer marries him because she’s pregnant with Arnold’s baby.  (Why else?)  But, when the plot shifts to 1907, Arnold becomes infatuated with the now-grown child (also played by Farmer).  This can’t be a movie in which a man is trying to bed his own daughter, certainly not in 1936, so I assume we’re meant to believe that the child is Brennan’s after all.  I guess we can go back to Edna Ferber for clarification, but does anybody really want to do that?

Farmer is lovely and capable in both roles (if a bit blonder as the daughter), though hardly first-rate.  She effortfully plays the toughness of the saloon singer; it just feels unnatural.  She’s more at home when singing.  In a voice as low as Dietrich’s, Farmer croons “Aura Lee” three times, twice as the singer, then once as the daughter.  The plot eventually becomes a male forerunner of Mildred Pierce (1945), with parent and child (this time father and son, Arnold and Joel McCrea) competing for the same love object (Farmer, the daughter).  Arnold is an unsympathetic, creepy lecher, jilting the mother then pursuing her child!  Farmer enjoys his gifts and his attention but curbs her materialism for the love of McCrea, a rebellious boy more concerned with conservation than profits.  McCrea is his reliably likable, alert self, bringing his natural three-dimensional presence to a bland-young-man role.  Andrea Leeds plays McCrea’s sister, and she has a strong, adult scene in which she tells Arnold about the commoner she loves, and that she’ll be unfaithful if forced to marry her rich suitor.  But the movie is nearly stolen by Cecil Cunningham as Arnold’s tart secretary.  With every not-to-be-missed subtle glance, she is sharp and amusing (and barely in the movie).

Come and Get It is, as expected, painted in big strokes, all about huge things like greed, lust, and opportunism.  It was a solid commercial entertainment for 1936, without being much more.  Still, it’s remembered for two things:  Brennan’s Oscar and the emergence of Frances Farmer, the golden girl more interested in being a serious actress than a movie star.  If she had been more malleable, more of a team player, perhaps her career would have flourished.  Or maybe she was simply one of those people who come out of nowhere, skyrocket to the top, and then vanish almost as quickly.  Her half-dozen years as a “name” actress produced mostly forgettable pictures, but she went out with a big one.  Son of Fury (1942), her unbeknownst farewell to stardom, opposite red-hot Tyrone Power, gave audiences a Frances Farmer more beautiful than ever, playing a woman not to be trusted, with speech so refined she seemed practically lock-jawed.  Even though it’s Power’s vehicle, it could never have occurred to audiences that Farmer would soon be off her Hollywood pedestal and subsequently associated only with disaster, including alcohol, arrests, and institutions.

Jessica Lange brought Frances Farmer’s name back to the Hollywood forefront, while Farmer’s actual movies continue to enthrall with their what-might-have-been questions regarding her fate.  Her Golden Age of Hollywood beauty and poise are intact, but what’s most fascinating is what can’t be seen, the untapped potential of Frances Farmer in movies that were never made.