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.
