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Today is the centennial of Jean Harlow's birth. In her honor, I'm posting this Reader's Digest version of the four-part, 5000 word essay I wrote about her last year.
If she'd just been another pretty face, she would have been forgotten long ago, one of the thousands of beauties who for a brief season capture the fancy of the paparazzi and the tabloids and the fickle paying public and then quickly fade from our memory. But more than just a platinum blonde beauty, Jean Harlow also possessed an unexpected gift for comedy and self-parody, and as the pre-Code era drew to a close, she became not only America's premier sex symbol but one of its premier actresses as well.
Born to a Kansas City dentist and the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer, Harlean Harlow Carpenter tried out for the movies on a dare, got the job and later signed with the Hal Roach Studios. Working under her mother's maiden name, Jean Harlow played the "swanky blonde" in four Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts and appeared in uncredited bit roles in more than a dozen movies (including Chaplin's City Lights) before Howard Hughes cast her in Hell's Angels. Hughes epic about World War I flying aces proved to be Harlow's big break. Although she was as skittish as a newborn foal, barely able to speak her lines, the public immediately responded to her beauty—the expressions "platinum blonde" and "blonde bombshell" were coined to describe her—and she soon landed better parts, including that of James Cagney's love interest in William Wellman's gangster classic The Public Enemy, and the unobtainable society girl in Frank Capra's comedy Platinum Blonde.
Directors clearly had no idea what to do with Harlow in these early efforts and mostly she stood around, serving as a symbol of something the hero thinks he wants and learns the hard way that he doesn't. The bombshell image may have packed the theaters with the curious and the salivating, but it blinded directors and producers to her talent.
"The newspapers sure have loused me up," she complained cheerfully, "calling me a sexpot! Where'd they ever get such a screwy idea?"
It was MGM's legendary producer Irving Thalberg who determined to mold a screen image for Harlow beyond that of sex symbol. Thalberg bought Harlow's contract from Howard Hughes and cast her in the screen adaptation of Red-Headed Woman, Katharine Brush's racy novel about a woman who sleeps her way into high society. F. Scott Fitzgerald took the first crack at the screenplay, but couldn't solve the puzzle of how to make the audience like a character he himself didn't approve of, and it was instead Anita Loos, a veteran screenwriter and author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, who drafted the final screenplay.
Although Harlow played a manipulative gold digger—she seduces her married boss and breaks up his marriage—there was a sincerity to her transparent scheming, and with Harlow serving up the brassy bits with humor and wounded pride, audiences found themselves rooting for her. The result was one of the biggest hits of 1932.
Variety summed up the general reaction: "Jean Harlow, hitherto not highly esteemed as an actress, gives an electric performance."
Next up was an even better vehicle for Harlow, one that would both display her talent for comedy and pair her with fast-rising star Clark Gable. Based on a failed stageplay, Red Dust starred Gable as the overseer of a Vietnamese rubber plantation, Harlow as the "cute little trick" who falls for him, and Mary Astor as the wife of the plantation's latest hire, a woman Gable sets out to seduce.
"What a pleasant little house party this is going to be," Harlow quips. The women's rivalry is not just one of sex and love but of class, education and manners—everything Astor's Mrs. Willis takes for granted, everything Harlow's Vantine has struggled to survive without—and as the love triangle plays out, Harlow really hits her stride as an actress. As Vantine competes with Mrs. Willis (and Harlow with Astor), she is funny, bawdy, hurt, angry, and then as much as her Vantine wishes she weren't, compassionate, too, protecting her rival when she could just as easily destroy her.
Harlow's "uniquely effortless vulgarity, humor and slovenliness," wrote Movie Diva in her review of Red Dust, "create the rarest of Hollywood goddesses, the beautiful clown."
It's one of the best performances of the pre-Code era.
The following year Harlow gave what may be her best-remembered performance, that of none-too-bright social climber Kitty Packard in the comedy-drama, Dinner At Eight.
A successful play by Broadway legends George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, Dinner At Eight is a loosely-connected series of vignettes about a group of wealthy Manhattanites preparing for a dinner party as their respective worlds fall down around their ears. For the movie adaptation, producer David O. Selznick assembled the brightest of MGM's stars, including the three male leads from Grand Hotel, and added America's most popular actress Marie Dressler as a faded Broadway star, Billie Burke as the twittery hostess of this train wreck, and Harlow as the spoiled young trophy wife of Wallace Beery's crooked businessman.
Director George Cukor, fresh off Katharine Hepburn's successful debut in A Bill Of Divorcement, cast Harlow over the objections of Louis B. Mayer, who felt she wasn't actress enough to keep up with her more experienced co-stars. But Red Dust had convinced Cukor that Harlow had a gift for comedy and with the director's help, she wound up stealing the show. Harlow's Kitty manipulates her men, bullies her maid, and otherwise lazes around, eating bonbons and complaining of boredom. Yet because she hungers to improve herself (even if she seems to think the surest path to knowledge is to sleep with an educated man), we find ourselves cheering her on.
"I'm going to be a lady if it kills me," she vows.
In terms of its complexity, the role of Kitty Packard was a leap for Harlow, but where she had been ill-equipped to handle early roles in Hell's Angels and Platinum Blonde, now she was ready. In Red-Headed Woman, she'd learned how to gain an audience's sympathy despite playing an unlikeable character. In Red Dust, she'd learned how to deliver tough wisecracks while conveying hurt and vulnerability. In Dinner At Eight, she found the last piece of the puzzle, "the ability," in the words of Frank Miller, writing for Turner Classic Movies, "to deliver lines as though she didn't quite know what they meant."
The result was the best performance of her career, and when Harlow finished her last scene for the movie, she went to her dressing room and cried, perhaps knowing that nothing she would ever do afterwards would top this performance.
"Harlow played comedy," said Cukor, "as naturally as a hen lays an egg."
Movie-going audiences loved Dinner At Eight and loved Harlow in it, not only because she looked great in her backless evening gown (designed by Adrian, it was known as the "Jean Harlow dress" and was so tight she couldn't sit down in it), but also because she had proven herself once and for all as one of Hollywood's great comedic actresses.
"Acting honors," said Variety at the time, "probably will go to Dressler and Harlow, the latter giving an astonishingly well-balanced treatment of Kitty, the canny little hussy who hooks a hard-bitten and unscrupulous millionaire and then makes him lay down and roll over."
"I was not a born actress," Harlow confessed later. "No one knows it better than I. If I had any latent talent, I have had to work hard, listen carefully, do things over and over and then over again in order to bring it out."
After the critical and commercial successes of Red Dust and Dinner At Eight, Jean Harlow leapt to the top of her profession, surpassing Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer as the most popular actress at MGM. And although Hollywood began enforcing the Production Code in 1934 and as a result toned down the more explicit sexuality of her movies, Harlow remained an audience favorite. In fact, from 1932 until her untimely death in 1937, Harlow had at least one movie, and often two, finish among the top ten grossing films of the year.
Despite her success with critics and audiences, Harlow was never nominated for an Academy Award—comedic performances rarely are—but she did rank twenty-second on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movie legends and forty-ninth on Entertainment Weekly's list of the all-time greatest movie stars. In his cult classic Alternate Oscars, Danny Peary chose her performance in the screwball comedy Libeled Lady as the best by an actress in 1936.
In contrast to her movie career, Harlow's personal life was marked by scandal and heartbreak. Harlow's mother was overbearing and controlling, living out dreams of movie stardom through her daughter. In 1932, Harlow's second husband Paul Bern died of a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances. In 1933, MGM arranged a quick, short-lived marriage to cinematographer Harold Rosson to cover up Harlow's affair with a married man. Like her character Lola Burns in the 1933 comedy Bombshell, Harlow was hounded by greedy studio bosses, greedier family members, stalkers, fraudsters, slicky boys and the tabloid press, and treated more as a cash cow than a flesh and blood woman.
"She didn't want to be famous," said Clark Gable, "she wanted to be happy."
In 1935, Harlow fell in love with William Powell, her co-star in the movie Reckless, and finally after years of turmoil, her personal life began to match the success of her professional one. The two secretly engaged although never married—in his early forties, Powell worried about being linked to such a young actress, and Harlow also claimed MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer didn't approve of the union.
In 1937, during filming of her sixth movie with Clark Gable, Saratoga, Harlow fell ill with a serious kidney ailment and died before the end of production. The studio finished the film with long shots of a stand-in and released the film with much fanfare. It was the highest grossing film of 1937, a fitting tribute to her brief but brilliant career.
Postscript
You can check out other tributes to Jean Harlow at the Kitty Packard Pictorial, a site devoted to all things Harlow. The Pictorial is also promoting a new biography, Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 by Darrell Rooney and Mark A. Vieira.
We here at the Monkey pause to note the passing of one our favorite actresses, Jane Russell. As my big brother noted an e-mail, "in 'the day,' she was hot, hot, hot."
She was indeed.
I am of an age that my first introduction to Jane Russell was during her stint as a foundation undergarment spokesperson "for us full-figured gals," as she put it. I was a little too young to understand what part of her figure she was referring to. Later I figured it out. Hubba hubba.
Probably her most famous role was her first, The Outlaw, in which she co-starred with a cantilevered bra designed by Howard Hughes and his team of aeronautical engineers. Truth be told, it's not a very good movie and she didn't wear the bra anyway. Filming was completed in 1941, but Hollywood's censors delayed its release until 1943, with a nationwide release not coming until 1946.
"They held up The Outlaw for five years," she said later. "And Howard Hughes had me doing publicity for it every day, five days a week for five years."
Russell didn't appear in another film until 1946.
If you want to see her in something good, I'd recommend the two movies she made with Robert Mitchum, His Kind Of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and what I think is the best performance of her career, as a nightclub singer trying to keep her gold-digging pal Marilyn Monroe out of trouble in Howard Hawks' musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953).
I know everybody remembers Marilyn Monroe's signature performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," but personally, give me Jane Russell.
The two best films of 1933 that unfortunately are not going to win any of my self-invented Katie awards are a pair of pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck classics, as different from each other in every respect except quality as two movies can get. I highly recommend you see both.
I've mentioned the term "pre-Code" many times and written about this period in Hollywood history at length here and here. In a nutshell, in order to stave off state and federal attempts to censor movies, Hollywood's studios issued a set of guidelines of what were unacceptable topics for the big screen. Without any enforcement power, though, the guidelines were more often than not honored in the breach, and in fact, New York's National Board of Review and the Catholic League of Decency had a far greater influence on the content of films than Hollywood's own Hays Office. Not until Joseph Breen took over the office in 1934 did Hollywood studios agree to enforce the Code.
Anyone who is a fan of pre-Code movies has in mind some actor or actress who personifies the era's permiss- iveness. For some it's Joan Blondell, for others it's Jean Harlow; still others prefer Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Mae West, Clark Gable, James Cagney or even Norma Shearer. For me, though, Barbara Stanwyck more than any other performer, has come to personify in my mind the essence of the pre-Code era. Not only did she strip down to her skivvies in such films as Night Nurse, but she also displayed a fierce independence than always feels modern to me, even in the creakiest of film vehicles.
"It would be difficult to think of an actress so expressive of the early 1930s girl on the make," British film historian David Thomson has written, "as intimate, shiny, and flimsy as a discarded slip, but with eyes ever sly and alert."
Stanwyck rose quickly to stardom in the pre-Code era, primarily through the films of two great directors, William Wellman (Night Nurse, So Big and The Purchase Price) and Frank Capra, whose early films with Stanwyck included Ladies Of Leisure, The Miracle Woman, Forbidden and in the 1933 film, The Bitter Tea Of General Yen.
General Yen is the story of an American missionary (Stanwyck) who travels to China to marry her rather stuffy fiance only to wind up as the captive of a powerful warlord during the country's interminable civil war. At first, Yen (Nils Asther in the best performance of his career) holds Stanwyck in an effort to blunt the reformist zeal of Stanwyck's fiancé, but he soon finds himself falling in love with her.
Stanwyck, for her part, has a hard time reconciling her properly virginal upbringing with her growing lust for Yen, and in the process must confront for the first time in her sheltered life her own hypocrisy and prejudices. Her fevered dream in which she finds herself both menaced by and drawn to Yen is one of the most beautifully filmed sequences of Capra's illustrious career.
The film was a flop upon its initial release and Capra later dismissed it as "the only film in which I ever tried to become arty, because I was trying to win an Academy Award." The notion of a romance between a white woman and an Asian man shocked some and the picture played to protests around the country. "The women’s clubs came out very strongly against it," Stanwyck later said. "I was so shocked."
Even more shocking was Stanwyck's next film, Baby Face, one of the most notorious films of the pre-Code era. Written by Darryl F. Zanuck, who quit Warner Brothers shortly afterwards to form Twentieth Century Films, Baby Face was so racy that many scenes had to be re-shot and even then two version went out to theaters.
In Baby Face, Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, the daughter of an abusive saloon keeper who's been pimping her out since she was fourteen years old. She's inured to the humiliation—the look on her face as she realizes her father has just pimped her out is perfectly underplayed, as bored and blase as if he'd just read her the out-of-town baseball scores, but underneath seething with resentment—but she yearns for something better and is beginning to understand the power of her own sexuality.
In a key early scene that sets the tone, a powerful local politician puts his hand on Lily's knee, expecting to put his hand on a lot more than that. With barely a glance, Lily picks up a cup of coffee and casually dumps it on his hand.
"Oh, excuse me, my hand shakes so when I'm around you." When she later breaks a bottle over his head, he finally gets the message that this isn't foreplay.
With her only friend Chico (Theresa Harris), Lily leaves her father and hops a freight train—sleeping with a railroad cop to avoid arrest—and winds up in the big city where she ruthlessly sleeps her way to the top. (Among her conquests, look for a young John Wayne.)
Baby Face won no awards, but in 2005, the Library Congress included the film in the National Film Registry. If you're going to see it, make sure to track down the uncut version, which was for years thought lost then rediscovered in 2004. It's worth seeing both as a reminder that Hollywood didn't invent sex and sin in 1967, and as a pivotal moment in Stanwyck's career, being to my mind the moment she really became what we think of as "Barbara Stanwyck," with the impudence of Bette Davis, the independence of Katharine Hepburn, and the street smarts of Joan Crawford, only warmer, sexier and much less neurotic, respectively.
Within a year, the studios began to enforce the strict guidelines of the Pro- duction Code and Holly- wood wouldn't again make films with content as explicit and controversial as The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Baby Face until the 1960s. Stanwyck herself shifted gears and found popularity playing the martyred mother in such films as Stella Dallas. Not until The Lady Eve in 1941 would she figure how to sell the public on a character as brazen as Lily Powers.
Trivia: The Bitter Tea Of General Yen was the first movie ever to play Radio City Music Hall in New York. Scheduled to run for two weeks, the theaters owners yanked the film after eight days despite having made back only $80,000 of the $100,000 rental they had paid the studio.
The most elusive and enigmatic superstar in movie history, Greta Garbo is also one of the most recognizable, familiar even to those who have never seen one of her movies. Because the beautiful and talented Swedish import rarely granted interviews, retired early and lived the rest of her days in jealously-guarded seclusion, nearly everything we know about her, or think we know, comes down to us in the form of the perfectly-rendered, never-aging images she made iconic on the silver screen. To the extent that acting is a matter of invention, Garbo surely ranks as one of the greatest, since in a very real sense, she is purely a product of her own self-creation.
Of the two dozen Hollywood movies she made in a career that began with great fanfare in the waning days of the silent age and lasted until her sudden retirement in 1941, many movie fans and historians count her performance in Queen Christina as the best of her career. I count it as the best by a dramatic actress in 1932-33.
The Contenders
Queen Christina may have been Garbo's best performance—to my mind, it was at the very least her first great performance after the introduction of sound—but the choice of Garbo as best dramatic actress of 1932-33 was hardly a clear-cut one.
Like Garbo, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn consistently turn up on lists of the ten best actresses in Hollywood history, and Kay Francis, though little remembered now outside a small but devoted band of followers, was at the peak of her career in 1932.
Why, even Fay Wray, who isn't generally regarded as a great actress, made a vital contribution to the field, teaching a generation of damsels in distress how to scream—and scream she did. She screamed with her whole body, she screamed from her toes, and the horror genre has never been the same. Think about it: before 1927, it wasn't even possible to hear an actress scream in a movie, and before Fay Wray, it wasn't clear we were supposed to. Afterwards, we knew that the only proper response to being scared out of our wits was to scream, and nobody would ever do it better. So before we move on to talk about greater actresses in greater roles, let's stop to salute her contribution to movie history.
Done? Okay, let's keep moving.
Barbara Stanwyck would have been a good choice for the top acting prize this year. The Bitter Tea Of General Yen and Baby Face are terrific movies, better than any movie at issue here aside from King Kong. The former, one of director Frank Capra's best, is the story of an American missionary (Stanwyck) who falls in love with a Chinese warlord (Nils Asther) and in the process confronts her own racism and hypocrisy. The latter, about a woman who sleep her way to the top, is the most deliciously cynical movie of the pre-Code era and helped usher in tighter studio censorship.
But while Stanwyck did some terrific work in the 1930s—these two pictures, The Miracle Worker, Stella Dallas—it's really her work in the 1940s that made her a legend and since she's a lock for two best actress awards, in 1941 (The Lady Eve, Ball Of Fire and Meet John Doe) and in 1944 (Double Indemnity), I'm going to risk the wrath of her loyal fans and bypass her this year.
Likewise, Katharine Hepburn is one of the greatest actresses of all time—maybe the greatest—but I can think of at least five performances from the 1930s alone (Alice Adams, Stage Door, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and even Sylvia Scarlett) that are more assured than the one she gave in Little Women. She's going to win two, three, maybe even four awards before we're done (assuming I live to be 140). I'm going to wait to recognize her accomplishments for a movie I really want to talk about.
Finally, we have Kay Francis who in the space of a little over two months starred in three of the best movies of her career, Jewel Robbery, One Way Passage and Trouble In Paradise, a phenomenal run. In particular, One Way Passage is a splendid showcase of her abilities. The story of two people (Francis as a cancer patient, William Powell as a condemned criminal) who fall in love on an ocean voyage not knowing the other has little time to live, it's one of those magnificently stylish weepers that once upon a time Hollywood cranked out in its sleep. If you haven't seen it, get cracking—I highly recommend it.
That said, though, it's was Greta Garbo who gave the most moving performance of the year, and in many ways, the most iconic of her career. The vote may have been close, but when the final tally was read, it was Garbo's name at the top of the list.
Queen Christina: Great Performance, Flawed Movie
As Queen Christina opens, Sweden is embroiled in midst of the Thirty Years' War, a destructive 17th century conflict that had its origins in the ongoing battle between Protestants and Catholics for control of central Europe. The country's beloved King Gustavus Adolphus has just fallen on the field of battle leaving his seven year old daughter to ascend to the throne. Raised as a boy and schooled in the arts of war (well, to the extent that a child can be), Christina tosses aside her regent's carefully-worded speech about "wag[ing] war with courage" and instead vows "to win it!"
In the next scene, it's years later and we see the grown up Christina (Garbo) in trousers and a man's hat riding astride a galloping horse through the forests on the palace grounds. To a modern audience, this scene might mean nothing, but in 1933 a woman in trousers riding astride rather than sidesaddle, these are signals that Christina has taken to heart the notion that to rule the country means ruling as a man. And indeed, by the standards of the day's cinema, she dresses like a man, argues like a man, and, it is implied when she kisses her lady-in-waiting on the lips, loves like a man.
Despite Christina's skill and devotion as a leader, all is not well at home. The people clamor for more war, clamor for a royal marriage, clamor for an heir.
"In short," she says, "they clamor."
At the heart of the unrest is the desire that the queen should settle the question of the royal succession by producing an heir of Swedish blood, which of necessity requires her to settle on a mate, be it the handsome schemer Magnus or the aging war hero, cousin Charles. Christina sees marriage as a loss of her hard-earned freedom, a prospect that drives her to distraction.
"But majesty, you cannot die an old maid!"
"I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor!"
Fed up with demands of power, Christina disguises herself (as a man, always as a man) and spends a few days riding alone in the wintery countryside to clear her head. There, she stumbles across the Spanish ambassador (John Gilbert) and his entourage stranded in the snow. The ambassador, Antonio, mistakes her for an impudent boy—a conceit the filmmakers expect you to roll with since Garbo looks no more like a boy than Jean Harlow looks like Abe Vigoda—and the two wind up sharing a room in a nearby inn.
Not until Christina slips off her outer garments does Antonio finally tumble to the fact that he's in the presence of a beautiful woman.
(To read about Garbo's real-life romance with Gilbert, click here.)
It's the goofiest sequence in the entire movie, one that always has me itching to turn off the player, but it's followed by what is not only the best scene in the movie, but to me, the best scene in Garbo's illustrious career.
Christina and Antonio have fallen into bed, no great surprise, but they've also fallen in love, an event so unexpected and new to both of them, they barely know how to express their joy and wonder. They recline sated before the fire, sharing a bowl of grapes and talking, but their spirits are soaring, and unable to contain herself, Christina finally gets up to wander around the room, as if first love were an out-of-body experience and she is following her soul around the bedchamber.
The scene works because it pays such close attention to the emotion, particularly the melancholy that colors Christina's happiness. She wanders around the room, touching everything that Antonio has touched—a dresser, a candle, a spinning wheel—memorizing by touch and smell and sight every inch of the only room in which she has ever known complete happiness.
"In the future in my memory," she says, "I shall live a great deal in this room."
You don't have to be a monarch to appreciate just how fleeting time is or how rare moments of pure happiness are.
It's telling that, as she tours the room, she watches Antonio's image in the mirror, and his image in turn watches her, as if she is already viewing the moment in her memory, and feeling already the exquisite pain associated with an ideal past we can never revisit.
It seems wholly appropriate to me that Garbo spends so much of the scene in front of both the mirror and, on the other side of the room, a religious triptych. Garbo was as much about images as she was about acting, holding poses that represent emotions rather than embody them from within, a style more akin to kabuki theater or the pantomime of the silent era than the Method approach actors have held to for more than fifty years. In that sense, Garbo's performance, like the triptych on the wall, is literally iconic—a pictorial representation whose form suggests its meaning. It's not "modern," but then when did we buy into the notion that "modern" and "better" were synonymous. In any event, I wouldn't want to throw out Garbo just because I also like Brando, any more than I'd throw out Rembrandt just because I also like Picasso.
In any event, as Christina feared, the moment is all too soon over. Antonio continues his journey to Stockholm, and she leaves by a different route to the same destination. Imagine Antonio's surprise when he discovers the woman he loves is a queen. Imagine the royal court's surprise when it discovers that their queen is in love with envoy of their enemy.
The latter conflict sets in motion the final act of the movie. For the Protestant Christina to pursue a relationship with the Catholic Antonio after thirty years of war between those two faiths would be like Nixon bedding down with Brezhnev at the height of the Cold War. It's not simply xenophobia or self-interest that drives the opposition to the romance, it's a genuine horror at the idea of having to refight, both at home and abroad, an issue that was settled at the price of so much blood and treasure. Christina must choose between love and responsibilities. The way she chooses, and the consequences of her choice, lead to the most famous scene of Garbo's career, that final enigmatic shot that I won't describe except to say every film buff must see it.
Now, I'm going to be up front with you: Queen Christina is one of the more problematic entrants in the Hollywood film canon. Even TV Guide in its glowing 5 (out of 5) star review describes the script as "great clumps of unleavened bread," which is a charitable way of saying that parts of the movie are preposterous—can anybody, for example, accept on the film's own terms the notion that John Gilbert could mistake Greta Garbo for a man? I don't care how dark that inn is or how mannish Garbo's clothes, unless Gilbert's character has an affinity for Swedish lads with rouged lips and plucked eyebrows, there's no way to watch that scene without thinking that either director Rouben Mamoulian set out deliberately to undermine his own movie or that the makeup man and cinematographer made some pretty grievous errors in professional judgment.
Then again, many critics have suggested that that is the point. Historically, Christina was thought to be bisexual, Garbo was almost certainly bisexual, and Mamoulian was gay; perhaps without being able to say it explicitly during a time when even pre-Code permissiveness didn't permit a frank exploration of such things, Garbo and Mamoulian set out to investigate the limits of sexual orientation and wound up suggesting that, rather than being distinctly straight or gay, we reside on a sliding continuum between the two. And that, thus, in the right moment with the right person, even John Gilbert's Antonio could find himself attracted to a young Swedish lad on a cold, cold night.
Well, maybe.
Or maybe Garbo should have scrubbed off her makeup and cut her hair, ala Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett, and really played the part instead of pretending to play it. But given the degree to which Garbo hid behind the mask of her perfect face and her professional mannerisms, asking her to strip all of that away and hang herself out there emotionally naked might have been as impossible as asking her grow wings and fly to the moon.
Besides, did anybody ever argue that Tony Curtis, Milton Berle, Dustin Hoffman or Bugs Bunny should have made greater efforts to look like women when they played such in their movies? God forbid—the lack of illusion was half the joke.
Anyway, I suspect that I'm bringing 21st century expectations of "realism" to a 1933 movie and that an audience of the time, with the conceits of the silent era's cross-dressing comedies still fresh in their minds, wouldn't have expected Garbo to look like a man, but would simply have accepted the comic set-up and moved on.
I don't know.
What I do know is that when Queen Christina works, it works as well as any movie Garbo ever made.
"They usually ask me if it was easy or difficult to direct Garbo," Rouben Mamoulian said years later, "and the answer is that it was either easy or impossible. If she respected you as an artist, and if you gave her something that was better than what she had in mind, she was the easiest, most professional person to work with. In the case of Queen Christina she was simply marvelous."
A Troubling Pattern: Garbo In Eclipse
Queen Christina premiered in New York the day after Christmas, 1933, with a nationwide release on February 9, 1934. Reviews were mixed. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times wrote that Queen Christina was "a skillful blend of history and fiction" and that Garbo, "alluring as ever, gives a performance which merits nothing but the highest praise." Variety on the other hand, called the movie "slow and ofttimes stilted" and criticized Garbo's performance as "too often apace of the script's lethargy."
It turned out Variety knew American audiences better than Hall did. The film didn't perform well in the U.S. Garbo's sensibilities had always been foreign to American audiences, and while during the silent era that may have suggested a "desirable metropolitan European sophistication" (to quote Marcia Landy and Amy Villarejo writing in the BFI Film Classic study of the movie), by the time of the Great Depression, American audiences had become increasingly hostile to Garbo (and to her German counterpart, Marlene Dietrich).
These same sensibilities, however, be they uniquely European or simply a product of Garbo's own matchless talents, helped make Queen Christina a big hit overseas where it made back twice its budget in Britain alone, establishing a pattern that would hold true for the remainder of Garbo's career. From Queen Christina forward through the end of her career, Garbo's movies made far more money overseas than in America, and more than any particular desire on Garbo's part, it was the outbreak of World War II, which closed off the foreign market, that hastened her early retirement from pictures. (After the war, Garbo sent out tentative feelers, thinking to make a comeback, but found no interest.)
Ironically, despite her waning domestic box-office appeal, with Queen Christina Garbo had hit her stride as an actress and would soon produce the best movies of her career, including Camille and Ninotchka. But we'll talk about those in their own good time.
[For a post on the production of Queen Christina, click here.]
Programming Note: Tuesday, August 24 is John Gilbert day on TCM and on the schedule is a showing of Queen Christina. Check your local listings and mark your calendar.
I've already written about most of the Hollywood sex symbols of the pre-Code era—Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, Marlene Dietrich, or if you prefer, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo and Clara Bow. But before I put the era in this blog's rearview mirror, I should stop briefly to mention perhaps the most famous sex symbol of the age, Mae West.
Now let's be honest: although I nominated her for a Katie Award for her work in I'm No Angel, Mae West really doesn't work for me, not as an actress, not as a comedienne and certainly not as an object of fantasy. She took the role of sex goddess and dialed it up to "11," beyond vamp, beyond burlesque, more like a drag queen, except, you know, less subtle. Mae West played so broadly, with the leer and the voice and the double entendres, that ultimately she became completely sexless, a threat to no one.
But maybe that's how she got away with it.
Born on August 17, 1893, in Brooklyn, New York, Mary Jane West started performing at the age of five and was a regular on the vaudeville circuit by the age of fourteen. In 1926, she had her first starring role on Broadway in a show she wrote herself, the subtly named Sex. The show sold over three hundred thousand tickets during its run but also resulted in a morals charge that landed West in the workhouse for eight days (with two days off for good behavior). The resulting publicity—she told reporters she wore silk underwear in prison—made her nationally famous.
West wrote other plays, but it was 1928's Diamond Lil that proved to be the turning point in her career. Set in the Bowery during the Gay Nineties, Diamond Lil is the story of a barroom singer who battles white slavers on the one hand and the Salvation Army on the other. Broadway audiences loved it and although she was already pushing forty—ancient for a budding Hollywood actress—Paramount Pictures signed her to a movie contract.
Hollywood's censors prevented West from filming Diamond Lil as written, and instead, a watered-down version was released as She Done Him Wrong, co-starring Cary Grant and boasting the oft-misquoted line, "Why don't you come up some time and see me?"
She Done Him Wrong was nominated for an Academy Award as best picture of 1932-33 and in 1996, the Library of Congress included it in the National Film Registry.
If you're going to see only one Mae West movie, I would suggest I'm No Angel, the follow up to She Done Him Wrong. Again co-starring Cary Grant, here Mae West plays a circus performer who gyrates for the (as she puts it) "suckers," but as with all of her movies, the story is irrelevant. You're paying to see Mae West play Mae West and she does it better here than anywhere else, singing such numbers as "They Call Me Sister Honky-Tonk," spouting double entendres and, unusual for the times, hamming it up with a Greek chorus of African-American actresses who function as her only true friends and confidants.
West's films go rapidly downhill after Hollywood's studios began enforcing the Production Code in mid-1934—not much point to a Mae West movie without the innuendo. The best of the bunch is probably My Little Chickadee, a 1940 pairing with W.C. Fields. In 1978, she made her last movie, Sextette, a cinematic disaster that put the bomb in bombshell.
West was married twice, but had her longest relationship with Paul Novak, her live-in partner from 1954 until her death in 1980. He was thirty years her junior.
Among her better-known quips:
"It's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men."
"When I'm good, I'm very good. But, when I'm bad, I'm better."
"A hard man is good to find."
"Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
[To a policeman in 1936] "Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"
"Never let one man worry your mind. Find 'em, fool 'em and forget 'em!"
"When women go wrong, men go right after them."
"Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution."
Of these Pre-Code Jean Harlow movies, which have you seen? (You may vote for more than one.)
Hell's Angels
The Public Enemy
Platinum Blonde
Three Wise Girls
Red-Headed Woman
Red Dust
Hold Your Man
Dinner At Eight
Bombshell
None, oh woe is me
As always, use the gadget at the top right-hand side of the page to cast your vote. The poll is open for a week.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two, click here. For Part Three, click here, and for Part Four, click here.]
V. Later Comedies and Lubitsch's Legacy
After Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living, "comedies without music" he called them, Lubitsch returned to the comfort of the operetta form he had perfected during the first days of sound. The story of a randy army officer ordered to woo a wealthy widow in order to save the country from bankruptcy, The Merry Widow—made while on loan to MGM—was the most polished and least suggestive of his five musicals. The Hays Office, by 1934 enforcing the Production Code, objected to several scenes and required extensive cutting before it would approve the film for release. (Fortunately, this footage was saved and has been restored.)
The Merry Widow received good reviews and won an Oscar for art direction, but with production costs of $1.6 million, it was the most expensive musical made to date and wound up losing money. It was also the last pairing of stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. The former found himself relegated to smaller and smaller parts and eventually returned to France; the latter paired up with Nelson Eddy and made commercially successful movies for the next decade, though in retrospect, none are as satisfying as those she made with Lubitsch.
After the commercial failure of The Merry Widow, Lubitsch did not direct another movie for three years. In the meantime, he took a job as production manager at Paramount, becoming the only director to ever run a major studio. I'd like to say it was an inspired choice, but in fact, Lubitsch had never been able to delegate authority easily and wound up interfering in many of the sixty productions a year he oversaw without really being able to contribute anything substantive, a result that pleased no one.
"I think I am possessed only of a fascination for the work I have chosen to do," he said later. "I am so engrossed by the production of a film that I literally think of nothing else. I have no hobby, no outside interests and want none."
He was unceremoniously dismissed as head of production in early 1936.
The time away from the director's chair, though, gave Lubitsch time to consider what kind of film he really wanted to make. Whipsawed on the one hand by the enforcement of the Production Code which had effectively forbidden the racier aspects of his style; and on the other by the aggressive style of the screwball comedy which made his gentle approach passe, Lubitsch temporarily lost confidence in his ability to make a successful picture.
He eventually figured it out, though not at Paramount, moving in 1939 to MGM, where he directed Greta Garbo in Ninotchka and James Stewart in The Shop Around The Corner, two of his best comedies, both preserved in the National Film Registry. In 1942, he made what is arguably his best movie, To Be Or Not To Be, an anti-war comedy starring Jack Benny and in the last role of her career, Carole Lombard. Blasted by critics at the time as being in bad taste, To Be Or Not To Be has become a particular favorite of critics over the intervening years and was included in the National Film Registry in 1996, one of five Lubitsch movies so honored.
"None of us thought we were making anything but entertainment for the moment," John Ford said later. "Only Ernst Lubitsch knew we were making art."
"Lubitsch had the greatest sense of humor of any individual I've ever met," said director Joseph M. Newman. "The actors all loved him. He had a very human quality about him. He was the type of man that became your friend after you met him once. A great man."
His most faithful disciple was fellow German refugee Billy Wilder, who wrote the screenplay to Ninotchka and later directed such classics as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. Over his desk, Wilder posted a sign "How would Lubitsch do it?" But despite winning six Oscars during his career, Wilder ultimately concluded he had never measured up to his mentor. "His art is lost," he said. "That most elegant of screen magicians took his secret with him."
In 1943, Lubitsch received an Oscar nomination for Heaven Can Wait, the third nomination of his career, but once again, he did not win. In March 1947, as it became clear that Lubitsch's health was failing, the Academy presented him with a special award "[f]or his distinguished contributions to the art of the motion picture."
"With the passing years," wrote his biographer Scott Eyman, "it became increasingly clear that Ernst Lubitsch had accomplished something only vouchsafed the greatest artists: he had created a self-contained universe with a sensibility so singular, behavioral beauties so intense, that it forever altered the world view of those lucky enough to experience it. He believed in his dreams so strongly that millions of others came to believe in them as well, and the fact that the values and style of Lubitsch's work constituted the finest examples of the discarded heritage of elegant screen comedy made his everlasting, gentle brilliance even more poignant."
Ernst Lubitsch died of a heart attack in November,1947.
"No more Lubitsch," Billy Wilder lamented at the funeral.
"Worse than that," said William Wyler. "No more Lubitsch films."
If she'd just been another pretty face, she would have been forgotten long ago, one of the thousands of beauties who for a brief season capture the fancy of the paparazzi and the tabloids and the fickle paying public and then quickly fade from our memory. But more than just a platinum blonde beauty, Jean Harlow also possessed an unexpected gift for comedy and self-parody, and as the pre-Code era drew to a close, she became not only America's premier sex symbol but one of its premier actresses as well.
Born to a Kansas City dentist and the daughter of a wealthy real estate developer, Harlean Harlow Carpenter tried out for the movies on a dare, got the job and later signed with the Hal Roach Studios. Working under her mother's maiden name, Jean Harlow played the "swanky blonde" in four Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts and appeared in uncredited bit roles in more than a dozen movies (including Chaplin's City Lights) before Howard Hughes cast her in Hell's Angels. Hughes epic about World War I flying aces proved to be Harlow's big break. Although she was as skittish as a newborn foal, barely able to speak her lines, the public immediately responded to her beauty—the expressions "platinum blonde" and "blonde bombshell" were coined to describe her—and she soon landed better parts, including that of James Cagney's love interest in William Wellman's gangster classic The Public Enemy, and the unobtainable society girl in Frank Capra's comedy Platinum Blonde.
"The newspapers sure have loused me up," she complained cheerfully, "calling me a sexpot! Where'd they ever get such a screwy idea?"
Although Harlow played a manipulative gold digger—she seduces her married boss and breaks up his marriage—there was a sincerity to her transparent scheming, and with Harlow serving up the brassy bits with humor and wounded pride, audiences found themselves rooting for her. The result was one of the biggest hits of 1932.
Next up was an even better vehicle for Harlow, one that would both display her talent for comedy and pair her with fast-rising star Clark Gable. Based on a failed stageplay, Red Dust starred Gable as the overseer of a Vietnamese rubber plantation, Harlow as the "cute little trick" who falls for him, and Mary Astor as the wife of the plantation's latest hire, a woman Gable sets out to seduce.
Harlow's "uniquely effortless vulgarity, humor and slovenliness," wrote Movie Diva in her review of Red Dust, "create the rarest of Hollywood goddesses, the beautiful clown."
Director George Cukor, fresh off Katharine Hepburn's successful debut in A Bill Of Divorcement, cast Harlow over the objections of Louis B. Mayer, who felt she wasn't actress enough to keep up with her more experienced co-stars. But Red Dust had convinced Cukor that Harlow had a gift for comedy and with the director's help, she wound up stealing the show. Harlow's Kitty manipulates her men, bullies her maid, and otherwise lazes around, eating bonbons and complaining of boredom. Yet because she hungers to improve herself (even if she seems to think the surest path to knowledge is to sleep with an educated man), we find ourselves cheering her on.
In terms of its complexity, the role of Kitty Packard was a leap for Harlow, but where she had been ill-equipped to handle early roles in Hell's Angels and Platinum Blonde, now she was ready. In Red-Headed Woman, she'd learned how to gain an audience's sympathy despite playing an unlikeable character. In Red Dust, she'd learned how to deliver tough wisecracks while conveying hurt and vulnerability. In Dinner At Eight, she found the last piece of the puzzle, "the ability," in the words of Frank Miller, writing for Turner Classic Movies, "to deliver lines as though she didn't quite know what they meant."
Movie-going audiences loved Dinner At Eight and loved Harlow in it, not only because she looked great in her backless evening gown (designed by Adrian, it was known as the "Jean Harlow dress" and was so tight she couldn't sit down in it), but also because she had proven herself once and for all as one of Hollywood's great comedic actresses.
Despite her success with critics and audiences, Harlow was never nominated for an Academy Award—comedic performances rarely are—but she did rank twenty-second on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movie legends and forty-ninth on Entertainment Weekly's list of the all-time greatest movie stars. In his cult classic Alternate Oscars, Danny Peary chose her performance in the screwball comedy Libeled Lady as the best by an actress in 1936.
In 1935, Harlow fell in love with William Powell, her co-star in the movie Reckless, and finally after years of turmoil, her personal life began to match the success of her professional one. The two secretly engaged although never married—in his early forties, Powell worried about being linked to such a young actress, and Harlow also claimed MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer didn't approve of the union.
You can check out other tributes to Jean Harlow at the Kitty Packard Pictorial, a site devoted to all things Harlow. The Pictorial is also promoting a new biography, Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 by Darrell Rooney and Mark A. Vieira.
