[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two of this essay, click here. To read Part Three of this essay, click here.]
IV. Design For Living: Screwball Before There Was Screwball In Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, Ernst Lubitsch had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness; with his next picture, Design For Living, he blew right past those limits. Design For Living was by far the naughtiest movie he made in a career filled with naughty movies.
The story of a woman who loves two men and makes them like it, Design For Living was based on Noel Coward's play about his own tangled relationship with Broadway's most famous acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a triangle marked by professional and romantic jealousy, and self-destructive egotism. So personal was the story, Coward refused to stage it until Lunt and Fontanne were available to appear in it, with Coward himself playing the third lead.
After acquiring the film rights to the play, Lubitsch initially asked Broadway playwright Samson Raphaelson, fresh off the success of Trouble In Paradise, to handle the screenwriting chores. Raphaelson declined, I suspect because as a Hollywood screenwriter he knew he couldn't produce a script faithful to the original play, and as a creature of Broadway, had no desire to cross a man of Coward's reputation.
So Lubitsch brought in Hollywood's foremost screenwriter, Ben Hecht, who had written the script for 1932's gangster classic Scarface (and would later pen Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious). Like Raphaelson, Hecht had had success on the stage (with The Front Page), but he'd made his name as a journalist covering Chicago's seamy, violent underworld and had no patience for the pretensions of Coward's characters. Hecht kept the relationships, the settings and the plot, and discarded the arch dialogue and the self-pitying tone. He also re-imagined the European male leads, Otto and Leo, as the distinctly American Tom and George. More importantly, he shifted the focus of the triangle onto the female character, Gilda, which served to turn a play about the limits of a man's sexual ego into an exploration of female empowerment.(To read more about Hecht, click here.) Coward had been pleased with Hollywood's adaptation of Private Lives, starring Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery (read my review of it here), but he refused to even see what Lubitsch had made of Design For Living. "I'm told that there are three of my original lines left in the film—such original ones as 'Pass the mustard,'" he quipped later.
Despite criticism at the time, I think Lubitsch and Hecht were right to go off in another direction. The subject matter, with hints of bisexuality, was intensely personal and would have been daring stuff, even for a pre-Code movie. And although the play has its moments (I've read it, but never seen it performed), it is not now regarded as one of Coward's better efforts and is rarely revived. As Coward himself admitted, Design For Living "was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors."
It's no wonder Lubitsch and Hecht took liberties with the text.
"I offer no apologies to Coward," Lubitsch said, "who knows very well that no picture ever lives up to a play if filmed word for word."
As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.
"A thing happened to me that usually happens to men," she says. "You see, a man can meet two, three or even four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of, uh, interesting elimination, he is able to decide which one he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it's alright for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out, but—"
"That's very fine," says Tom, "but which chapeau do you want, madame?"
"Both."
Ironically, a few years before, Lubitsch had before faced the same dilemma in real life—his wife Helene Kraus had an affair with his best friend, writer Hans Kraly—which resulted not in the sophisticated comedy of his movies but in a very public scene and an acrimonious divorce.
Lubitsch sought Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard for the male leads, but Colman wanted too much money and Howard didn't want to risk the comparison to Alfred Lunt, then the most respected actor on Broadway. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was cast opposite Oscar-winner Fredric March, but fell ill shortly before production began, and the part finally fell to Gary Cooper.
For the female lead, Gilda Farrell, Lubitsch turned again to Miriam Hopkins, who had starred in The Smiling Lieutenant and Trouble In Paradise. Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Edward Everett Horton provides his typically wonderful support as a disapproving stuffed-shirt who finds himself caught in the middle of this ménage à trois.
Design For Living doesn't hit as many notes as Trouble In Paradise, but it tackles the triangular dilemma presented by the former head on and comes up with a perfectly logical, if perfectly insane, solution. Had the pace and performances in Design For Living been a touch more manic, you could credit Lubitsch with inventing the screwball comedy, that distinctly American form of humor that features crazy situations and aggressively loony characters. As it is, you can see that a key component of the screwball style is an inherent lack of sympathy with the screwball character's plight—you're not rooting for him to solve his problem, you're waiting for him to grow up and realize he is the problem—and to the extent that he succeeds or fails determines whether he is the hero or the villain. While the distinction of creating the screwball comedy was reserved for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night and Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, both released a year later, Design For Living fits neatly within the tradition and should be mentioned when discussing this beloved art form.
Although Mordant Hall of the New York Times praised the film as "a most entertaining and highly sophisticated subject," most critics took Lubitsch to task for departing from the text of Coward's play and panned the movie. But though it won no awards, audiences, at least, were pleased—Design For Living was one of the year's top ten grossing films.
As with its immediate predecessor, Trouble In Paradise, the Hays Office did not certify Design For Living for re-release after the Code took effect in 1934 and the film languished unseen in studio vaults for decades. Even now, it is available on DVD only as part of The Gary Cooper Collection, which also includes such titles as Beau Geste and The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer. It is well worth searching out.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two of this essay, click here.]
III. Trouble In Paradise: Champagne and Moonlight After the success of his naughty operettas, The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You (and the failure of a somber anti-war film, Broken Lullaby), Ernst Lubitsch turned his attention to what most critics now point to when they speak of Lubitsch's best work, Trouble In Paradise.
Trouble In Paradise is the story of a pair of sophisticated lovers, Gaston and Lily, who romance and thieve their way across Europe, only to find their happiness threatened by a beautiful young widow who also happens to be the target of their latest scam. Lubitsch based the story on the first act of Laszlo Aladar's failed stageplay, The Honest Finder—a crook finds a rich woman's handbag—and originally thought to do a spoof of the gentleman-thief stories, such as Raffles, The Saint and The Falcon, which were popular at the time. Then Lubitsch and long-time collaborator Samson Raphaelson hit upon the idea of making the thieves a man and a woman, which added both a romance angle and then when they take aim at the widow, a romantic complication.
The gentleman thief is Gaston Monescu, "the man who walked into the Bank of Constantinople and walked out with the Bank of Constantinople." The studio had suggested a young Cary Grant for the role, but as Lubitsch's biographer Scott Eyman noted, in 1932 Grant was still more the Cockney roughneck Archie Leach of his birth than the style icon of later years; and Lubitsch preferred an actor who possessed the sort of cultured aplomb that one can only acquire through experience.
Instead, he chose another English actor, Herbert Marshall, a twenty year veteran of the London stage who was as suave and sophisticated in real life as the gentleman thief he portrayed on screen here, but who, having lost a leg in World War I and then so mastered the use of a prosthetic limb the resulting limp was barely apparent, also possessed the mettle to convincingly depict a master criminal.
When the movie opens, we see the thief's escape, his silhouette leaping over the balcony of a ritzy Venetian hotel while his victim lays unconscious on the floor, an example of the indirect and innovative way Lubitsch preferred to stage action—rather than show us the crime itself, Lubitsch leaves us to fill in the blanks and instead moves us directly into the relationship that will define the rest of the movie.
We get our first good look at Gaston a short distance from the scene of his crime as he instructs a waiter on the preparation of a romantic dinner:
"It must be the most marvelous supper. We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous." "Yes, Baron." "And waiter?" "Yes, Baron?" "You see that moon?" "Yes, Baron." "I want to see that moon in the champagne." "Yes, Baron." (makes note on pad) "'Moon in champagne.'" "I want to see—um—" "Yes, Baron." "And as for you, waiter—" "Yes, Baron?" "I don't want to see you at all."
Gaston is pretending to be a baron so he can scam a countess, who ironically turns out to be Lily pretending to be a countess so she can scam a baron. As Lily, Lubitsch cast Miriam Hopkins, who had worked with the director a year earlier in the musical comedy, The Smiling Lieutenant (she would work with him again in 1933's Design For Living). As I have written before (here), "Hopkins was one of the sauciest actresses of the pre-Code age, excelling in light comedies and lurid melodramas alike," yet because her best films often proved too scandalous to be re-issued once censors began taking scissors to Hollywood's past, "even film fanatics can admit to having rarely seen her work."
It doesn't take long for Gaston and Lily to realize the truth about each other, but rather than being angry or disappointed, the two are titillated, and dinner turns into a virtual striptease of items they've stolen from each other—a wallet, a brooch, a pocket watch—climaxing with the revelation of the most audacious theft of all:
"I hope you don't mind if I keep your garter." "Darling!"
The film quickly jumps ahead a year—no wasted motion for Lubitsch. Gaston and Lily have been living together and thieving together through the capitals of Europe and all is well until they run across a wealthy young widow. Madame Colet is rich, generous and bored with the stiffs who court her—veteran farceurs, Charlie Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton (the latter the very man Gaston robbed in Venice). When Gaston appears at her door as part of a scheme to separate her from her fortune, she sees in him the sort of handsome, Continental man she's been longing for.
"Madame Colet, if I were your father—which fortunately I am not—and you made any attempt to handle your own business affairs, I would give you a good spanking. In a business way, of course." "What would you do if you were my secretary?" "The same thing." "You're hired."
The widow, who may well know she's being taken but is still eager for the ride, is played with sympathy and sex appeal by Kay Francis. Her polished, dark beauty contrasts nicely with Hopkins's earthy blonde charms and no doubt was a factor in her casting, as was her performance earlier that year in Jewel Robbery, in which she plays a willing victim to William Powell's elegant jewel thief. Although her career would later take a nose-dive after a bitter contract dispute at Warner Brothers, in 1932, she was at the peak of her popularity.
Just the plot I've described so far would provide the makings of a good comedy (or spun in a different direction, suspense thriller), but Lubitsch ups the ante by creating genuine chemistry between Gaston and the widow. Suddenly Trouble In Paradise is no longer a simple story about the theft of money, but the theft of Gaston's affections as well, which realistically can't end well for somebody. The inevitable heartbreak adds what Andrew Sarris called "a counterpoint of poignant sadness during a film's gayest moments," and is what, I think, lifts this sparkling comedy to the level of pure genius.
And that's without even addressing the numerous examples of Lubitsch's mastery of the technical end of his craft, which not only keeps the story moving but gives this confection its airy, art Deco style. "I think I have done nothing better or as good," he wrote of the film shortly before his death.
"The plot is grown-up, funny and sad," Roger Ebert wrote in 2002, and for his review of the film for his Great Movies series, he added, "in a drawing room comedy of froth and inconsequence, you find that you believe in the characters and care about them."
The result was a hit with audiences and the film landed in the list of the year's top ten money makers despite mixed reviews from the critics. Despite its success, relatively rare for Lubitsch, the film was withdrawn from circulation once the studios began enforcing the Production Code in 1934 and was not seen again until 1968. Coupled with the fact that it was never released on videotape and didn't land on DVD until 2003, Trouble In Paradise probably ranks high on a list of least-seen essential classics.
In 1991, the Library of Congress selected Trouble In Paradise for preservation in the National Film Registry.
If you're a devotee, as I am, of both Turner Classic Movies and the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards, you'll be glad to know that a pair of Katie nominees, King Kong and Jewel Robbery are airing on America's classiest cable channel tomorrow, Saturday, May 8. King Kong is up for three Katies, including best picture and director; Kay Francis is up for best actress in Jewel Robbery.
At 6 a.m. EDT is Jewel Robbery, starring William Powell as a suave jewel thief who forces his victims to smoke marijuana during the robbery, leaving them happy, giggling and quite unable to identify him to the police. One of his victims (Kay Francis) is so taken with the thief, she insists on a repeat performance.
After the film's release, thousands of people wrote the studio asking where they could get hold of some of this marijuana stuff for themselves.
The other film, King Kong, I dare say you've heard of. Released in 1933, this is the ultimate in fun-stupid summer-blockbuster entertainment. It's spawned many remakes and sequels, but the original is the one people keep coming back to, and with good reason. If somehow you've never seen this classic action-sci-fi-horror flick, set your recorder or block out some time.
It's on at Noon, EDT time.
From TCM's website:
6:00am [Romance] Jewel Robbery (1932) A jewel thief falls for a tycoon's wife in Vienna. Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright Dir: William Dieterle BW-68 mins
12:00pm [Horror/Science-Fiction] King Kong (1933) A film crew discovers the "eighth wonder of the world," a giant prehistoric ape, and brings him back to New York, where he wreaks havoc. Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher Dir: Merian C. Cooper BW-105 mins
À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford) Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.) Freaks (prod. Tod Browning) Grand Hotel (prod. Irving Thalberg) Monkey Business (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz) Scarface (prod. Howard Hughes) Waterloo Bridge (prod. Carl Laemmle Jr.)
If you have Turner Classic Movies and you've never seen Jean Harlow take a bath in a barrel before, be sure to tune in tomorrow, Saturday, April 3, 2010 at 9 a.m. for Red Dust. I've only mentioned it tangentially a couple of times, but Red Dust will figure in the next go-round of Katie Awards so you don't want to miss out.
Here's what TCM says about it:
9:00am [Romance] Red Dust (1932) A plantation overseer in Indochina is torn between a married woman and a lady of the evening. Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gene Raymond, Mary Astor Dir: Victor Fleming BW-83 mins
Choosing the best actress of 1931-32 was a bit problematic—the two best performances by an actress during this award season, Miriam Hopkins (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and Joan Crawford (Grand Hotel) were both supporting ones, Hopkins's obviously so, Crawford's not so clearly, since she and her co-stars all received star billing, but Grand Hotel was an ensemble piece, the first in Hollywood history, and to my mind at least, none of its stars were on screen long enough to receive a nomination in the lead category. The Oscars didn't have a supporting category back in those days so it's difficult to say which if any of the film's stars the Academy might have nominated in a supporting category; but none were nominated as lead performers and I'll follow suit here. (The Academy would be faced with an identical dilemma the following year with the star-studded ensemble piece Dinner At Eight and arrived at an identical solution—none of those wonderful performances were nominated then either.)
Which is not to say there were no good choices for the award. The Academy nominated three fine actresses—the ever-popular Marie Dressler (Emma) who had won an Oscar the year before for Min and Bill (and who won a Katie award for her supporting performance in Anna Christie); stage legend Lynn Fontanne (The Guardsman) in the only film appearance of her career; and eventual winner Helen Hayes (The Sin of Madelon Claudet), another stage legend making her feature-film debut. (Hayes would win a second Oscar in 1970 for Airport.)
And then there were unnominated performances such as Constance Bennett in What Price Hollywood?, Joan Blondell in Blonde Crazy and Dorothea Wieck in Mädchen In Uniform. The Academy similarly ignored all four of my nominees—Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge), Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express), Norma Shearer (Private Lives) and Barbara Stanwyck (The Miracle Woman).
I'm guessing that Marlene Dietrich would be the popular choice. The first phase of her career was in full swing, she was working with a great director, and Shanghai Express is one of the tastiest collaborations. But I gave Dietrich the award just last year for her Hollywood debut, Morocco, and I can't see giving her back-to-back awards, especially when Shanghai co-star Anna May Wong completely out-cools her and steals every scene they're in together. (Still, it's a must-see performance in a must-see movie. Go watch it. Now. I'll wait.)
As for Stanwyck, she was one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood history, and she has not one but two best actress awards in her future—I'm thinking The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire in 1941 and Double Indemnity in 1944. But while The Miracle Woman, a biting look at the sordid intersection of religion and money, is one of her most interesting pre-Code films, Stanwyck's best work is still ten years in front of us. She'll have to wait a little longer.
Which leaves Mae Clarke and Norma Shearer.
If you only remember Clarke as the good- looking blonde who got James Cagney's grapefruit in the kisser, you really should take time to explore her work during this period. No actress in 1931 appeared in more must-see movies than Mae Clarke. In addition to her memorable supporting role in The Public Enemy, she also played Molly Malloy, a hooker with a heart of gold who befriends a death row inmate in the comedy The Front Page; a mad scientist's much put-upon fiancee in Frankenstein; and in one of the few lead roles of her career, American chorus girl-turned-prostitute Myra Deauville in the first and best version of the tragic romance Waterloo Bridge. Myra meets a naive soldier boy on the bridge where she plies her trade and this being wartime, he falls in love quickly and asks her to marry him. Based on a play by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert E. Sherwood, there is no villain in this piece other than cold, hard reality. It's the sort of movie that critics of the day dismissed as a "woman's picture"—and dismiss now as a "chick flick"—and if you're tempted to do the same and give this one a miss because it features tears and romance, I urge you not to. In fact, if I thought doing so would convince you to expand your film-watching repertoire enough to include Waterloo Bridge, I would hand Clarke the award as best actress of 1931-32. And maybe she'd deserve it.
But there was another actress from 1931 who I think deserves your attention, certainly if you want a well-rounded sense of the era; and just coincidentally, her wickedly comic portrayal of a recently remarried divorcee who would rather fight with her ex-husband than honeymoon with her new one is my favorite performance of the year.
Much celebrated in her day, Norma Shearer's name is now met by many largely with derision, including I confess by me. Choosing her as the best actress of this or any other year will no doubt get me drummed out of the very exclusive alternate Oscar club—a year ago, in fact, I would have voluntarily resigned my membership before I would have chosen Norma Shearer for an award. But only a schmuck won't admit when he's wrong and I was wrong to dismiss Norma Shearer without first seeing her pre-Code work (and a few silents, too). As it happens, before she got culture and started playing those maddeningly starchy good girls in bloodless MGM literary adaptations, Shearer turned in some fine performances playing against type, including a terrific one here in the film adaptation of Noel Coward's comedy, Private Lives. It's the best of her career—sharp, witty, and here at least, appropriately theatrical. In an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, Dan Callahan called it "Shearer's finest, most well-rounded performance, and it's the only film that you can show to the uninitiated without fear of the dreaded Shearer-isms."
If she'd made more movies like this one, you could safely admit to liking her without fear of making a fool of yourself in mixed company.
"She was hotter than a half-f***ed fox in a forest fire," said the ever-classy Mickey Rooney years later, and for those who find that assertion at odds with their preconceived notions of Shearer, well, it's time to dip into her pre-Code work.
Private Lives is what I'd call a divorce comedy, of which there were several in Hollywood's golden age, most of them starring Cary Grant for some reason—perhaps because he was so unbelievably good in them—comedies such as The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story. The formula required discord, divorce (or its threat), laughs arising from screwball attempts to undermine a new relationship and salvage the old one, and by the movie's end, of course, a tender reconciliation.
In Private Lives—a faithful adaptation of Noel Coward's popular stageplay—the twist is that two recently remarried divorcees, Robert Montgomery's Elyot and Shearer's Amanda, find themselves honeymooning in adjoining suites at the same resort. While most divorce comedies lean to varying degrees on the screwball comedy, Private Lives leans heavily on the discord. The two ex-spouses are less interested in tenderness than in tearing into each other, preferably with a wit so biting, the quips leave teeth marks, and when that's not enough, they turn to actual biting, along with fisticuffs and furniture throwing. (Indeed, while filming one particularly physical encounter, Shearer accidently knocked her co-star unconscious.)
"I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives," Amanda observes in one of her few introspective moments. "It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one mightn't do. That was the trouble with Elyot and me, we were like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle."
You'd be tempted to call this a comedy of mutual spousal abuse but for the fact that the two participants so thoroughly enjoy themselves. Elyot and Amanda are natural-born performers—drama queens, we'd call them now—and after a season apart, they realize each is the other's best audience. They can't live together, but to live apart means they'd have climb off their private little stages and start living with themselves, or more to the point, with their brand new spouses who, they quickly discover, bore them to tears.
"There isn't a part of you that I don't know, remember, and want," Elyot confesses to Amanda even while calling her a "slattern" and threatening to beat her like a gong.
In order to help both Shearer and Montgomery prepare for their parts, the studio filmed a stage performance featuring Gertrude Lawrence and Noel Coward himself in the leads. The result was what Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times called "a swift and witty picture ... one of the most intelligent comedies that has come to the screen." Coward was so pleased with the result, he immediately sold more of his plays to Hollywood.
So why don't we have a similarly positive reaction to the name Norma Shearer?
Well, for one thing, if it's true that the history of war is written by the winners, then it's equally true that the history of Hollywood is written by the ones with the biggest mouths, and a great deal of what we think we know about Norma Shearer is a product of one of the biggest, Joan Crawford's. "What chance do I have now?" she quipped when Shearer won an Oscar in 1930. "Norma sleeps with the boss."
But while it was true Irving Thalberg, as MGM's producer boy wonder could procure almost any role for his wife, if anything, Shearer's career and reputation suffered for her husband's interference. As Walter Clemons once wrote for EW.com, "Thalberg was fatally afflicted with gentility. He cast his wife in movies with literary pretensions—O'Neill's Strange Interlude, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and as a mature Juliet in a suffocatingly tasteful rendition of Shakespeare. Norma gets a bad rap for these turkeys, but the reverence in which Thalberg's contemporaries held him is an unexamined delusion."
And maybe, too, Shearer craved the respect that roles such as Juliet promised. If only she'd always maintained the same cavalier attitude toward the so-called "legitimate" theater she evinced in answer to Noel Coward's early reservations about her ability to play Amanda. "I don't care what he thinks—he thinks in theater terms—I think in film terms. It doesn't seem to occur to Mr. Coward that we both may turn out to be right!" I suspect, though, that the forced smile she always seemed to wear masked a crippling insecurity, and in retrospect it's a wonder she was able to act at all. After her father squandered a fortune in her youth, leaving the family in poverty, Shearer's mother left him, taking Norma and the other children to New York. Shearer coped by retreating into a carefully-constructed fantasy world, and to a degree, she lived in that world for the rest of her life. That bipolar disorder ran in her family as well with Shearer herself suffering from depression, makes her subsequent climb to stardom all the more remarkable.
Her acting career was a sheer act of will.
"How did you ever become a star?" asked an incredulous Robert Morley on the set of Marie Antoinette.
"Because I wanted to!" she laughed.
Unfortunately, as Gary Morris points out (again in Bright Lights Film Journal), "While this description seems to point to Shearer as a sympathetic, even tragic character, she rarely moves far enough inside her characterizations to create a genuine sense of pathos. She seems to work too hard for her effects, almost desperately concerned with image and the mechanical aspects of performance, with measuring up to 'legitimate theatre' standards with their attendant excessive mannerisms."
He may be right. But at the same time, I am reminded of some- thing Norman Mailer wrote about Ernest Hemingway, not long after the latter's suicide. "It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day that would have suffocated any man smaller than himself."
The question is not why Norma Shearer made so many bad movies, but how she managed to make so many good ones.
... and there's gonna be trouble, hey la hey la. At least that's what Katie-Bar-The-Door is singing down in the kitchen as she searches the cabinets for breakfast. We flew back late last night into the front edge of a storm that promises to dump twenty inches of snow by Sunday morning. Cannibalism may be on the menu. Stay tuned.
I'm just getting reoriented to the internet and blogging but I'll post my entry on Little Caesar and The Public Enemy as soon as it's ready. Unlike most of my friends, when I'm on the road, I have no internet capability—or try not to—so I'm way behind reading comments, news and the blogs I follow.
I see that Waterloo Bridge is showing early strength in the contest for the last nomination for best picture of 1931-32. This would only come as a surprise to someone who hasn't seen the movie. It really does stand head and shoulders above its better known remake.
Anyway, you have until December 24 to cast your vote.
Marlene Dietrich began her career as a cabaret singer in Berlin and made several silent movies in Germany before rocketing to international stardom in Josef von Sternberg's noirish masterpiece, The Blue Angel. Dietrich's portrayal as the amoral and treacherous Lola Lola set the pattern for femme fatales for decades to come and had American audiences panting to see what all the fuss was about.
Morocco was the second of seven movies (eight if you count the German and English versions of The Blue Angel separately) with director Josef von Sternberg, but the first released in America—Paramount Pictures held back The Blue Angel for a year until it could launch Dietrich's Hollywood career with a more sympathetic role. Morocco proved to be a perfect vehicle for her, fully establishing the Dietrich persona—exotic, jaded, daringly androgynous (for example, she wears a tuxedo and kisses a woman; to quote Robert Osborne, "very European!")—lacking only the humor and self-parody she would later display in films such as Destry Rides Again and Foreign Affair.
Adapted by veteran screenwriter Jules Furthman from the stageplay Amy Jolly, Morocco is the story of a romantic triangle between a cabaret singer, her wealthy patron and a Foreign Legion soldier, who between them have experienced every kind of love but true love, and when at last it happens for each of them, they hardly know what to do with it.
Dietrich is the cabaret singer Amy Jolly (pronounced "Jolie," ala Angelina Jolie), down on her luck and traveling to Morocco for a job. On the boat she meets a wealthy playboy (the always dapper Adolphe Menjou) who as much out of habit as lust dangles jewelry in front of her—as the captain of the boat implies, the stop after Morocco is prostitution and if you're going to go, you might as well go in style—but Dietrich's Amy Jolly is too proud to jump at such baubles. Nevertheless, she turns to Menjou at a critical moment of need.
And all would be well but for the young, handsome soldier (Gary Cooper) sitting in the cheap seats at Dietrich's first performance. Predictably, the two are drawn to each other, at first simply because they are accomplished bed-hoppers who know they will look beautiful in each other's arms, but soon after because they discover in each other a longing for a past they can never reclaim.
"There's a foreign legion of women, too," confesses Amy Jolly, "but we have no uniform, no flag—and no medals." For these two, the single greatest act of passion they can perform is to not perform at all and to the surprise of all involved, genuine intimacy and tenderness develops, not just between the singer and the soldier, as you might expect, but between the singer and her wealthy patron as well.
The result is the warmest of the collaborations between Sternberg and Dietrich, maybe the only film they made together that suggests that the union of a man and a woman can produce something other than misery and obsessive, fetishistic self-destruction.
Morocco was a smash hit, earned four Oscar nominations (for actress, director, cinematography and art direction) and landed Dietrich the most lucrative contract in Hollywood. I should take time to mention the work of cinematographer Lee Garmes whose lighting of Dietrich was a key to the film's success. He positioned the key light above and slightly forward of her which (according to TV Guide's online review) "hollowed her cheeks, shadowed her heavy eyelids, and masked the dimensions of her wide nose." Dietrich was so pleased with the effect, she insisted on it for the rest of her career.
But despite the film's success, the set had not been a happy one. Sternberg focused his attention solely on making Dietrich look good to the annoyance of Gary Cooper, already a big star, and further underscored where his interests lay by speaking only German to Dietrich whenever Cooper was around.
The mutual animosity between director and star had no impact on Cooper's relationship with Dietrich though—shortly after filming commenced, the two began an affair that would continue for years. Despite the fact that she was living with Sternberg at the time, there was no slinking around for Dietrich. Reportedly, she and Cooper conducted their trysts in Sternberg's Hollywood home while Sternberg worked in the garden outside and silently seethed.
I share this anecdote, by the way, not because I am a fan of celebrity gossip but by way of explaining how the partnership of Sternberg and Dietrich, which began with such critical and commercial success, could wind up being a threat to both their careers. More and more, their collaboration became an exercise in voyeuristic excess, with Sternberg trying to control Dietrich with his camera in a way he couldn't control her off screen. And while these films have their champions (see, e.g., Kim Morgan on Blonde Venus or Roger Ebert on The Scarlet Empress), the public gradually turned away until they were turning away in droves.
Dietrich survived the fall by smirking her way through the worst of it—emerging for example from a gorilla costume in Blonde Venus with a half smile that seemed to say I'm so cool even this looks good on me—but Sternberg never recovered, earning only eight screen credits after his last picture with Dietrich (1935's The Devil Is A Woman) and even those credits are misleading, given that he was fired from at least two of those projects, Macao and the execrable Jet Pilot.
In 1939, after years of fading box office appeal, Dietrich reluctantly agreed to star in a comedy/Western, Destry Rides Again. The result was box office gold. Co-starring Jimmy Stewart as a pacifist sheriff armed only with folksy wit, saloon singer Dietrich parodied her own image so successfully she was able to reinvent herself as a comic actress and endear herself to audiences once again. (Madeline Kahn memorably spoofed the performance in Mel Brooks's comedy Blazing Saddles.)
After Destry, Dietrich's best performances were in a pair of Billy Wilder efforts, Foreign Affair, a romantic comedy set in postwar Berlin, and Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama co-starring Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lanchester. Many will also remember her cameo in Orson Welles's noir thriller, Touch of Evil.
Despite this impressive body of work, Dietrich was nominated for just one Academy Award, for the picture I've just written about, Morocco, losing to Marie Dressler. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the ninth greatest actress of all time.
After a supporting role in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg, Dietrich retired from acting, making only one cameo appearance after that, in David Bowie's 1978 misfire, Just A Gigolo. She spent the final decade of her life living in seclusion in her Paris apartment and died in 1992.
Postscript: Be sure to look for a young Cary Grant in the clip from Blonde Venus. This was just his sixth movie and he isn't given much to do—as the New York Times put it in its 1932 review, "Cary Grant is worthy of a much better role." Like Gary Cooper, Grant was the object of Josef von Sternberg's jealousy; unlike Cooper, Grant didn't yet have the clout to do much about it.
Marie Dressler (with Wallace Beery in Min and Bill)
I'll be re-watching the winning movie again tomorrow. So far I've written nine words about it. You can clock me to see how long it takes to write one of these things. But it's going into the blog by Monday if I have to shove it out the door in its underpants ...
Of the first 1300 words of my essay on the best director of 1930-31, I've written about the Beatles, baseball, Robert Osborne, Glenn Beck, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Casablanca and the baking of cakes, but I haven't written about Charles Chaplin, René Clair or Fritz Lang—perhaps a significant oversight given that the essay is about one of them.
Obviously, this is taking longer than I had intended.
In the meantime, here is some eye candy for both sexes: Ramon Novarro and Greta Garbo in 1931's elegant, trash-tastic romance/spy-thriller, Mata Hari.
The second in a series of brief essays about the Katie winners of the pre-Oscar era.
I've teased Gloria Swanson off and on for two lines of dialogue that her character, Norma Desmond, spoke in the Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard—"We didn't need dialogue; we had faces!" and "I am big; it's the pictures that got small!"—but she really was one of the best actresses of the Silent Era and for her breakthrough performance in the Cecil B. DeMille drama Male and Female, I gave her the Katie for best actress of 1919.
The movie itself is an odd marriage of Upstairs Downstairs and Gilligan's Island—a group of English aristocrats and their servants are marooned together on a South Seas island where naturally the servants prove much more adept at survival than their indolent, self-indulgent counterparts. Initially, Gloria Swanson plays the most stubbornly indolent of them all, but when she falls in love with her butler, the real leader on the island, she gradually comes to realize what's truly important in life.
That is until they're all rescued and DeMille serves up one of the most reactionary endings in movie history.
That Swanson managed to make all this hokum believable was a testament to her skill as an actress. Overnight, both she and DeMille became major players in Hollywood and both were stars on their respective sides of the camera for the rest of the decade.
Swanson made such silent classics as The Affairs of Anatol and Sadie Thompson and seemed to make the transition to talkies successfully—she received an Oscar nomination for her first talkie, The Trespasser—but her career went into decline and, with one exception, she made no movies between Music in the Air in 1934 and her comeback in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, for which she received her third and final Oscar nomination.
In Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, Ernst Lubitsch had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness; with his next picture, Design For Living, he blew right past those limits. Design For Living was by far the naughtiest movie he made in a career filled with naughty movies.
After acquiring the film rights to the play, Lubitsch initially asked Broadway playwright Samson Raphaelson, fresh off the success of Trouble In Paradise, to handle the screenwriting chores. Raphaelson declined, I suspect because as a Hollywood screenwriter he knew he couldn't produce a script faithful to the original play, and as a creature of Broadway, had no desire to cross a man of Coward's reputation.
Despite criticism at the time, I think Lubitsch and Hecht were right to go off in another direction. The subject matter, with hints of bisexuality, was intensely personal and would have been daring stuff, even for a pre-Code movie. And although the play has its moments (I've read it, but never seen it performed), it is not now regarded as one of Coward's better efforts and is rarely revived. As Coward himself admitted, Design For Living "was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors."
As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.
Ironically, a few years before, Lubitsch had before faced the same dilemma in real life—his wife Helene Kraus had an affair with his best friend, writer Hans Kraly—which resulted not in the sophisticated comedy of his movies but in a very public scene and an acrimonious divorce.
For the female lead, Gilda Farrell, Lubitsch turned again to Miriam Hopkins, who had starred in The Smiling Lieutenant and Trouble In Paradise. Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Design For Living doesn't hit as many notes as Trouble In Paradise, but it tackles the triangular dilemma presented by the former head on and comes up with a perfectly logical, if perfectly insane, solution. Had the pace and performances in Design For Living been a touch more manic, you could credit Lubitsch with inventing the screwball comedy, that distinctly American form of humor that features crazy situations and aggressively loony characters. As it is, you can see that a key component of the screwball style is an inherent lack of sympathy with the screwball character's plight—you're not rooting for him to solve his problem, you're waiting for him to grow up and realize he is the problem—and to the extent that he succeeds or fails determines whether he is the hero or the villain. While the distinction of creating the screwball comedy was reserved for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night and Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, both released a year later, Design For Living fits neatly within the tradition and should be mentioned when discussing this beloved art form.
As with its immediate predecessor, Trouble In Paradise, the Hays Office did not certify Design For Living for re-release after the Code took effect in 1934 and the film languished unseen in studio vaults for decades. Even now, it is available on DVD only as part of The Gary Cooper Collection, which also includes such titles as Beau Geste and The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer. It is well worth searching out.
