Charles Laughton (The Private Life Of Henry VIII)

Here's some fun Oscar trivia (provided your definition of fun is incredibly flexible) — for which movie did Charles Laughton win his only Oscar?

If you said Mutiny on the Bounty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Witness for the Prosecution, or even his lone directorial effort, the classic film noir The Night of the Hunter, those are all good guesses.

They're also wrong.

No, the answer is The Private Life of Henry VIII, a 1933 dark comedy about divorce, beheadings, marriage, affairs, affairs of state — the sort of history lesson that might make knowledge cool again.

Ostensibly the true story of England's King Henry VIII, this is the sort of movie they promoted with the tagline "He gave his wives a pain in the neck and did his necking with an axe."

What this film knows about history wouldn't fill out the back flap of Henry's biography, but what it knows about people would fill volumes.

If I had to boil the plot down to a central throughline, it would be the efforts of Henry's fifth wife (Binnie Barnes) to become his third wife then his fourth wife. She's determined to put a ring on it no matter what the cost, and after watching Henry execute wife two, bury wife three and divorce wife four, finally gets the randy old goat ginned up enough to lose his head ... and loses her own in the process.

That Henry works as well as it does is largely thanks to Laughton's interpretation of the title character — no surprise there; he was a terrific actor.

As Laughton plays him, Henry is vain, buffoonish, dangerous, impetuous, larger than life, loving life, and ultimately, despite his tendency to separate his wives from their heads, sympathetic — an unwitting victim of women too clever for him by half.

In fact, most of what you think you know of Henry VIII as a personality comes not from the history books but from Laughton.

You can't take your eyes off him.

Look, I wouldn't watch this in lieu of studying for the A.P. history exam — there's no mention of the Pope, the Reformation, Sir Thomas More or any of the other things people write essays about. Instead it's all bedroom shenanigans and giant turkey legs. But who doesn't like bedroom shenanigans and giant turkey legs?

The film was a big hit in 1933 and made international stars of not only Charles Laughton, but also Merle Oberon, Elsa Lanchester and Robert Donat. And it made producer-director Alexander Korda synonymous with British sophistication.

Now I don't want to oversell Henry VIII. It's an early sound picture and suffers from the same problems that plague many movies of that era: it's static and stagy, and lacks a score (some producers thought audiences would get confused if they didn't understand "where" the music was coming from, which is why there are so many nightclubs, radios and kazoo bands in late 20s, early 30s pictures).

That said, any movie that can turn vice into a virtue and get laughs from chopping people's heads off is okay in my book.

If it shows up on TCM again, and you have 97 minutes to spare, give it a look — I think you'll get a kick out of it.

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1935)

You know, every once in a while you're faced with something so perfect—the Sistine Chapel, Secretariat at the Belmont, John Lennon's vocal on "Twist and Shout"—you can actually hear the music of the spheres as they move through the eternal ether.

When I watch Astaire and Rogers dance, I reconsider the possibility that maybe there is a heaven after all.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The 39 Steps (prod. Michael Balcon)
nominees: Bride Of Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr. and James Whale); The Informer (prod. John Ford); Mutiny On The Bounty (prod. Frank Lloyd and Irving Thalberg)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Top Hat (prod. Pandro S. Berman)
nominees: A Night At The Opera (prod. Irving Thalberg); Ruggles of Red Gap (Arthur Hornblow, Jr.)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: La kermesse héroïque (Carnival In Flanders) (prod. Pierre Guerlais)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Charles Laughton (Mutiny On The Bounty)
nominees: Ronald Colman (A Tale Of Two Cities); Robert Donat (The 39 Steps); Errol Flynn (Captain Blood); Boris Karloff (Bride Of Frankenstein)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Marx Brothers (A Night At The Opera)
nominees: Fred Astaire (Top Hat); W.C. Fields (The Man on the Flying Trapeze); Charles Laughton (Ruggles Of Red Gap)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Katharine Hepburn (Alice Adams and Sylvia Scarlet)
nominees: Greta Garbo (Anna Karenina)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Ginger Rogers (Top Hat)
nominees: Margaret Sullavan (The Good Fairy); Shirley Temple (The Little Colonel, Our Little Girl, Curly Top and The Littlest Rebel)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps)
nominees: John Ford (The Informer); James Whale (Bride Of Frankenstein)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Sam Wood (A Night At The Opera)
nominees: Leo McCarey (Ruggles Of Red Gap); Mark Sandrich (Top Hat); William Wyler (The Good Fairy)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Edward Everett Horton (Top Hat)
nominees: W.C. Fields (David Copperfield); Charles Laughton (Les Miserables); Charlie Ruggles (Ruggles Of Red Gap); Franchot Tone (The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer and Mutiny On The Bounty); Ernest Thesiger (Bride of Frankenstein)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Elsa Lanchester (Bride Of Frankenstein)
nominees: Peggy Ashcroft (The 39 Steps); Mary Boland (Ruggles Of Red Gap); Una O'Connor (Bride Of Frankenstein and The Informer); Edna May Oliver (David Copperfield and A Tale Of Two Cities)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Dudley Nichols, from a story by Liam O'Flaherty (The Informer)
nominees: William Hurlbut (screenplay), adaptation by William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston (Bride Of Frankenstein); W.P. Lipscomb, from the novel by Victor Hugo (Les Misérables); George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, story by James Kevin McGuinness (A Night At The Opera); Charles Bennett (adaptation), Ian Hay (dialogue) and Alma Reville (continuity) (The 39 Steps)

SPECIAL AWARDS
John J. Mescall (Bride of Frankenstein) (Cinematography); Charles D. Hall (Bride of Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Gilbert Kurland (Bride of Frankenstein) (Sound); Herbert Stothart (Mutiny on the Bounty) (Score); "Cheek To Cheek" (Top Hat) Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin (Song); Derek Twist (The 39 Steps) (Film Editing)

The Old Dark House

I'm out of the office for a few days, so as Halloween approaches, I'm reposting some essays about classic horror films. I'll catch up on comments early next week.

Although he directed all sorts of movies, including the musical Show Boat, the name James Whale will always be linked with horror. During an age characterized by great horror films, Whale directed four of the greatest—Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride Of Frankenstein. If he didn't invent the genre, Whale redefined it so thoroughly that it's difficult, even now, to make a horror film without dipping into his bag of tricks.

Born in Worcestershire, England, in 1889, the son of a factory worker and a nurse, Whale discovered an interest in the theater while putting on productions for his fellow prisoners of war in a German POW camp during World War I. After the war, he worked as an actor and director in London, with his big break coming in 1928 when he directed Journey's End, R.C. Sherriff's anti-war play about life in the trenches. Starring Colin Clive, later the star of Frankenstein, the play ran on London's West End for two years and brought Whale to the attention of Hollywood. There, he directed a film version of Journey's End as well as an adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's Waterloo Bridge, the latter starring Mae Clarke.

Seeking to cash in on the box office phenomenon of Dracula, the classic thriller about a vampire turned loose on Victorian England starring Bela Lugosi, Whale directed one of the most famous and influential movies ever made, a screen adaptation of Mary Shelley's horror novel Frankenstein. The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation, Frankenstein contains more iconic images than any other movie of the period and it made an international star of Boris Karloff, who was both menacing and sympathetic as the monster.

Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the opportunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.

Frankenstein was 1931's box office champ, grossing $5 million (with an additional $7 million overseas) on a budget of $291,000.

Producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., wanted a sequel to Frankenstein, but Whale resisted. Ironically, despite helping to define the genre, he didn't much care for horror, and would have preferred to direct more movies like Waterloo Bridge—dramas and romances with literary antecedents. Business, though, was business, and after directing The Impatient Maiden, a little-seen drama starring Mae Clark and Lew Ayres, Whale turned back to the horror genre with an adaptation of J.B. Priestley's novel, Benighted, retitled The Old Dark House for the U.S. market.

The plot is a staple of the horror genre—strangers forced to spend the night in a scary house—although the threat, in this case, is not supernatural but based in the psychotic behaviors of the people who live there. Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart play a quarrelsome couple stranded by a storm in the mountains of Wales with Melvyn Douglas, their good-natured traveling companion. The three seek shelter in a nearby farmhouse belonging to Horace and Rebecca Femm, an elderly brother-sister couple played by Ernest Thesinger (later Dr. Pretorius in Bride Of Frankenstein) and a particularly belligerent Eva Moore.

"What are they doing here? What do they want? No beds! No beds!"

Upstairs is their crazy father and an even crazier brother.

Playing the Femm's mute butler is Boris Karloff, so heavily made up the producers added a note at the beginning of the movie to say that, yes, he was the same Karloff who had portrayed the monster in Frankenstein. Soon added to the mix are two more stranded travelers, Charles Laughton in his American film debut, and his mistress, played by Lilian Bond.

The fun lies in trying to decide who's merely eccentric and who's a homicidal maniac. Whale and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front, Casablanca) do a wonderful job of creating a sense of foreboding with shadows and Expressionistic camera angles. Whale was also one of the first directors to grasp the possibilities of the sound medium, and rain, wind, creaking boards, screams and howls, contribute to the mood.

TV Guide also praised Whale's ability to "emphasize an actor's entrances and exits, or to delay them as needed (as in the case of Saul). His striking flair for composition and editing works an audience over thoroughly, and he adds to the film's impact by deliberately playing with the buildup of suspense."

And Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice noted that Whale—who was born in a working class slum and invented for himself a cool, aristocratic bearing—was particularly sensitive to class distinctions, an awareness that shows in Laughton's character, "a knighted bigmouth industrialist, still smarting from slights before his social rise."

Despite a generally warm critical reception, The Old Dark House was a box office failure in the United States (it set records in Whale's native England). The film was thought lost for decades until it's rediscovery in the 1970s and its reputation has grown over the last few years until it is now regarded as one of Whale's best.

Gail Patrick For Who Am Us

This is what makes blogging all worthwhile: our good friend Who Am Us of the blog Who Am Us Anyway (check it out here) wrote in the comment section of "Carole Lombard In The Public Domain" that "Believe or no, this was my first-ever viewing of My Man Godfrey." To introduce someone to a classic movie—well, for a blogger, it doesn't get any better than that.

That he also had the same reaction to My Man Godfrey that I did, that's just icing on the cake:

And ahh, Gail Patrick as Cornelia—have you written about her before? Must check ... dang! The search button produces results in the amount of zero! Well, I'm a Gail fan starting tonight ...

That's the phenomenon known as "the hotter younger sister," which the fine, fine folks at Bright Lights After Dark wrote about at some length last year. As they so eloquently put it, "damn is she hot!"

Amen, brother.

Born Margaret LaVelle Fitzpatrick in Birmingham, Alabama, Patrick was the dean of women at Howard College and was studying law at the University of Alabama when she entered a nationwide contest for a part in a Paramount film. She didn't win, but she was offered a film contract and moved to Hollywood.

Appropriate to a blog currently covering 1932-33, Patrick made her film debut in the 1932 film If I Had A Million, starring Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton and George Raft. She typically played arrogant socialites and femme fatales and is best known for three comedic roles—Carole Lombard's scheming sister in My Man Godfrey, a haughty wannabe actress who clashes with Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn in Stage Door and Cary Grant's not-so-favored bride in My Favorite Wife.

Patrick appeared in sixty-two movies between 1932 and 1948.

She abandoned acting when she married her third husband, literary agent Cornwell Jackson. One of Jackson's clients was mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner who created the fictional defense lawyer Perry Mason. Patrick (credited now as Gail Patrick Jackson) obtained the rights to Perry Mason and for nine seasons produced one of the most successful television series in American history.

Patrick died of leukemia in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine.

Nominees For Best Actor Of 1932-33 (Drama)

The all Marx Brothers all the time blog-a-thon comes to an end. Here are the nominees for best actor of 1932-33 (drama).

Nils Asther (The Bitter Tea Of General Yen)

Charles Laughton (The Old Dark House, Island Of Lost Souls and The Private Life Of Henry VIII)

Paul Muni (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang)

Claude Rains (The Invisible Man)

Paul Robeson (The Emperor Jones)

Note: I've had trouble figuring out whether Charles Laughton belongs in drama or comedy—I had initially nominated him in the category of drama for his performance in The Private Life Of Henry VIII, but as Erik Beck of the Boston Becks pointed out, it's really a comedic performance (though it does, I think, have dramatic elements). I tried him out for a while in comedy, but then I took a second look at two more of his performances from 1932-33—The Old Dark House and Island Of Lost Souls—decided they were also nomination worthy, added them to list of credits and found that overall, he had tilted back into the category of drama.

Of course, the other solution would be to nominate him in both categories, in comedy for Henry VIII and in drama for the two horror classics, but I prefer to limit actors to one or the other in any given year. Leaves more slots for other actors and lets me spread the wealth. You're free to approach the question differently.

On Second Thought, I Don't Know Lilian Bond

As I was reviewing The Old Dark House, James Whale's story of things that go bump in the night, the name Lilian Bond kept buzzing around in my head—she played Charles Laughton's mistress, as you may recall—and I had this vague feeling I was supposed to know who she was. But as it turns out, no, I'd never heard of her, and moreover, further research reveals that there was no reason I should have heard of her.

Maybe I was thinking of Lillian Roth or Beulah Bondi or somebody like that. Ward Bond, maybe. I don't know. Just not Lilian Bond as it turns out. Because not to put too fine a point on it, Lilian Bond was nobody. Harsh, but essentially true, at least as far as movie history goes.

But let's talk about her anyway.

Born in London in 1908, Lilian Bond began working in the theater at the age of fourteen in the pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat, a traditional story first performed on the English stage in 1605. Later she danced in the chorus of the Piccadilly Revels. In 1926 Bond won a beauty contest and moved to America where she performed in the Ziegfeld Follies.

She made her first movie, No More Children, in 1929, and in 1932 was named a "WAMPAS Baby Star" along with Ginger Rogers, Gloria Stuart and eleven other actresses. WAMPAS, in case you didn't know, was the Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers and from 1922 to 1934, it selected a dozen or so young actresses as rising stars. Sometimes they got it right—Clara Bow (1924), Mary Astor (1926), Joan Crawford (1926), Jean Arthur (1929), Joan Blondell (1931)—but mostly they got it woefully wrong, and sometimes it looks like they just picked actresses based on who they thought would show up for the annual "WAMPAS Frolic," one of those gruesome little shindigs where fat guys in cheap suits make fools of themselves trying to impress beautiful girls half their age.

But I digress.

Appearing in forty-eight movies between 1929 and 1955, Bond played mostly supporting parts, with occasional starring roles in B-movies. Her best known roles are as Gladys Perkins (where she was credited as "Lillian" Bond) in the aforementioned The Old Dark House and as Lily Langtry in The Westerner, which starred Gary Cooper and scored an Oscar for Walter Brennan (who played Judge Roy Bean).

I've seen both movies, posted three pictures of her, and read everything about her I could find. Yet even now I doubt I could pick her out of a lineup, and that may be the problem with her career in a nutshell.

She married three times—twice until the death of her husbands did them part—and died herself of a heart attack in 1991.

And now before we leave the subject of Lilian Bond behind forever, here's a clip of her from The Old Dark House. She's playing across from the great Melvyn Douglas, who had only just broken into the movie business himself the year before. But more about him later.

Best Director Of 1932-33 (Drama): James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man)

Although he directed all sorts of movies, including the musical Show Boat, the name James Whale will always be linked with horror. During an age characterized by great horror films, Whale directed four of the greatest—Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and Bride Of Frankenstein. If he didn't invent the genre, Whale redefined it so thoroughly that it's difficult, even now, to make a horror film without dipping into his bag of tricks.

Born in Worcestershire, England, in 1889, the son of a factory worker and a nurse, Whale discovered an interest in the theater while putting on productions for his fellow prisoners of war in a German POW camp during World War I. After the war, he worked as an actor and director in London, with his big break coming in 1928 when he directed Journey's End, R.C. Sherriff's anti-war play about life in the trenches. Starring Colin Clive, later the star of Frankenstein, the play ran on London's West End for two years and brought Whale to the attention of Hollywood. There, he directed a film version of Journey's End as well as an adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood's Waterloo Bridge, the latter starring Mae Clarke.

Seeking to cash in on the box office phenomenon of Dracula, the classic thriller about a vampire turned loose on Victorian England starring Bela Lugosi, Whale directed one of the most famous and influential movies ever made, a screen adaptation of Mary Shelley's horror novel Frankenstein. The story of a young scientist who soon regrets cracking the secret of creation, Frankenstein contains more iconic images than any other movie of the period and it made an international star of Boris Karloff, who was both menacing and sympathetic as the monster.

Although he began his career as a theater director, Whale took full advantage of the opportunities film presented, using any number of techniques to distance Frankenstein from its literary and stage antecedents. In addition to the memorable use of sound effects, Whale abandoned the so-called proscenium arch—that is, the now long-forgotten habit of photographing a set from only one position, as if the camera had bought a ticket in the third row of a Broadway theater, that makes early sound movies feel so stagy—moving the camera around the room to get interesting angles, indeed, actually moving the camera, rather than leaving it bolted to the floor, such as for the long tracking shot of the father carrying his drowned daughter through the village square.

Frankenstein was 1931's box office champ, grossing $5 million (with an additional $7 million overseas) on a budget of $291,000.

Producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., wanted a sequel to Frankenstein, but Whale resisted. Ironically, despite helping to define the genre, he didn't much care for horror, and would have preferred to direct more movies like Waterloo Bridge—dramas and romances with literary antecedents. Business, though, was business, and after directing The Impatient Maiden, a little-seen drama starring Mae Clark and Lew Ayres, Whale turned back to the horror genre with an adaptation of J.B. Priestley's novel, Benighted, retitled The Old Dark House for the U.S. market.

The plot is a staple of the horror genre—strangers forced to spend the night in a scary house—although the threat, in this case, is not supernatural but based in the psychotic behaviors of the people who live there. Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart play a quarrelsome couple stranded by a storm in the mountains of Wales with Melvyn Douglas, their good-natured traveling companion. The three seek shelter in a nearby farmhouse belonging to Horace and Rebecca Femm, an elderly brother-sister couple played by Ernest Thesinger (later Dr. Pretorius in Bride Of Frankenstein) and a particularly belligerent Eva Moore.

"What are they doing here? What do they want? No beds! No beds!"

Upstairs is their crazy father and an even crazier brother.

Playing the Femm's mute butler is Boris Karloff, so heavily made up the producers added a note at the beginning of the movie to say that, yes, he was the same Karloff who had portrayed the monster in Frankenstein. Soon added to the mix are two more stranded travelers, Charles Laughton in his American film debut, and his mistress, played by Lilian Bond.

The fun lies in trying to decide who's merely eccentric and who's a homicidal maniac. Whale and cinematographer Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front, Casablanca) do a wonderful job of creating a sense of foreboding with shadows and Expressionistic camera angles. Whale was also one of the first directors to grasp the possibilities of the sound medium, and rain, wind, creaking boards, screams and howls, contribute to the mood.

TV Guide also praised Whale's ability to "emphasize an actor's entrances and exits, or to delay them as needed (as in the case of Saul). His striking flair for composition and editing works an audience over thoroughly, and he adds to the film's impact by deliberately playing with the buildup of suspense."

And Nick Pinkerton in The Village Voice noted that Whale—who was born in a working class slum and invented for himself a cool, aristocratic bearing—was particularly sensitive to class distinctions, an awareness that shows in Laughton's character, "a knighted bigmouth industrialist, still smarting from slights before his social rise."

Despite a generally warm critical reception, The Old Dark House was a box office failure in the United States (it set records in Whale's native England). The film was thought lost for decades until it's rediscovery in the 1970s and its reputation has grown over the last few years until it is now regarded as one of Whale's best.

For the subject of Universal's next "monster" movie, producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., settled on the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man, and following the released of a mystery starring Paul Lucas called The Kiss Before The Mirror, Whale began production in June 1933.

The Invisible Man is the story of Dr. Jack Griffin who discovers a process that will render a man invisible, a secret he initially plans to sell to the highest bidder until he realizes to his horror that there's no way to reverse the process. Its screenplay proved to be a tough nut to crack—no less a writer than Preston Sturges tried and failed, as did Garrett Fort and John Balderson, who had successfully adapted Dracula. Ultimately it was playwright R.C. Sherriff, whose Journey's End had provided Whale's break, who figured it out. He focused on the practical problems of invisibility—for example, Griffin must hide for an hour after he eats while his meal digests. In addition, Sherriff and Whale agreed that since the film's audience would believe that "only a lunatic would want to make himself invisible anyway," the story would emphasize Griffin's descent into madness.

"We'll begin with a reign of terror," Griffin says as his megalomania takes hold, "a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction."

To play the invisible man, Whale had initially planned on Boris Karloff, who had been such a sensation in Frankenstein, but when he proved to be unavailable, Whale opted for Claude Rains, a veteran of the stage and an instructor at the Royal Academy where he counted both Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud among his students. Although he was reluctant to begin his movie career with a horror film, Rains proved to be an inspired choice. Since the audience can't see him until the final scene, Griffin's entire character must be conveyed through his voice—and Rains had one of the richest, most melodious voices in movie history.

The other key to the success of The Invisible Man was, of course, its special effects, and those concocted by John P. Fulton and Arthur Edeson are among the best of its era. To create the illusion of invisibility, Fulton clothed Rains from head to toe in black velvet and filmed him before a black background. The footage was then optically printed over the scenes filmed on the set. In addition, to cover imperfections, Edeson retouched over four thousand frames of film by hand.

The result is startlingly effective, especially when Rains unwinds the bandages that conceal his face to reveal first empty eye sockets, then holes where his mouth and nose should be, and finally, nothing at all.

But as convincing as the special effects were, the movie would have collapsed had Whale not known how to move the story along, pull memorable performances from his actors—Una O'Connor as a terrified bar maid is unforgettable—and ratchet up the tension as the film races toward its conclusion.

The film was the critical and commercial hit Laemmle had hoped for. The New York Times named it one of the year's ten best and Whale himself won the special recognition at the Venice Film Festival for his direction. Even more important to Universal, the box office appeal of Whale's films helped keep the studio afloat during the darkest days of the Depression.

In 2008, the Library of Congress added The Invisible Man to the National Film Registry.

Despite reaching such heights, though, glory proved to be fleeting for Whale. After 1935's Bride of Frankenstein—the sequel he had resisted making for as long as he could—he never again directed a horror picture, and although credited with directing Show Boat, he was actually fired before production ended, having uncharacteristically gone over budget. Afterwards, he directed a string of commercially unsuccessful pictures and was pretty much out of movies by 1941.

In 1957, after a series of strokes, Whale committed suicide by drowning himself in his swimming pool. One of the few openly-gay directors working in Hollywood, Whale's life was the subject of the 1998 film Gods and Monsters, starring Ian McKellen.

Street Legal Henry

For a limited time only, the Internet Movie Database is serving up free viewings of Charles Laughton's Oscar-winning performance in 1933's The Private Life Of Henry VIII. And we here at the Monkey pass it along to you, legally and free of charge.

If you've never seen The Private Life Of Henry VIII, I recommend you avail yourself of the opportunity. I nominated Laughton in the drama category, but between you and me, this is really a black comedy about divorce, beheadings, affairs, affairs of state, the sort of movie the studio promoted with the tagline "He gave his wives a pain in the neck—and did his necking with an axe!"

It made international stars of Laughton, Merle Oberon, Elsa Lanchester and Robert Donat, and director-producer Alexander Korda's name became synonymous with the finest in British filmmaking.

What the movie knows about history wouldn't fill out the back flap of Henry's biography, but what it knows about people would fill volumes. Korda and writer Lajos Biró basically threw the facts out the window and made up a very entertaining movie as they went along. It reminds me a bit of a book journalist Mark Shiper wrote thirty-plus years ago, Paperback Writer, a fictional history of the Beatles that includes such little-remembered facts as that their first album was named We're Gonna Change The Face Of Pop Music Forever and that the string-laden "Shake Your Booty" was one of their biggest hits.

If you're a history buff and want to know what Henry was up to with his six wives, look elsewhere. But if you're interested in history the way it should have been written, then this just might be your cup of Earl Grey.



Postscript: Remember to vote for best original song of 1932-33 in the latest Monkey Poll. Your vote will actually decide who wins the award. Herself, a.k.a. Katie-Bar-The-Door, voted for "Isn't It Romantic" and warned ominously that if it doesn't pick up the pace, "There'll be no lovin' in Monkey Town tonight." But don't let my problems sway your thinking. Click here to watch and listen to your choices, then head on over to the right hand side of the page to cast your vote.

Best Actress Of 1930-31: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)

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. Sternberg further underscored where his interests lay by speaking only German 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.