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But only a bloviating narcissist determined to repeat his mistakes won't admit when he's wrong, and I was wrong to dismiss Norma Shearer without first seeing her pre-Code work.
In fact, before she got culture and started playing those maddeningly starchy good girls in bloodless MGM literary adaptations, Shearer turned in some of the best performances of the early sound era, playing — pardon my French — horny blue bloods too eager to get into a man's pants to worry about the impact on her social standing.
Thank God for pre-Code movies! All that misbehavior kids think they invented in the Sixties — sex, drugs, hot music, adultery, abortion — Hollywood was making movies about in the early 1930s, and making all that sin look like a helluva lot fun.
Too much fun as it turned out for the Puritans who get their mitts on the government from time to time. With censorship threatening their profit margins, Hollywood invented the Code, which not only banned onscreen depictions of all that naughtiness we're not supposed to enjoy but so obviously do, but also wholesome activities like a husband and wife sleeping in the same bed together, a fact of life every child in America was damn well aware of, else why bother to climb in there with them in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Who did they think they were fooling?
But I digress ...
I suspect Shearer's husband, the legendary producer Irving Thalberg, was only too happy to wrap his wife up in a shroud of respectability. Probably didn't want her audience to know the woman he had married was, in the words of the ever-classy Mickey Rooney, "hotter than a half-f***ed fox in a forest fire."
Well, some guys are like that.
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."
So what Norma Shearer movies should you see?
The 1939 comedy The Women would be an obvious choice — it's her best known film and it's a good one. But let's be honest, Norma is a bit of a sad sack in The Women — abandoned by her cheating husband, betrayed by her closest friends — and frankly, co-stars Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell blow her off the screen.
Instead, try these three pre-Code classics:
The Divorcee (1930) — When husband Ted (Robert Montgomery) has an extramarital fling, his wife Jerry (Shearer) retaliates with one of her own. Suddenly the gander, who always felt free to goose anything in a skirt, gets his feathers in a ruffle and files for divorce.
Separated, Ted drinks, Jerry parties, and neither is any too happy with the state of their affairs. Eventually, Jerry falls into the arms of a married man and ... well, there's enough here for a season's worth of Real Housewives, all of it unfolding in a brisk 84 minutes.
Shearer topped Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson, among others, at the 3rd Academy Awards for the only Oscar of her career.
A Free Soul (1931) — Even better than The Divorcee, in this sprightly 91-minute melodrama, free-spirit Jan Ashe (Shearer) falls for a gangster (Clark Gable in a star-making turn), discovering too late what kind of a man he really is.
When her ex-beau (Leslie Howard) comes to her rescue and winds up on trial for murder, Jan turns to her alcoholic father, a once successful attorney, hoping he can pull one more rabbit from his briefcase of lawyerly tricks.
Lionel Barrymore (at his hammy best as Jan's alcoholic father) won the Oscar for best actor, and Shearer picked up another nomination for best actress, one of five in her career.
Private Lives (1931) — In this faithful adaptation of Noel Coward's popular stageplay, two recently remarried divorcees, Elyot (Robert Montgomery, again) and Amanda (Shearer), find themselves honeymooning in adjoining suites at the same resort. The two ex-spouses are less interested in starting life anew than in tearing into each other, preferably with a wit so biting, the quips leave teeth marks.
And when the wit's not wounding enough, they use actual teeth!
You'd be tempted to call this a comedy of 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 — 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 to 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.
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 you're only going to see one Norma Shearer movie, see this one.
Next up: Howard Hawks: A Baker's Dozen
August 1, 1930-to-July 31, 1931, was one of those movie years where the list of the Academy's nominees and winners would give you a completely distorted idea of what was actually going on in movie history.
1931 was a pivotal year. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Clark Gable all went from bit players to stars within the space of twelve months and in so doing, they gave the cinema a distinctly American feel for the first time. Instead of actors aping polished stage performers with British or faux-British accents, audiences heard the inflections and rhythms of urban wise guys like Cagney and Gable, or in the case of Robinson — who was born in Romania and raised in New York's Lower East Side — the voice of the American immigrant experience.
Gangster pictures starring Cagney and Robinson — The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, respectively — proved to be big, if controversial, hits with both critics and audiences. Censors were not so thrilled, however, contending that the films (and Howard Hawks's Scarface the following year) glamorized crime.
Hollywood, as usual, proved to be of two minds on the subject, happy to bank the money that was rolling in while paying lip service at Oscar time to the notion that gangster pictures were bad for us.
It was the same story with Universal's cycle of great horror pictures, which began in 1931 with Dracula, and continued in November of that year (too late for an Oscar nomination) with Frankenstein. Their stars, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, would dominate the genre and box office for years to come without either ever receiving any recognition from the Academy.
There was also the groundbreaking western The Big Trail, starring an impossibly young John Wayne and featuring the first widescreen movie in history.
And, of course, Groucho Marx gave us what was perhaps the most famous monologue of his career, confessing to audiences, "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."
If, however, you look at the list of winners and nominees from the Academy Award ceremony held on November 10, 1931, you won't see any of these films or performers:
Picture: Cimarron
Actor: Lionel Barrymore (A Free Soul)
Actress: Marie Dressler (Min and Bill)
Director: Norman Taurog (Skippy)
Admittedly, although the Academy failed to recognize the revolution in their midst, Cimarron makes sense in the context of the times — it was based on a best-selling novel, critics loved it, and helped sell the notion that movies were high art. Not to mention the opening sequence is spectacular.
As for Marie Dressler and Lionel Barrymore, they were big stars and turned in good performances in solid films.
The only truly inexplicable award went to Norman Taurog for his direction of the comedy Skippy.
Skippy is pleasant enough, with a fine performance from child star Jackie Cooper, but in terms of what went on in the director's chair, it isn't much unless you count Taurog's threat to shoot Cooper's dog if the kid didn't cry on cue (he cried buckets and earned an Oscar nomination).
Nothing compared to the accomplishments of Charlie Chaplin and René Clair, who were eligible for the award, or Josef von Sternberg and Lewis Milestone, who were actually nominated.
Not to mention Taurog might be the worst director to ever win the award — aside from nabbing the Oscar itself, Taurog is mostly remembered now for directing nine Elvis Presley movies (and not the good ones either).
Well, okay, he directed Boys Town, I'll give him that. But that hardly makes up for Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.
Anyway, these are my picks:
1930-31
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Public Enemy (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck)
nominees: The Big Trail (prod. Winfield R. Sheehan); The Dawn Patrol (prod. Robert North); Dracula (prod. Tod Browning and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Morocco (prod. Hector Turnbull)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
nominees: Animal Crackers (prod. Adolph Zukor); Bimbo's Initiation (prod. Max Fleischer); The Front Page (prod. Lewis Milestone); Min And Bill (prod. George W. Hill)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: M (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
nominees: L'Âge d'Or (prod. Le Vicomte de Noailles); Le Million (prod. Frank Clifford); Prix de Beauté (prod. Romain Pinès); The Threepenny Opera (prod. Seymour Nebenzal)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar)
nominees: James Cagney (The Public Enemy); Gary Cooper (Morocco); Walter Huston (The Criminal Code); Bela Lugosi (Dracula)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Marx Brothers (Animal Crackers)
nominees: Eddie Cantor (Whoopee!); Charles Chaplin (City Lights); Jackie Cooper (Skippy); René Lefèvre (Le Million)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)
nominees: Joan Crawford (Dance, Fools, Dance); Irene Dunne (Cimarron); Norma Shearer (A Free Soul); Barbara Stanwyck (Night Nurse)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Marie Dressler (Min And Bill)
nominees: Virginia Cherrill (City Lights); Ina Claire (The Royal Family Of Broadway); Lya Lys (L'Âge d'Or); Jeanette MacDonald (Monte Carlo)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Fritz Lang (M)
nominees: Tod Browning (Dracula); Howard Hawks (The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code); Josef von Sternberg (Morocco); Raoul Walsh (The Big Trail); William A. Wellman (The Public Enemy)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
nominees: Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or); René Clair (Le Million); Lewis Milestone (The Front Page); G.W. Pabst (The Threepenny Opera)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Peter Lorre (M)
nominees: Dwight Frye (Dracula); Clark Gable (A Free Soul); Fredric March (The Barkleys of Broadway)
SUPPORTING ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Harry Myers (City Lights)
nominees: Adolphe Menjou (The Front Page)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse)
nominees: Sylvia Sidney (An American Tragedy)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Lotte Lenya (The Threepenny Opera)
nominees: Mae Clarke (The Front Page); Margaret Dumont (Animal Crackers); Marjorie Rambeau (Min And Bill)
SCREENPLAY
winner: René Clair; from a play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud (Le Million)
nominees: Morrie Ryskind; from a play by George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby (Animal Crackers); Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
SPECIAL AWARDS
René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
If you're reading this blog, I assume you know the sophisticated comedy classic, The Philadelphia Story. Designed as a comeback vehicle for Katharine Hepburn, the movie won two Oscars (Jimmy Stewart as best actor, and best screenplay) and features what many consider the best performance of Cary Grant's illustrious career.
But if Hepburn had had her way, the movie would have starred not Grant and Stewart but Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. That's right—Hepburn, who owned the film rights, wanted Gable and Tracy, and if they hadn't been tied up with other projects, that's who the studio would have cast.
And in the context of the times, you can see where she was coming from. Gable was the most popular actor in Hollywood, fresh off the smashing success of Gone With The Wind. And he'd made a career of taking the mickey out of upper class actresses—his Oscar-winning turn across from Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, in the aforementioned Gone With The Wind with Vivien Leigh, and many others.
As for Tracy, he'd won two Oscars, and Hepburn's instincts that she and he would be good together was right on the money—they eventually made nine movies together, including such comedy classics as Woman of the Year, Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike.
Not to mention Grant and Stewart weren't necessarily sure things in early 1940. We look back on Hepburn's three previous films with Grant as being treasures, particularly Bringing Up Baby and Holiday, but the fact is, all their previous pairings had been flops at the box office—indeed, the colossal failure of the former is why Hepburn needed a comeback vehicle in the first place.
And while Stewart had earned an Oscar-nomination the previous year with Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, nobody was ready yet to put him on the Mt. Rushmore of acting.
But sometimes, not getting what you want is the best thing that can happen to you. While I'm certain The Philadelphia Story would have been a hit with Gable and Tracy, it would have lacked Grant's champagne fizz and Stewart's fevered act-three naivete. You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, and you don't mess with a movie that film guru Leslie Halliwell called "Hollywood's most wise and sparkling comedy."
Bonus Trivia: On Broadway, Joseph Cotten and Van Heflin played the Grant and Stewart roles, respectively.
A great year in film history that needs no introduction—which is a good thing because I haven't written one.
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Gone With The Wind (prod. David O. Selznick)
nominees: Goodbye, Mr. Chips (prod. Victor Saville); Gunga Din (prod. George Stevens); The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (prod. Pandro S. Berman); Only Angels Have Wings (prod. Howard Hawks); The Roaring Twenties (prod. Hal B. Wallis); Stagecoach (prod. John Ford); Wuthering Heights (prod. Samuel Goldwyn)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Wizard Of Oz (prod. Mervyn LeRoy)
nominees: Destry Rides Again (prod. Joe Pasternak); Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (prod. Frank Capra); Ninotchka (prod. Ernst Lubitsch); The Women (prod. Hunt Stromberg)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: La règle du jeu (The Rules Of The Game) (prod. Claude Renoir, Sr.)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Clark Gable (Gone With The Wind)
nominees: James Cagney (The Roaring Twenties); Robert Donat (Goodbye, Mr. Chips); Henry Fonda (Young Mr. Lincoln); Cary Grant (Gunga Din and Only Angels Have Wings); Laurence Olivier (Wuthering Heights); Basil Rathbone (The Hound Of The Baskervilles and The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: James Stewart (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and Destry Rides Again)
nominees: Don Ameche (Midnight); Melvyn Douglas (Ninotchka); W.C. Fields (You Can't Cheat An Honest Man)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Vivien Leigh (Gone With The Wind)
nominees: Ingrid Bergman (Intermezzo: A Love Story); Bette Davis (Dark Victory and The Old Maid); Irene Dunne (Love Affair); Merle Oberon (Wuthering Heights); Barbara Stanwyck (Union Pacific)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Judy Garland (The Wizard Of Oz)
nominees: Jean Arthur (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington); Claudette Colbert (Midnight); Joan Crawford (The Women); Marlene Dietrich (Destry Rides Again); Greta Garbo (Ninotchka)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: John Ford (Stagecoach)
nominees: Victor Fleming (Gone With The Wind); Howard Hawks (Only Angels Have Wings); William Wyler (Wuthering Heights)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Victor Fleming (The Wizard Of Oz)
nominees: Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington); Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka); Jean Renoir (La règle du jeu a.k.a. The Rules Of The Game)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Thomas Mitchell (Stagecoach, Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame)
nominees: Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr (The Wizard Of Oz); Frank Morgan (The Wizard Of Oz); Robert Preston (Union Pacific); Claude Rains (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Hattie McDaniel (Gone With The Wind)
nominees: Olivia de Havilland (Gone With The Wind); Geraldine Fitzgerald (Wuthering Heights); Kay Francis (In Name Only); Margaret Hamilton (The Wizard Of Oz); Butterfly McQueen (Gone With The Wind)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, from the play by Clare Boothe (The Women)
nominees: Jean Renoir and Carl Koch (La règle du jeu a.k.a. The Rules Of The Game); Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch and Billy Wilder; story by Melchior Lengyel (Ninotchka); Sidney Buchman; story by Lewis R. Foster (Mr. Smith Goes To Washington)
SPECIAL AWARDS
"Over The Rainbow" (The Wizard Of Oz) music by Harold Arlen; lyrics by E.Y. Harburg (Song); Max Steiner (Gone With The Wind) (Score)
Be sure to look for a Joan Blondell double feature on Turner Classic Movies early Thursday, June 9, 2011, with Night Nurse at 6 a.m. EDT, followed by Other Men's Women at 7:15.
I cited both of these movies when I chose Blondell as the best supporting actress of 1930-31. This is what I had to say, in part:
If any one person has come to personify in my mind the glorious excesses of Hollywood's pre-Code era, it's Joan Blondell. She was sexy, she was sassy, and stripped down to her skivvies as she invariably was, she was always on the make. She had big blue eyes that rivaled those of Bette Davis, but unlike Bette's eyes, which always promised a knee to the groin if you got too close, Blondell's eyes promised a good time—if you measured up. And with very few predecessors to point the way, she had a gift for projecting moral ambiguity on the screen that set her work apart from the black-and-white caricatures her peers presented. Her very real talent was too often taken for granted but it really shone during the Early Sound Era when the brakes of censorship were off and if you want to know what film historians mean when they talk about "pre-Code" movies, you need look no further than Joan Blondell.
Movie audiences wouldn't see this much explicit behavior on screen again until Hollywood abandoned the Code altogether in 1968 and suffice it to say the Joan Blondell movies I've cited here—Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse—violated just about every aspect of its prohibitions, showing murder, revenge, the use of liquor, undressing scenes, scenes in bedrooms, adultery, impure love, semi-nudity, transparent clothing and God knows what else in ways that made all of those things seem like pretty good ideas. Throw in the cruelty to children and surgical operations that were central to the plot of Night Nurse and you've pretty much covered every aspect of the Code except venereal disease and the ridicule of religion.
No wonder these movies were so much fun to watch.
The first movie on my list, Sinners' Holiday, is typical of Blondell's pre-Code work, showing off both her no-nonsense sex appeal and talent for playing working class women. Set on the Coney Island boardwalk, Blondell here plays a photographer's model who gets mixed up with James Cagney and his penny ante bootleg liquor operation with tragic results. Although playing what are clearly supporting roles, Blondell and Cagney provided the movie's energy, blowing their higher-billed, better-paid co-stars off the screen, and drawing the attention of critics and moviegoers alike. Maybe it was their talent for making stock characters seem like real people—the eye is drawn to that on the screen that reminds you of something real, and both Blondell and Cagney imbue their characters with a reality otherwise sorely lacking in this pedestrian tale.
Sinners' Holiday was based on a stage play, Penny Arcade, that featured both Blondell and Cagney. The play only ran three weeks, but in the audience was Al Jolson (of The Jazz Singer) who was so impressed with the supporting work Blondell and Cagney turned in, he bought the film rights to the play for $20,000 and sold them to Jack Warner on the condition that he cast Blondell and Cagney in their original roles. Jolson had never met either performer, but he had an eye for talent. Sinners' Holiday was Blondell's fifth movie, co-star James Cagney's film debut, and for both performers it proved to be a promise of great things to come.
Blondell and Cagney teamed up again just three months later for Other Men's Women, the story of a love triangle involving a married couple and the husband's best friend. That neither Blondell nor Cagney, again relegated to supporting roles, figure into the affair should tell you all you need to know about the production's chief weakness. But the movie still works as a showcase of both stars' talents and is a prime example of the sort of things a pre-Code movie could get away with that movie audiences wouldn't see again for thirty years.
Blondell is slinging hash behind the counter at a railroad diner in this one, and with her eyes and with her voice, she draws a convincing portrait of a tired, jaded working woman, a real tough cookie. When she asks the customers "Anything else you guys want?" you can feel the slap in her voice and when one of them eyes her as she bends over and answers "Yeah, gimme a big slice of you on toast" she tells him with a look that let's him know she's heard it all before and is immune to his nonsense, "Listen, baby, I'm A.P.O.—Ain't Puttin' Out!"
Blondell's pining for the railroad engineer who's forgotten he's promised to marry her when he gets back into town—pining, that is, without love and without feeling any need to be particularly chaste while she's waiting. She blows him the raspberry and when he later rips her her dress, she gives him a slap he no doubt felt down to his heels; if Blondell pulled her punch, it was the most convincing pulled punch in movie history.
The star of Other Men's Women is a young and beautiful Mary Astor, who just as in Red Dust, can make you believe a guy would throw over a Joan Blondell or a Jean Harlow for her. But Blondell is the most convincing performer in the movie, and that includes Cagney in his last role before he became a star (by the way, what a swell movie this might have been if director Wellman had thought to cast Cagney as the lead). Blondell could play saucy in her sleep and hers is the performance you'll remember from this one.
After the January premiere of Other Men's Women, Blondell made nine more movies in 1931 (she made ten in 1932 and eight the year after that), her best roles coming in Night Nurse and Blonde Crazy, two of the best Code-busting movies ever made. The latter, with Blondell's famous bathtub scene, came out too late in 1931 to be eligible for a Katie here, but Night Nurse and its parade of lingerie just squeezed in with a July premiere in New York.
In Night Nurse, Blondell again has a supporting role, this time to Barbara Stanwyck who plays a nurse trainee paired with a more experienced nurse (Blondell) who specializes primarily in ways to skirt the strict rules against men, booze and late nights boozing with men.
"I'm sure in your heart you love it," says the eager Stanwyck.
"Sez you," sneers Blondell.
The movie is not eight minutes old before the actresses are out of their clothes. Blondell picks out a uniform for Stanwyck then watches as she undresses, sizing up the competition. William A. Wellman—this is the same guy who gave us a quick glimpse of Clara Bow's bare breasts in Wings—directs the scene in his typically leering style. "Oh, don't be embarrassed," says Dr. Smooth-Weasel when he saunters in. "You can't show me a thing. I just came from the delivery room."
Then Stanwyck plants her foot in Blondell's lap so Blondell can help Stanwyck off with her stockings. To their credit, the two actresses handle the scene so casually it almost doesn't occur to you to wonder what director Wellman thought he was up to. Almost. Stanwyck and Blondell spend an awful lot of the movie dressing and undressing, and in the case of Stanwyck, who at this point in her acting career was as green as wet wood, it helps disguise the fact that she didn't quite know what she was doing. In Blondell's case, it just seems a natural aspect of her gum-chewing, hip-swiveling character.
The plot is pure gangster melo- drama. In a part originally written for James Cagney (who, with the unexpected success of The Public Enemy, was now too big for supporting roles) (and yes, Blondell was in that Cagney effort, too; in the first five years of their careers, they made seven movies together), Clark Gable starves the children of his rich society lover so he can get his hands on their trust fund. Stanwyck and Blondell stumble across the scheme when they sign on as night nurses at the rich woman's estate and the rest of the plot concerns the plucky Stanwyck's attempts to thwart Gable, a charismatic brute who doesn't mind knocking a woman cold with a right cross.
Despite the role's size, the best performance in the movie once again belongs to Blondell. What I like most about her, in this movie and elsewhere, is you can't easily read her character. Does she have a heart of gold or a heart of brass? Usually, it's both, with the mix, depending on the role, sliding along the continuum toward one end or the other but never fully arriving—as with most people. This is her strength as a character actress, I think, and maybe her weakness as a lead: Hollywood typically likes its stars to be all one thing, a hero or a villain you can root for or against. With Blondell, well, you're never quite sure.
Take Night Nurse, for example. For Stanwyck, nursing is a calling and she's ready to risk her career to stop Gable. For Blondell—"I don't know a thing, I just work here"—nursing is a job and sticking her neck out is no way to keep the paychecks coming. In other words, Blondell is us the way we really are, Stanwyck as we like to pretend we are, and we go to the movies to pretend.
Joan Blondell worked very hard for a very long time but with a few exceptions—most notably in 1945's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn—she flew under the radar. Like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Arthur, she excelled at playing working class women. Like Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, she was genuinely sexy. But after a couple of successful starring roles, she was largely relegated to supporting status.
Between film, stage and television, Blondell worked steadily from 1930 to her death in 1979, receiving a Tony nomination in 1958 for The Rope Dancers and two Emmy nominations for the television series Here Come The Brides. She received her only Oscar nomination, a supporting actress nod, for the 1951 movie The Blue Veil, and won the National Board of Review's award for the best supporting actress of 1965 for her performance as Lady Fingers in The Cincinnati Kid.
"I don't know what the secret to longevity as an actress is," she once said. "It's more than talent and beauty. Maybe it's the audience seeing itself in you."
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