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On September 14-16, In The Good Old Days Of Classic Hollywood is hosting The Lauren Bacall Blogathon. For reasons I won't go into here, I can't post on the day of, so instead I offer up this early post as my way of encouraging you to please make a note on your calendars and check out the blogathon.
At the heart of every Howard Hawks action movie is the concept of the professional doing his job, and doing it well, despite the imminent threat of death, an idealized code of conduct Hemingway called "grace under pressure." We're all going to die sooner or later, Hawks seems to be saying, can't we at least do it with a bit of dignity and honor and laughter and good company?
That, above all, I think, is at the core of what is known as "a Hawksian woman," one who can laugh and provide good company in the face of death.
Whatever else a Howard Hawks drama is about, usually a woman meets a man and grows up enough to prove worthy of him and his cadre of professional associates (what one might loosely think of his family).
His comedies, in contrast, are about a man proving worthy enough of a woman to start a family (through marriage).
To Have and Have Not, so far as I can remember, is the one Hawks movie that takes that comedy formulation — the man proving worthy of the woman — and applies it to a dramatic situation. Do you know To Have and Have Not? In it, Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) has retreated from the messy political world into a cocoon of isolationism so complete he's willing to ignore the fascists in charge of the local government even as they are shooting his clients and making his life and the lives of his friends miserable.
Into that mix comes Marie "Slim" Browning (Lauren Bacall in her first film role), teaching him how to whistle and forcing him to realize that no matter how much he thinks he's successfully avoided sticking his neck out, his neck is out there, on the block, along with the necks of his "family" (Eddie, Frenchy, Cricket and, finally, Slim herself).
Whether he likes it or not, the Cause is his and he can either fight for it or go down the tubes anyway. So he fights, and in so doing, becomes worthy of Lauren Bacall, the toughest of tough young broads ever to grace the screen.
Katie-Bar-The-Door is still out of town, so Mister Muleboy and I again met at the AFI-Silver, this time for the Charlie Chaplin talkie Limelight.
This was Chaplin's third sound picture and the last film he made in the United States. I guess everybody has their favorite Chaplin talkie — I assume most would choose The Great Dictator (1940), his savage spoof of Adolf Hitler, while others might go for Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a black comedy about a serial killer whose latest victim simply refuses to die.
Me, I prefer Limelight.
It's the story of an alcoholic has-been (Chaplin) who rescues a suicidal ballerina (Claire Bloom), nurses her back to health, gets her on her feet again. During the day, she talks about her troubles; at night he dreams of his past as London's greatest music hall comedian. Once she recovers, her career takes off while his continues to decline. Along the way, a love triangle of sorts develops, with the ballerina torn between her platonic devotion to Chaplin while falling deeply in love with a shy young composer (played in a nice Freudian twist by Chaplin's son Sydney).
Chief among the film's delights is the casting of Buster Keaton as his stage partner, the only time these two silent comedy legends appeared in a movie together. Both men were past their primes here — Chaplin hadn't had an unalloyed success since Modern Times in 1936 and Keaton's heyday was even more distant, with his peak years running from just 1920 to 1928 — and Keaton's appearance is not much more than a cameo. But boy, what a cameo.
In their scene together, Chaplin's has-been teams up with Keaton's has-been to perform a silent sketch where two clumsy musicians destroy a piano and a violin mid-concert. If you've ever seen Chaplin in, say, The Pawnshop or Keaton in The Boat, you know just how much damage these guys can do.
Chaplin always played well off an opposite number — think of Roscoe Arbuckle, Eric Campbell, Mack Swain and Harry Myers — and his and Keaton's contrasting styles, the clown and the stoneface, work especially well. For a few minutes, the two legends defy the passage of time and remind us of what made them so special in the first place.
The novelty of seeing the silent era's two greatest comics together at last would be enough to make the film worth watching, but Chaplin also revisits the Tramp in at least three scenes, albeit with a different moustache and a check vest. Sure, he's not twenty-five anymore, but he can still bring it.
There's something poignant about watching a fading legend facing his loss of talent, energy and inspiration so directly, and those scenes where the has-been looks out on an empty theater that once was filled with cheering fans must have been particularly haunting for Chaplin as his real-life audience deserted him. But Chaplin being Chaplin, he finds an answer: to inspire the next generation, the only immortality an artist ever really knows.
Nigel Bruce — better known as Dr. Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes — turns in a good supporting performance as a theater manager, and there's a long ballet sequence reminiscent of The Red Shoes that I thought was quite beautiful. There's also a terrific silent gag about a high-end prostitute working the theater crowd that was worthy of Ernst Lubitsch.
Which is not to suggest that Limelight is a perfect film. Far from it. It suffers from the same flaw as all of Chaplin's sound pictures — he talks too much! In the silent era, Chaplin's Tramp could speak volumes with a single look. In the sound era, he simply speaks volumes. And frankly, as a moral philosopher, Chaplin is a hackneyed windbag.
Too, your opinion of Limelight depends on your willingness to tolerate Chaplin's return to the theme that haunted most of his work — his compulsive need to rescue damsels in distress. No doubt he was replaying, consciously or not, his boyhood situation with his mentally-ill mother, but the fact is, damsels who are chronically in need are beyond help, and the rest get better and move on, which suggests that the compulsion to rescue them is less about helping others and more about courting rejection and self-pity.
At least here, Chaplin at last finds the only solution to the dilemma that really works. I'll leave it to you to discover what that is.
Look, I'm not one of those people forever crabbing about Chaplin and sentimentality. Sentimentality is just a way of saying "an appeal to emotion rather than reason" and I happen to think that that's exactly what the movies are for, to bypass the frontal lobes and head straight for the lizard brain where love and anger and fear reside. If a movie can make me think, fine; but it had better make me feel something first or it's wasting my time.
My quibble here is that, at least where the ballerina's story is concerned, Chaplin more insists on the sentiment than actually creating it.
Still, the good far outweighs the bad.
I'd like to tell you that Limelight was a critical and commercial success, but the fact is, the film never received a proper release in the United States. When the film was completed, Chaplin boarded a boat to visit his home in England, and as soon as the ship cleared the harbor, the U.S. government declared Chaplin an undesirable alien and revoked his visa.
There were two types of anti-Communists in the 1940s and '50s: those seeking to best the Soviet Union in the existential struggle of the Cold War (e.g., Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, George Kennan, George Marshall); and those seeking to destroy their political and personal enemies with scurrilous accusations (Joe McCarthy, HUAC). Chaplin was a victim of the latter. He wouldn't return to America for twenty years.
The odd situation with Limelight did lead to the answer to a trivia question that film fans often get wrong: name the movie for which Chaplin won a competitive Oscar. In 1972, fans of Chaplin realized Limelight had never played in Los Angeles, so they rented a theater for a week and screened it, making it eligible for an Oscar under the rules of the time. Chaplin's original score received a nomination and when the envelope was opened, Chaplin had won. It was a sentimental gesture, but then Chaplin was a sentimental man so it seems fitting.
Awards or no, though, Chaplin achieved his immortality — he continues to inspire artists and will for as long as films are shown.
I'm working on a review of the classic Mary Pickford film Stella Maris, which if I work well this week, will be up by Friday. But the whole point of the review is to encourage you to see the movie, so why not cut out the middle man?
In terms of its narrative, Stella Maris has both feet planted firmly in the Charles Dickens tradition, with a rich girl (Pickford) crossing paths with a poor one (an unrecognizable Pickford in a dual role). Great, melodramatic stuff.
Whoever uploaded this to YouTube very cleverly left off the soundtrack. That's how they get you, in case you didn't know—the movie itself is in the public domain, but the soundtrack isn't and so the studio can reassert control of the movie through the music rights. That's why It's A Wonderful Life isn't on television twenty-eight hours a day during the Christmas season anymore—the film itself is in the public domain, but the score isn't.
Which is a real problem for a talkie, but a silent movie, well, I just provide my own soundtrack, probably Oscar Peterson's Night Train, which is what I've been listening to lately.
Before Marlene Dietrich, before Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren or even Greta Garbo, Polish film star Pola Negri made the journey from Europe to Hollywood and found fame in America, the first European film actress to succeed on both sides of the Atlantic.
She was born Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec in what is now Poland in 1897, fashioning the name "Pola Negri" for herself (after Italian poet Ada Negri) during her confinement to a sanitarium for tuberculosis. After Russian authorities sent Negri's father to Siberia as a revolutionary, Negri and her mother moved to Warsaw where Negri studied ballet and eventually found success on the stage and screen.
During World War I, she moved to Berlin where she caught the attention of Ernst Lubitsch who signed her to a movie contract at Universum Film AG ("UFA"), Germany's best studio and, until the Nazis took power in 1933, one of the most influential in the world. After a half dozen low-budget films with other directors, Lubitsch in 1918 cast Negri as the lead in Die Augen der Mumie Ma—"The Eyes of the Mummy."
We remember Lubitsch now for his witty, sophisticated comedies, but during his early career in Germany, he alternated between broad farces and serious dramas. The former usually starred Ossi Oswalda, the latter, Negri. Despite its lurid title, The Eyes of the Mummy wasn't a horror picture but a tragic romance, the story of a young woman (Negri) rescued from the Egyptian tombs where her captor (Emil Jannings) has held her for years only to find him stalking her anew through the posh capitals of Europe.
The Eyes of the Mummy is a minor entry in the Lubitsch canon, and Negri is still a raw young actress (she was just twenty-one when filming began), but somebody connected with the film—the screenwriters, Lubitsch, Negri—knew something about the psychology of stalking from the point of view of both the stalker and the victim, and Negri is effective as a lusty child-woman slavishly devoted to whichever man possesses her at any given moment.
Better is Lubitsch's next collaboration with Negri, a film version of Prosper Mérimée's novel, Carmen. Adapted to film as early as 1907, the story of a soldier who throws over his family, his fiancee and his honor for a beautiful gypsy smuggler with tragic results has spawned dozens of versions over the years and was familiar enough to audiences that Charlie Chaplin could film a spoof of it, A Burlesque on Carmen, in 1915. Stripped of its Spanish setting, Carmen is essentially a retelling of Eve and the apple, and while I agree with Nero Wolfe's sidekick Archie Goodwin that "[n]o man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables," that doesn't mean this oft-repeated formula doesn't work; indeed, it forms the basis of much of literature, film noir and some of the more brutal aspects of many of the world's cultures.
The key to Carmen is, of course, the actress playing the title role. You have to believe that an honorable man would throw away his good name, a promising career and a faithful fiancee for a romp with a treacherous tramp. Although the print of Carmen has deteriorated beyond repair in places, it's still possible to see what both Don José and movie audiences saw in Pola Negri's Carmen—she's ripe and sensual, with large eyes full of promises she has no intention of keeping.
Better men than Don José have given up a whole lot more for a whole lot less.
"Love is disgusting," Negri herself later opined, "when you no longer possess yourself."
Negri and Lubitsch made a total of eight movies together, each better than the one before it. In addition to The Eyes of the Mummy and Carmen, they made Madame DuBarry (a.k.a Passion) and Rausch (both 1919), Sumurun (a.ka. One Arabian Night) (1920), Die Bergkatze ("The Wildcat") (1921), Die Flamme (1923) and Forbidden Paradise (made in Hollywood in 1924 for Paramount).
Negri's collaboration with Lubitsch made her an international star, and so great was her reputation that the U.S. finally dropped its embargo of German films (instituted during the war) just to satisfy popular curiosity. After the success of Carmen (released in the United States in 1921 as Gypsy Blood), Negri signed with Paramount and arrived in New York in September 1922.
She quickly supplanted Theda Bara as silent film's top sex symbol and while (thanks to the vagaries of film preservation) I can't compare Negri to Bara's most famous role, Cleopatra, if Bara's surviving film A Fool There Was is any indicator, Negri was lightyears beyond her in terms of projecting sexuality on the screen. Was Negri a great actress? I'm not sure. But judging from the reaction of audiences when her European films finally made their way to America, she was revolutionary.
The films with Lubitsch also represented Negri at the top of her popularity. Despite begging her to come to Hollywood, Paramount didn't really know what to do with Negri and as her star faded, she became even more theatrical and haughty, which poisoned her relationship to both the studio and her audience.
When in 1926, the press decided her engagement to the recently deceased Rudolph Valentino was a fabrication, the public was done with her. To her dying day, Negri insisted that the engagement was real and told the Los Angeles Times shortly before her death, "Rudy was the great love of my life. I remember him with great regret. Somehow, the fates changed what wasn't to be. You can't rage with anger against it, and even though you love someone, you like to be with them and want to marry them and hope that it will all work out this time ... but he died, just when we were engaged to be married."
She was also briefly engaged to Charlie Chaplin who jilted her soon after giving her a $15,000 engagement ring. Negri's revenge? She gave the ring to her Forbidden Paradise co-star, Rod La Rocque.
She later married a Georgian prince, Serge Mdivani, who left her for an opera singer after Negri lost her fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. After their divorce, Negri lived with Margaret West, a Texas oil heiress, until the latter's death in 1963.
"No one could believe that we were closest friends, that nothing sexual was involved," she wrote in her autobiography. "Yet it is true. She was as close a friend as I've ever had."
When talkies came in, Negri's thick accent relegated her to supporting roles. Despite a measure of success in such films as A Woman Commands—she had a hit with the song "Paradise"—she retreated to Europe and retired in 1943, making one last picture in 1964, The Moon-Spinners, at Walt Disney's personal behest. Her London press conference promoting the film was a sensation—she showed up with a live cheetah on a chain leash.
Negri died on August 1, 1987, in San Antonio, Texas. She was 90 years old.
I once told my pal, Mister Muleboy, I wanted to be able to reprint an old post every day of the year. I was only half joking. This one is from 2009.
"There is no Garbo, there is no Dietrich, there is only Louise Brooks!"
Or so curator Henri Langlois said when asked why he had chosen to prominently display a huge portrait of Louise Brooks rather than Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich at the entrance of the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris on the occasion of its retrospective of the first sixty years of motion pictures.
I wonder how many essays about Louise Brooks begin with that quote. All of them, probably.
Langlois was overselling his case—after all, I wouldn't want to imagine a movie history without Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich—but I wouldn't want to imagine one without Brooks either. She made just twenty-three movies and she's not nearly as celebrated as her two counterparts, but in 1929 at least, there was no actress better than Louise Brooks, and when Langlois reintroduce her to a world that had forgotten her after a twenty-five year exile, perhaps he was entitled to a bit of hyperbole.
Brooks's brief but unforgettable film career followed the trajectory of an early NASA rocket—straight up, then straight down, with some crazy loops in the middle and a spectacular explosion at the end. She combined brains, elegant beauty, and scorching sex appeal with a party-girl work ethic self-destructive enough to end ten careers. She made no apologies for preferring sex, jazz and alcohol to a steady job, and she burned every bridge she ever crossed, some while she was still standing on them, until finally there were no bridges left to burn.
"I have a gift for enraging people," she once said, "but if I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife."
Twice married, twice divorced, Brooks conducted well-documented affairs with Charles Chaplin, Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, movie producer Walter Wanger, and many others, including an experimental one-night stand with Greta Garbo. CBS founder William Paley, who was briefly involved with Brooks in his youth, was so fond of her that when she hit the skids after her movie career, he helped her with a monthly stipend for the rest of her life.
Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1906 to an indulgent lawyer father and a social-crusading mother with the maternal instincts of an "alligator," Brooks became a dancer at an early age and as a teenager joined the Denishawn Dancers (working with the legendary Martha Graham). Later she danced with the George White Scandals and the Ziegfeld Follies. "I learned how to act by watching Martha Graham dance," Brooks said, "and I learned how to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act."
She made her movie debut in 1925 for Paramount Pictures, appearing in eleven films over a three year period, playing the quintessential flapper across from such actors as Adolphe Menjou and W.C. Fields. She had an insatiable appetite for the Hollywood nightlife, was a regular at William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle, and was a fixture in the gossip columns. Her "black helmet hairdo" was one of the ten most influential haircuts in history, according to InStyle magazine, and she was one of the most photographed celebrities of her time.
But it wasn't until 1928, when she made Howard Hawks's A Girl In Every Port and William A. Wellman's Beggars of Life, that she really made an impression as an actress.
Her contemporaries, schooled in the art of silent film overacting, thought she was doing nothing on screen; years later, it's clear she was a method actress before the method had been invented. "The great art of films does not consist in descriptive movement of face and body," she said, "but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation." As with the works of Buster Keaton, Brooks's understated, internal approach gives her performances a modern feel, very much in contrast to her contemporary, Greta Garbo, who wouldn't completely shed her silent film theatrics until 1933. Brooks never had any to lose.
With her work in A Girl in Every Port and Beggars of Life, Brooks came to the attention of German director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, a collaboration that would result in the best work of both their careers.
Pabst, an Austrian born in what is now the Czech Republic, was one of the leading directors in Germany's important and influential film industry. After making movies with Greta Garbo (The Joyless Street, her first outside of Sweden) and Brigitte Helm (who later played the lead in Metropolis), Pabst set his sights on a movie version of a pair of stage plays, Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and Der Büchse Die Pandora (Pandora's Box), two well-known works by German playwright Frank Wedekind.
In his two plays, Wedekind had set out to expose the secret lusts and private immoralities of Berlin's ruling class, with the action centering on the manipulations and cruelty of a prostitute named Lulu. Wedekind described Lulu as a "monster," but Pabst re-envisioned her as "sweetly innocent" and unaware of the evil she inspired, shifting the moral responsibility for the resulting tragedy to a flaw in her upper class patrons.
It was bold idea for a story well-fixed in the mind of a German public in no mood to acknowledge their role in the decadence and growing weakness of the Weimar Republic. "[M]y playing of the tragic Lulu with no sense of sin," Brooks wrote later, "remained generally unacceptable for a quarter of a century."
In Brooks, Pabst saw the precise combination of innocence and unapologetic sexual appetite he was looking for in his Lulu. The problem was, she was under contract to Paramount Pictures and the studio had its own plans for the actress. Sitting in post-production was a silent movie, The Canary Murder Case—Brooks played the "Canary" of the title, a blackmailing singer turned murder victim—which the studio wanted to re-shoot as a "talkie."
Typical of the industry as a whole, though, Paramount saw the advent of sound not just as a technical challenge, but also an opportunity to slash salaries and dump difficult stars (such as Wallace Beery and Clara Bow), using the cost of converting to the new technology as an excuse. Never a fan of the business side of acting to begin with, Brooks balked when the studio informed her she would be doing the work of dubbing The Canary Murder Case for less pay. She quit on the spot, at which time studio head B.P. Schulberg informed her of Pabst's offer.
Legend has it that Marlene Dietrich was waiting in Pabst's outer office to test for Pandora's Box when a cable arrived saying that Brooks had left Paramount and was available to play Lulu. For Brooks, it was a fateful decision.
The first scene of Pan- dora's Box sets the tone. We first see Lulu in her spacious apartment in the city, friendly, smiling, fresh-faced—with a bottle of brandy tucked under her left elbow to pay off the meter reader with less than what she owes, and even though he's old enough to know better, he can't help thinking such a lovely, innocent smile is for him only. And it is for him only, at least until the next man arrives at the door.
Any number of men open this particular Pandora's box without much regard to the cost to their dignity, social standing or bank accounts: Schigolch, a pimp and a leech, Lulu's first "patron," respectable until he met her, now an alcoholic bum with holes in his shoes; Dr. Schön, a wealthy publisher with a high-society fiancee, who lusts after Lulu and hates himself for it; and his son, Alwa, who adores her even as she cheerfully tells him she is incapable of love. There's even a Countess (played by a reluctant Alice Roberts, who didn't realize she was to play what was perhaps the first overtly lesbian character in movie history) who longs for Lulu with an unrequited passion.
Like Josef von Sternberg who was busy making a very similar movie, The Blue Angel with the aforementioned Marlene Dietrich, Pabst had men pegged as nothing much more than big animals with pants on—in one scene he shows Schön rutting like a pig in white tie and tails—and it comes as no great surprise that the last man in Lulu's life, Jack the Ripper, proves to be the biggest animal of all, albeit with a different agenda on his mind.
Lulu is blessed with a sort of short-term moral amnesia that it makes it possible to forget from moment to moment that her relationships with other people flow, or should flow, in two directions. As Brooks plays her, Lulu is a child in a woman's body, and that childlike innocence at the core of Brooks's approach is the key to the movie. Lulu is a flame who attracts men to their destruction, but because there's no malevolence in her, the audience never turns on her as they might a typically scheming femme fatale.
No doubt that's why Pabst so preferred Brooks to Dietrich. "It's a part that can't be played by her type," Brooks said later of Dietrich in a rare interview. Pabst agreed, saying, "Dietrich was too old and too obvious—one sexy look and the picture would have become a burlesque."
Pandora's Box is not a perfect movie. At 133 minutes, it's about half an hour too long for a silent film, and Pabst never really solved the structural problem of stitching two stories together. But Brooks's performance is extraordinary, quite unlike anything that had come before it and so far ahead of its time, years would pass before it found an audience.
Premiering in Berlin in January 1929, Germans were outraged that Pabst had chosen an American to play their beloved Lulu and were offended that he had dared show Berlin's upper classes in a less than flattering light. The movie fared no better when it reached the U.S. in December of that same year. Already a relic of the Silent Era, Pandora's Box sank without a ripple.
Undeterred, Pabst began work on a follow-up to Pandora's Box in June, 1929. Diary Of A Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) is an adaptation of Margarete Böhme's novel about a girl who is seduced and raped only to be sent to a brutal reform school by a hypocritical father who himself has a taste for young girls.
In choosing to make Diary of a Lost Girl, Brooks turned down an offer of $10,000 from a Paramount Pictures now desperate to avoid the expense of finding another actress to dub her voice in The Canary Murder Case. With this second rejection, Brooks burned all but the last of her Hollywood bridges. B.P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount, put the word out that Brooks's voice was unsuitable for talkies and she was blackballed from most of the major studios. It was years before Brooks grasped the significance of her decision.
The resulting collaboration between Brooks and Pabst is not quite as good as Pandora's Box, but Brooks's performance may be even better. The movie blogger L'Eclisse has observed that while she's not convinced the movie works, "What is indisputable ... is the gravity of Brooks’ performance. She is delicate, subtle, vulnerable, intuitive, and a host of other immortal adjectives."
Certainly the performance proves Pandora's Box was no fluke.
As an innocent victim made to suffer outrageously at the hands of others, Brooks's character in this one, Thymian, is very nearly a polar opposite of Lulu. Yet in both movies, Brooks serves as a prism refracting upper class hypocrisy into its full spectrum of hidden sin. Discovering her father has seduced and impregnated the family housekeeper, a woman not much older than herself, Thymian turns to her father's lecherous business partner for solace, an unscrupulous lech who takes full advantage of the opportunity.
Brooks noted she played the scene as a ballet, an emo- tionally complex scene in which an "'innocent' young girl" (the quotation marks around "innocent" are Brooks's own) subtly maneuvers a "wary lecher" without any idea of what is at stake, knowing only that her father has hurt her. For Thymian, to faint dead away in her lover's arms was the consummation promised in romance novels. For the lecher, consummation was something else.
The subsequent rape, implied but not shown, leaves Thymian pregnant which, in the eyes of the hypocrites who raised her, is her own fault, a sin worthy of harsh punishment.
Filming those scenes must have been an uncomfortable reminder of a pivotal incident from Brooks's own childhood when as a nine year old she was sexually molested by a neighbor only to have her mother blame her for seducing the man when she came home crying. Brooks wrote later that the episode haunted her for the rest of her life and shaped her feelings about love and sex.
"Love is a publicity stunt," she said bluntly, "and making love—after the first curious raptures—is only another petulant way to pass the time waiting for the studio to call."
After Thymian gives birth, her baby is given over to a midwife and Thymian herself is sent to a girl's reformatory, which like the girl's school in Mädchen In Uniform, which followed two years later, seethes with authoritarian cruelty and repressed desire. That Thymian's life improves when she escapes the reform school to work in a brothel should tell you everything you need to know about Pabst's opinion of reform schools, and I think Pabst, like fellow German directors Fritz Lang (M) and Leontine Sagan (Mädchen In Uniform), was groping to diagnose the very real sickness in German society that would soon bring Adolf Hitler to power.
Censors heavily edited Diary of a Lost Girl on its release, the French version being so cut up (the entire brothel sequence was excised), the movie's screenwriter thought the film had broken half way through its premiere. Still, despite making no impression in America, Diary of a Lost Girl was enough of a success in Europe that Brooks made a third movie, Prix de Beauté, a truly European effort with a screenplay from Pabst and French director René Clair, and direction by Italian Augusto Genina.
The film was a hit, yet despite Pabst's promise to turn her into an international star to rival Garbo, Brooks was bored with Europe and after three movies there, returned to an indifferent America. The hard work of making films in a language not her own held no interest for her, no matter how much fame or fortune was in the offing.
"Your life is exactly like Lulu's," Pabst angrily told her on parting, "and you will end the same way." He wasn't far wrong.
Although her European films had had no impact on the American market and she was still in bad odor after snubbing Paramount, Brooks did find small roles in four pictures, and made her belated sound debut in the execrable comedy short Windy Riley Goes Hollywood, directed by the still-disgraced Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle under an assumed name. All four movies are terrible and Brooks, who admitted she knew nothing about how to project her voice for the microphone, is pretty bad in them.
Still, in 1931, William Wellman, who had directed Brooks in Beggars of Life, offered her the female lead in his next picture, James Cagney's gangster classic, The Public Enemy. Brooks initially said yes, then changed her mind and abruptly left Hollywood to be with then-lover George Preston Marshall. The role went instead to Jean Harlow and made her an instant star.
Brooks had burned her last bridge. There was nowhere to go but down.
"That Hollywood treatment is murder, just murder," she said later. "It isn't that people turn their heads not to speak to you, they don't see you, you're not a person anymore. The people who've dined with you and you've spent weekends with, they look right at you, you don't exist."
By the time she realized she missed acting, it was too late. "I never gave away anything without wishing I had kept it," she said later, composing her own epitaph, "nor kept anything without wishing I had given it away."
Brooks returned to Hollywood in 1936 and appeared in a pair of Westerns, including her last film, Overland Stage Raiders with John Wayne a year before his breakthrough in Stagecoach, then spent another two years in Hollywood waiting for offers that never came. When she left California in 1940, she left for good. She was thirty-four.
Brooks fell back on dancing for a while, working on the stage in Chicago, and even opened a dance studio in Wichita, Kansas, but she was as impatient and ill-tempered as ever, alienating clients and driving away business. Eventually she retreated to New York, working as a salesgirl, maid and finally as an "escort."
She said later that only Paley's monthly stipend kept her from suicide. "How I have existed fills me with horror," she wrote, "for I have failed in everything—spelling, arithmetic, riding, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend. Even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual excuse of not trying. I tried with all my heart."
She was "a very strong woman," a friend said after her death, "but whose strength annihilated her, I think, and I always felt she was a lost soul."
Then by chance in 1953, Brooks's neighbor had a conversation with James Card, curator of the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, N.Y., who mentioned that he had been searching for years to find Brooks. The neighbor introduced the two, and Brooks and Card began a correspondence that led Brooks to relocate to Rochester and begin writing a series of respected essays about the Silent Era, collected under the title Lulu in Hollywood. In 1957, Henri Langlois held his film retrospective in Paris and reintroduced Brooks to a world finally ready to recognize her talent.
More than a quarter of a century after she had turned her back on fame, fame forgave her. She is now regarded as one of the greatest actresses of the Silent Era.
Brooks lived out the rest of her life in Rochester, writing, painting, reading voraciously, entertaining friends, occasionally lecturing to students at the Eastman House, but otherwise avoiding the public that had rediscovered her. In her later years, she suffered from arthritis and emphysema, living, like a character from the Proust she loved, in memories of things past.
"In my dreams," she said not long before her death, "I am not crippled. In my dreams, I dance."
To read Part One of this essay, click here.
Little Mary Takes Charge
Mary Pickford was already a star by 1917, of course—she'd been a star, in fact, before anyone even knew her name.
Known as "America's Sweetheart," Pickford was actually Canadian, born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto in 1892. Shortly after the death of her alcoholic father, the seven year old Gladys hit the stage, and along with her brother and sister, began to tour Canada and the United States regularly as part of a series of low-rent theater troupes.
Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York in 1906 and changed her name to Mary Pickford. While she did land a few parts, by 1909 she was desperate for work and auditioned for a role in a D.W. Griffith film, and although she didn't get the part, Griffith offered her a contract at $10 a day with a guarantee of $40 a week—double the going rate.
In keeping with the practice of the times, Pickford received no billing for her efforts—not even the director received a credit in those days—but audiences knew what they liked, and though they didn't know Pickford's name, they—and the theater owners who paid to exhibit her films—clamored for more of "The Girl with the Golden Curls."
While at Biograph Studios, Pickford made over 130 short films with Griffith. But despite that early success and their later partnership (along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks) in forming United Artists, Pickford didn't much care for the "lordly" Griffith, and when he elevated newcomer Mae Marsh over her, she departed for the employ of Adolph Zukor, head of Lasky's Famous Players (later Paramount).
One of her earliest feature-length films for Zukor, 1914's Tess of the Storm Country, was a smash hit and made Pickford an international star.
Although audiences may have thought of her as the perennially adolescent "Little Mary," by the beginning of 1917, Pickford was a very grown up twenty-four and knew better than anyone what her fans wanted to see—better, certainly, than the men who ran the studio. After starting the year with an adult role—the leader of a Scottish fishing village in The Pride of the Clan, worth tracking down for the scene where she drives errant parishioners to church with a bullwhip—Pickford, over the objections of Zukor, chose a popular stageplay of the day, The Poor Little Rich Girl as her next starring vehicle.
Looking back now, the story of a girl who nearly meets with a tragic end would seem to be right in Pickford's wheelhouse, but the man initially chosen to helm the production, Zukor's top director Cecil B. DeMille, wasn't so sure, and when Pickford insisted her friend Frances Marion write the screenplay, the autocratic DeMille attempted to put his foot down.
Instead, it was Pickford who won the ensuing battle of wills, and when she successfully lobbied to have DeMille replaced with Maurice Tourneur, who had directed The Pride of the Clan, she may have been the first star in movie history to fire a director. She wouldn't be the last.
The basic story of The Poor Little Rich Girl—Gwendolyn's parents neglect her, their wealth isolates her, the family servants prey upon her—could easily have become the cheap, sentimental claptrap Zukor feared it would be. It works, though, thanks to Marion's script, Tourneur's direction and above all, Pickford's performance.
Frances Marion you know, if you've been following this blog for a while. From 1915 to 1933, the two-time Oscar winner was the highest paid and most respected writer in Hollywood, shaping the screen images of some of Hollywood's greatest stars including Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler—and, of course, Mary Pickford, writing seventeen movies for the latter between 1915 and 1921. Along with Anita Loos, Marion revolutionized the art of intertitle writing, turning dull exposition into clever bon mots worth the price of admission in their own right. More importantly, she grasped that movies were primarily visual, and she suggested ways of showing character and action that were uniquely adapted to the new medium. (Read more about her here.)
Marion's screen adaptation boasted an unprecedented blend of comedy and melodrama that worried the studio but delighted Pickford—indeed, the two women added comedic bits throughout filming, exasperating the fastidious Tourneur. On closer inspection, the comedy that so puzzled Zukor and Tourneur was really the writer's happy choice to draw Gwendolyn not as a saint or as a symbol, but as a real girl—by turns, impetuous, flighty, bored, sullen, but also curious, kind, imaginative and fun. Gwen is so appealing that by the time catastrophe strikes, the audience is deeply invested in her fate.
To create the illusion that Pickford, already tiny at five feet, was young enough to pass for a child, director Tourneur surrounded her with oversize sets and furniture, and hired tall actors whom he stood on platforms or in the extreme foreground, making them look even taller. He also shot several scenes of Pickford lying down in a bed or sitting in an over-sized chair where it's impossible to judge the relative heights of the other actors.
Remembered now, if at all, as the father of Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past), Maurice Tourneur proves here and in his follow-up film, The Blue Bird, that he was one of the most adept visual stylists of the period. Aside from his technical skill in helping Pickford pass for a young girl, a couple of fantasy sequences—Gwen's literal interpretations of a two-faced woman and bears on Wall Street—are well done and typical of Tourneur's style. (Both The Poor Little Rich Girl and The Blue Bird are preserved in the National Film Registry.)
But even with Marion's screenplay and Tourneur's technical skill, the film wouldn't work without the best "trick" of all—Pickford's ability to behave like a young girl would, not overplaying her part as if in a broad farce or a Victorian melodrama, just playing it. She kicks, she yawns, she flings mud at little boys, but far from coming across as a spoiled brat, she's a spunky underdog fighting arbitrary authority even as she longs for a normal childhood (something Pickford herself never had).
As Daniel Eagan writes in America's Film Legacy, "[I]t's a measure of her talent and appeal that she could make a child of privilege appear deprived."
Studio executives were horrified when they saw the finished film (you can see it for yourself here) and, convinced he had a very expensive flop on his hands, Zukor sent a chastened Pickford out west to make two films with the aforementioned Cecil B. DeMille—what fun that must have been for both director and star!
Andre Soares of Alt Film Guide picks the first, A Romance of the Redwoods—the story of an outlaw who steals a dead man's identity only to fall in love with the deceased's niece—as the best picture of 1917, and it is a fine picture, but I see it primarily as a showcase for Elliott Dexter. The second film, a World War I propaganda piece called The Little American, is, frankly, a mess, at the end pairing a typically charming Pickford with a would-be rapist rather than with a brave, self-sacrificing suitor for no better reason than that the former is played by a better looking actor than the latter.
In any event, neither film did much at the box office and meanwhile, a strange thing was happening with The Poor Little Rich Girl, which Zukor had released only to fulfill a contractual obligation to theater owners—audiences loved it, finding it by turns funny and poignant. Indeed, The Poor Little Rich Girl was one of the biggest hits of Pickford's career.
After that, Zukor gave up trying to control his star and instead signed her to a new contract, giving her $10,000 a week, 50% of her films' profits, and complete creative control.
"She knew what she was worth," wrote biographer Eileen Whitfield, "and she didn't hesitate to ask for it. She was a woman in complete control."
As a follow-up to The Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford chose a similar subject, this time the Kate Douglas Wiggin novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The story of a poor girl sent to live with a pair of maiden aunts—sort of a cross between Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott—is maybe the most typical example of the kind of movies Pickford made during the remainder of the silent era.
To handle the adaptation of the novel, Pickford again chose her friend and closest collaborator, Frances Marion. To direct, she selected Marshall Neilan, a journeyman whose movie career began when he sold a car to director Allan Dwan. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was the beginning of a brief but productive partnership with Pickford that produced her best film, Stella Maris, as well as Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M'Liss, Daddy-Long-Legs and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
With the exception of her economic situation, Pickford plays the same sort of character as in The Poor Little Rich Girl—a feisty underdog who melts the stony hearts of everyone she meets. Her age here is a little ambiguous; the novel suggests Rebecca is "ten or eleven," but the film seems to indicate she's more like fourteen, still a stretch considering Pickford had celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday before filming began, but there are plenty of five foot tall fourteen year olds running around and in any event, her fans were more than willing to suspend disbelief.
After the unexpected success of The Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford and Marion were determined to follow the same formula, including plenty of comedy bits—poking the preacher's snooty daughter with an umbrella, fainting dead away when a handsome young man buys 350 bars of the soap she's selling for a contest, reciting a scandalous poem for a town gathering—with a soupçon of pathos in the final act.
As usual, Frances Marion takes the opportunity to poke fun at social conventions such as mix-and-match morality—when confronted with competing aphorisms, "Thou Shalt Not Steal" and "God Helps Those Who Help Themselves," Rebecca opts for the latter to justify eating a piece of pie—as well as the withered humanity underlying so much of religious fanaticism.
Viewed back-to-back with The Poor Little Rich Girl, it's clear Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is the inferior film. The story is more episodic, the emotions touched on less intense. Nor was Neilan the visual stylist that Tourneur was—he drank too much and often left the direction to Pickford herself—but overall, it's a fun picture, and maybe the best at highlighting Pickford's lighter side. (In 1933, Pickford hired the by-then unhireable Neilan to direct what would be her last film, Secrets, then wound up firing him when he was simply too drunk to work.)
The finished product was box office gold, an even bigger hit than The Poor Little Rich Girl. In fact, the two films finished second and third on the list of the year's biggest grossing films, behind only Theda Bara's Cleopatra.
The "little girl" films of Mary Pickford aren't for everybody. A modern audience has little practice at accepting an adult actor in the role of a child and the effort doesn't work in every picture—for example, in The Little Princess, also from 1917, Pickford looks more like a wizened gnome than a little girl.
Too, the stories Pickford chose to tell—innocent tales completely devoid of irony—seem to be out of fashion these days, even at a studio like Disney. Indeed, Pickford herself chafed at the constant parade of little girl roles—"I'm sick of Cinderella parts," she once said, "of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover."—while remaining determined to give her fans exactly what they wanted, which they did to the tune of millions of tickets sold.
But if you're willing to give yourself to it, Pickford's little girls are bright, kind, spunky, mischievous—a blueprint for the Shirley Temple movies that were so popular during the Depression—and provide a chance to re-experience simple pleasures undistilled.
"Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter," she said. "What do people want to go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that."
She won a competitive Oscar for acting in 1930 and an honorary one in 1976 "in recognition of her unique contributions to the film industry and the development of film as an artistic medium."
Pickford dominated the movie and cultural landscape for another decade, a superstar before there was such a word, with a string of box office hits, the financial acumen to found and run United Artists, and a celebrity that today's tabloid fodder can't begin to imagine, for example, drawing a crowd of 300,000 when she and Douglas Fairbanks honeymooned in Paris.
In fact, I'd say there's no equivalent to Pickford in today's Hollywood, and you'd have to combine three women—say, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Kate Middleton—to equal one Mary Pickford. And even then, you wouldn't come close to matching the lasting impact of her legacy on the art and business of film.
[To continue to Part Three, "The Chaplin Mutuals," click here.]
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