Katie-Bar-The-Door is out of town this weekend, so last night the Monkey sat on the couch with the dog and box of ginger snaps and watched They Came To Cordura, a mediocre late-50s western starring Gary Cooper as a coward ironically put in charge of making Medal of Honor recommendations during America's little-remembered invasion of Mexico in 1916.
Because America will need live heroes to pimp for the coming world war, Cooper is charged with escorting the Medal nominees back to base, giving him a perfect opportunity to quiz each man on the essential nature of courage and to marinate in his own lack thereof. Unfortunately, the nominees aren't really heroes, just deeply (deeply!) flawed men who happened to have had one reflexive moment of extraordinary valor. Given ample opportunity to demonstrate their true nature, they talk-talk-whine gripe-carp-moan all the way home while the supposed-coward Cooper shows them what real men are all about.
Sort of a Red Badge of Courage for people who wished that classic novel had fewer battle scenes and more ham-handed philosophical discussions.
The main attraction of this film for me was its setting. My late father-in-law was pals with John Eisenhower who wrote a series of books about U.S.-Mexican relations including one, Intervention!, about the time Black Jack Pershing, his cavalry aide George S. Patton and half the U.S. Army chased Pancho Villa around the mountains of northern Mexico. Eisenhower sent me a copy of the book, wrote a nice note, and I've since become something of a nut for the subject. The movie doesn't have much to say about that farcical episode in American history, but there are a few location shots and when Cooper mentioned hiding in a railroad ditch in Columbus, New Mexico, I knew exactly what he was talking about.
So in a sense, this review is really about me. As is everything I write.
Also starring Rita Hayworth and Van Heflin.
Rating: 2 stars out of 5.
Trivia note: It was during the filming of this movie that Dick York of Bewitched fame severely injured his back leading to a lifetime of pain and addiction that cut short his career.
Day 4 of Carole & Co.'s Great Silent Recasting Blogathon.
Today: a silent take on one of my favorite guilty pleasures (although I don't feel even remotely guilty about it), Tom Selleck's High Road To China, a romantic adventure about a guy, a girl and an airplane. Here, I've re-imagined it as William Wellman's follow-up to the first Oscar-winning picture Wings, with return performances by two of that film's biggest stars, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper. Frankly, I don't know why Cooper and Bow didn't make another movie together except that the head of the studio, B.P. Schulberg, was something of an idiot.
With Ernest Torrence as "Struts," Sessue Hayakawa as Suleman Khan, Anna May Wong as Alessa and Gustav von Seyferrtitz as Bentik.
Credit where credit is due: the painting of Clara Bow is by Paul Petro, the one of Gary Cooper is by Toby Thane, and the Sopwith Camels are by Steve Heyen.
If top seed Carole Lombard expected a quiet second round, she was mistaken. Noisy upstairs neighbor Jean Arthur leads by four votes with 68 already cast.
But it's early days yet. You've got until 10 p.m. Saturday night to make yourself heard!
I won a major award last November for my thoughts on Citizen Kane which you can read here. I won't rehash any of that now except to say that despite its revered status as the classic to end all classics, Citizen Kane is a terrifically entertaining and satisfying movie.
Or to put it another way, just because your 10th grade English teacher made you read Silas Marner and called it a "classic"—because that's what this is all about, isn't it—that's no reason to avoid Citizen Kane.
My other thought (SPOILERS AHEAD) is about Mary Astor, whose performance in The Maltese Falcon is surprisingly divisive among classic movie fans. Many think she is not nearly enough of a "knockout" to justify Sam Spade's interest in her.
Me, I think the thirty-five year old Astor was perfectly cast. We've grown inured to the notion that in movies, forty-two year old actors should hook up with twenty-four year old actresses, but the fact is, if Bogart's Sam Spade had flipped for a young hottie, we the audience would have concluded that he was thinking with his libido and she was playing him for a sap.
Very noirish, but rendering the twist ending emotionally hollow, in my opinion.
As it stands, they come to each other as equals: he's found his soul mate, someone as smart, amoral and reptilian as he is; and she, after a decade of knocking around places like Istanbul and Hong Kong with a collection of tough, dim pretty boys, has at last met a man with whom she feels truly safe.
Ironic how it works out.
That they are both also rapidly approaching their sell-by date makes the ending all the more poignant.
But maybe that's just the romantic in me.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:Citizen Kane (prod. Orson Welles) nominees:High Sierra (prod. Hal B. Wallis); How Green Was My Valley (prod. Darryl F. Zanuck); The Little Foxes (prod. Samuel Goldwyn); The Maltese Falcon (prod. Hal B. Wallis)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Sullivan's Travels (prod. Preston Sturges) nominees:The Devil And Miss Jones (prod. Frank Ross); Fantasia (prod. Walt Disney); Here Comes Mr. Jordan (prod. Everett Riskin); The Lady Eve (prod. Paul Jones)
PICTURE (Foreign Language) winner:Genroku Chûshingura (The 47 Ronin) (prod. Shintarô Shirai) nominees:Todake no kyodai (The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family) (prod. Shôchiku Film)
ACTOR (Drama) winner: Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) nominees: Humphrey Bogart (High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon); Walter Huston (The Devil and Daniel Webster); Herbert Marshall (The Little Foxes); Tyrone Power (Blood and Sand)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Gary Cooper (Meet John Doe and Ball Of Fire) nominees: Charles Coburn (The Devil And Miss Jones); W.C. Fields (Never Give A Sucker An Even Break); Henry Fonda (The Lady Eve); Joel McCrea (Sullivan's Travels); Robert Montgomery (Here Comes Mr. Jordan); William Powell (Love Crazy and Shadow of the Thin Man)
ACTRESS (Drama) winner: Bette Davis (The Little Foxes) nominees: Joan Crawford (A Woman's Face); Olivia de Havilland (Hold Back The Dawn); Irene Dunne (Penny Serenade); Joan Fontaine (Suspicion); Vivien Leigh (That Hamilton Woman)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical) winner: Barbara Stanwyck (Ball Of Fire and The Lady Eve) nominees: Jean Arthur (The Devil And Miss Jones); Deanna Durbin (It Started With Eve); Wendy Hiller (Major Barbara); Dorothy Lamour (Road to Zanzibar); Myrna Loy (Love Crazy and Shadow of the Thin Man)
DIRECTOR (Drama) winner: Orson Welles (Citizen Kane) nominees: John Ford (How Green Was My Valley); John Huston (The Maltese Falcon); Raoul Walsh (High Sierra); William Wyler (The Little Foxes)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical) winner: Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels) nominees: Frank Capra (Meet John Doe); Alexander Hall (Here Comes Mr. Jordan); Howard Hawks (Ball of Fire); Sam Wood (The Devil and Miss Jones)
SUPPORTING ACTOR winner: Sidney Greenstreet (The Maltese Falcon) nominees: Donald Crisp (How Green Was My Valley); William Demarest (The Lady Eve); James Gleason (Here Comes Mr. Jordan); Peter Lorre (The Maltese Falcon); Claude Rains (Here Comes Mr. Jordan)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS winner: Mary Astor (The Great Lie and The Maltese Falcon) nominees: Sara Allgood (How Green Was My Valley); Spring Byington (The Devil And Miss Jones); Patricia Collinge (The Little Foxes); Veronica Lake (Sullivan's Travels); Teresa Wright (The Little Foxes)
SCREENPLAY winner: Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane) nominees: John Huston (The Maltese Falcon); Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels)
SPECIAL AWARDS Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) (Cinematography); Perry Ferguson and Van Nest Polglase; Al Fields and Darrell Silvera (Citizen Kane) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane) (Score); Robert Wise (Citizen Kane) (Film Editing)
Adapted from three previous posts on the occasion of Miriam Hopkins's 109th birthday.
Largely forgotten now, Miriam Hopkins was one of the sauciest actresses of the pre-Code age, excelling in light comedies and lurid melodramas alike and nabbing an Oscar nomination along the way. Her early sound movies are some of the best of the era, yet often proved too scandalous to be re-issued once censors began taking scissors to Hollywood's past. Coupled with the years lost while she languished on the McCarthy-era blacklist, and even film fanatics can admit to having rarely seen her work.
Hopkins was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in a small town on the Alabama border, but she was acting on the Broadway stage by the age of eighteen with her turn in the stage adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy in 1926 really making audiences sit up and take notice. She made her feature-film debut in the 1930 comedy Fast and Loose, and within a year turned in two of her best film performances, in Ernst Lubitsch's musical comedy The Smiling Lieutenant and Rouben Mamoulian's adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson horror classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
In the first of these, Maurice Chevalier plays a randy lieutenant in the Austrian army who beds down with an equally randy violinist played by Claudette Colbert. (Her band's name? "The Viennese Swallows." Ahem.) The two make beautiful music together, literally and figuratively, until by accident, Chevalier finds himself mistakenly flirting with a visiting princess—the prim, virginal Hopkins—instead of Colbert, threatening an international incident.
"When you winked at my daughter," asks the king, "were your intentions honorable?" "They were," says the lieutenant. "Well, then naturally you'll marry her." "My intentions were dishonorable!" the lieutenant says quickly. "Then you'll have to marry her!"
Variety in a contemporary review praised Hopkins as the more experienced Colbert's equal, while eighty years later Dan Callahan noted, "Hopkins gives an expertly timed comic performance as plain-Jane royalty with Princess Leia buns on her ears who makes a play for Chevalier."
A movie fan of today who knows Hopkins's pre-Code work waits a little impatiently for the princess to bust out—knowing that when she does, it'll be worth it. But an audience of the time, not knowing Hopkins and what she was capable of, must have found her transformation from a prudish virgin to a cigarette-smoking, jazz-playing temptress just as shocking as Chevalier's lieutenant does.
It's a fun movie, loaded with double entendres and sexy situations, served up with the director's typically light, frothy style. I tell you, it's as bracing and intoxicating as cold champagne.
Hopkins followed up her success in The Smiling Lieutenant with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a movie that is the polar opposite of Lubitsch's comedy in every sense but quality. Both pictures received Oscar nominations, the former for best picture, the latter for actor, cinematography and screenplay.
The basic outline of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is familiar to us all—a scientist drinks a potion that turns him into a murdering beast with hairy hands and bad teeth. What tends to be forgotten is the why. Dr. Jekyll (here pronounced with a long "e," as in "gee whiz" rather than the familiar rhyme with "heckle") is striving for the perfectability of man, using science to distill out our bestial dark side, freeing the angels of our better nature to pursue more virtuous callings.
As in the other great horror picture of 1931, Frankenstein, the hubris of playing God leads to disaster.
Here, Hopkins plays Ivy Pearson, saloon singer, prostitute, and physical embodiment of Jekyll's base desires. The character is not in the novel, but is so perfect, you wonder why not. Taking full advantage of the pre-Code era's permissiveness, there's no question that Ivy is a prostitute and Hopkins doesn't try to soften her. Her Ivy is both lovely and—what is the word?—skanky at the same time. Her play for Jekyll is coarse and obvious, pulling up her skirts to show her legs, offering to be his slave. Even the priggish and pompous Jekyll feels the pull of the animal, and his shame is what drives him to try to cleanse himself of his base nature, resulting in the experiments that divide him.
That's the flaw, by the way, in the great Ingrid Bergman's performance as the same character in the 1941 remake. Her Ivy may live in low economic circumstances, but Bergman can't convince us that even on her worst day she was ever low or common, and thus Jekyll's revulsion at himself for wanting her makes no sense. But Hopkins? Well, she's very convincing as someone who'd inspire you to both sleep with her and then scrub yourself with lye soap and a wire brush afterwards, so different from the prim and proper princess of The Smiling Lieutenant you wonder that it's the same actress.
After the triumphs of 1931, Hopkins would top herself in two more Lubitsch comedies, Trouble in Paradise, in which she plays a con artist who teams up romantically and professionally with Herbert Marshall's master thief, and Design For Living, in which she scandalously resolves a love triangle with Fredric March and Gary Cooper by living with them both.
Trouble In Paradise is the story of a pair of sophisticated lovers, Gaston and Lily—Herbert Marshall and Hopkins—who romance and thieve their way across Europe, only to find their happiness threatened by a beautiful young widow who also happens to be the target of their latest scam.
The widow, who may well know she's being taken but is still eager for the ride, is played with sympathy and sex appeal by Kay Francis. Her polished, dark beauty contrasts nicely with Hopkins's earthy blonde charms and no doubt was a factor in her casting, as was her performance earlier that year in Jewel Robbery, in which she plays a willing victim to William Powell's elegant jewel thief. Although her career would later take a nose-dive after a bitter contract dispute at Warner Brothers, in 1932, she was at the peak of her popularity.
Just the plot I've described so far would provide the makings of a good comedy (or spun in a different direction, suspense thriller), but Lubitsch ups the ante by creating genuine chemistry between Gaston and the widow. Suddenly Trouble In Paradise is no longer a simple story about the theft of money, but the theft of Gaston's affections as well, which realistically can't end well for somebody. The inevitable heartbreak adds what Andrew Sarris called "a counterpoint of poignant sadness during a film's gayest moments," and is what, I think, lifts this sparkling comedy to the level of pure genius.
And that's without even addressing the numerous examples of Lubitsch's mastery of the technical end of his craft, which not only keeps the story moving but gives this confection its airy, art Deco style. "I think I have done nothing better or as good," he wrote of the film shortly before his death.
If Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness, Hopkins's next picture, Design For Living, blew right past them.
The story of a woman who loves two men and makes them like it, Design For Living was based on Noel Coward's play about his own tangled relationship with Broadway's most famous acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a triangle marked by professional and romantic jealousy, and self-destructive egotism.
As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.
"A thing happened to me that usually happens to men," she says. "You see, a man can meet two, three or even four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of, uh, interesting elimination, he is able to decide which one he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it's alright for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out, but—"
"That's very fine," says Tom, "but which chapeau do you want, madame?"
"Both."
Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Even more scandalous was 1933's The Story of Temple Drake. Based on William Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, the story of a flighty debutante's rape proved so shocking, it was banned in many states; Joseph Breen, who succeeded Will Hays as the head of the Production Code Office, later ordered it withdrawn from circulation and it remained unseen for decades. (Click here for Erik Beck's review.)
In 1935, Hopkins received her only Oscar nomination, for playing the conniving title character in Becky Sharp. Being a fellow Georgian, she was Margaret Mitchell's choice to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With The Wind, but of course it was David O. Selznick's opinion that mattered.
Despite her success on screen, Hopkins was not well-liked by her Hollywood peers and she bounced around several studios in a short number of years. She had several well-publicized battles with Bette Davis on the sets of The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance, Davis later declaring, "Miriam Hopkins was a bitch!" (That Davis was having an affair with Hopkins's husband, Anatole Litvak, was no doubt a primary cause of the friction.)
Hopkins also disdained Hollywood society, preferring the company of writers such as William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser and William Saroyan. And even her sympathetic biographer Allan Ellenberger admits she had a volatile temper, waging on-set and behind-the-scenes battles with producers, directors and co-stars alike. She was also well-known for her eccentricities, for example, always consulting a psychic before accepting a new role, leading her to turn down the lead role in Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, a part that won Claudette Colbert an Oscar, proving once and for all that the stars may control our fates but they don't know a damn thing about the movies.
Hopkins grew in- creasingly unpopular as the decade wore on—in 1940, the Harvard Lampoon dubbed her "the least desirable companion on a desert island"—and she retired in 1943. She didn't appear in another movie for six years, then made her comeback in The Heiress as Olivia de Havilland's aunt, a performance the Golden Globe awards recognized with a nomination for best supporting actress. In 1952, however, Hopkins was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and again she was out of the movies, this time for nine years.
In all, Hopkins made only thirty-three movies in her career, twenty-two of them by 1937.
Hopkins launched yet another comeback in the 1961 film, The Children's Hour, playing Shirley MacLaine's ditsy aunt to good reviews. (Coincidentally, Hopkins had played the MacLaine role in the first film version of Lillian Hellman's play in 1936 when it was produced under the title These Three.)
Hopkins also did a lot of television back when that meant appearances in live theater productions on shows such as Studio One and Lux Video Theater. She continued to work almost up to her death of a heart attack in 1972.
The Write Stuff Billy Wilder is tied with three other writers for the record for most writing Oscars (three wins, in three different writing categories). For what 1941 comedy starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck did Billy Wilder share a nomination with Thomas Monroe for Best Original Story?
Memorable Oscar Moments In one of the more embarrassing Oscar moments, presented Lloyd Bacon called out "Come and get it, Frank!" in announcing Frank Lloyd as the winner of the award as Best Director of 1933—and fellow nominee Frank Capra leapt to his feet to head toward the stage. The film for which Lloyd won, shown in its TCM premiere, is a historical drama based on a Noel Coward stage hit. Name it.
Remember, you can check out TCM's entire "31 Days of Oscar" schedule here.
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.
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.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two of this essay, click here. To read Part Three of this essay, click here.]
IV. Design For Living: Screwball Before There Was Screwball In Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, Ernst Lubitsch had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness; with his next picture, Design For Living, he blew right past those limits. Design For Living was by far the naughtiest movie he made in a career filled with naughty movies.
The story of a woman who loves two men and makes them like it, Design For Living was based on Noel Coward's play about his own tangled relationship with Broadway's most famous acting couple, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, a triangle marked by professional and romantic jealousy, and self-destructive egotism. So personal was the story, Coward refused to stage it until Lunt and Fontanne were available to appear in it, with Coward himself playing the third lead.
After acquiring the film rights to the play, Lubitsch initially asked Broadway playwright Samson Raphaelson, fresh off the success of Trouble In Paradise, to handle the screenwriting chores. Raphaelson declined, I suspect because as a Hollywood screenwriter he knew he couldn't produce a script faithful to the original play, and as a creature of Broadway, had no desire to cross a man of Coward's reputation.
So Lubitsch brought in Hollywood's foremost screenwriter, Ben Hecht, who had written the script for 1932's gangster classic Scarface (and would later pen Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious). Like Raphaelson, Hecht had had success on the stage (with The Front Page), but he'd made his name as a journalist covering Chicago's seamy, violent underworld and had no patience for the pretensions of Coward's characters. Hecht kept the relationships, the settings and the plot, and discarded the arch dialogue and the self-pitying tone. He also re-imagined the European male leads, Otto and Leo, as the distinctly American Tom and George. More importantly, he shifted the focus of the triangle onto the female character, Gilda, which served to turn a play about the limits of a man's sexual ego into an exploration of female empowerment.(To read more about Hecht, click here.) Coward had been pleased with Hollywood's adaptation of Private Lives, starring Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery (read my review of it here), but he refused to even see what Lubitsch had made of Design For Living. "I'm told that there are three of my original lines left in the film—such original ones as 'Pass the mustard,'" he quipped later.
Despite criticism at the time, I think Lubitsch and Hecht were right to go off in another direction. The subject matter, with hints of bisexuality, was intensely personal and would have been daring stuff, even for a pre-Code movie. And although the play has its moments (I've read it, but never seen it performed), it is not now regarded as one of Coward's better efforts and is rarely revived. As Coward himself admitted, Design For Living "was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors."
It's no wonder Lubitsch and Hecht took liberties with the text.
"I offer no apologies to Coward," Lubitsch said, "who knows very well that no picture ever lives up to a play if filmed word for word."
As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.
"A thing happened to me that usually happens to men," she says. "You see, a man can meet two, three or even four women and fall in love with all of them, and then, by a process of, uh, interesting elimination, he is able to decide which one he prefers. But a woman must decide purely on instinct, guesswork, if she wants to be considered nice. Oh, it's alright for her to try on a hundred hats before she picks one out, but—"
"That's very fine," says Tom, "but which chapeau do you want, madame?"
"Both."
Ironically, a few years before, Lubitsch had before faced the same dilemma in real life—his wife Helene Kraus had an affair with his best friend, writer Hans Kraly—which resulted not in the sophisticated comedy of his movies but in a very public scene and an acrimonious divorce.
Lubitsch sought Ronald Colman and Leslie Howard for the male leads, but Colman wanted too much money and Howard didn't want to risk the comparison to Alfred Lunt, then the most respected actor on Broadway. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. was cast opposite Oscar-winner Fredric March, but fell ill shortly before production began, and the part finally fell to Gary Cooper.
For the female lead, Gilda Farrell, Lubitsch turned again to Miriam Hopkins, who had starred in The Smiling Lieutenant and Trouble In Paradise. Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Edward Everett Horton provides his typically wonderful support as a disapproving stuffed-shirt who finds himself caught in the middle of this ménage à trois.
Design For Living doesn't hit as many notes as Trouble In Paradise, but it tackles the triangular dilemma presented by the former head on and comes up with a perfectly logical, if perfectly insane, solution. Had the pace and performances in Design For Living been a touch more manic, you could credit Lubitsch with inventing the screwball comedy, that distinctly American form of humor that features crazy situations and aggressively loony characters. As it is, you can see that a key component of the screwball style is an inherent lack of sympathy with the screwball character's plight—you're not rooting for him to solve his problem, you're waiting for him to grow up and realize he is the problem—and to the extent that he succeeds or fails determines whether he is the hero or the villain. While the distinction of creating the screwball comedy was reserved for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night and Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, both released a year later, Design For Living fits neatly within the tradition and should be mentioned when discussing this beloved art form.
Although Mordant Hall of the New York Times praised the film as "a most entertaining and highly sophisticated subject," most critics took Lubitsch to task for departing from the text of Coward's play and panned the movie. But though it won no awards, audiences, at least, were pleased—Design For Living was one of the year's top ten grossing films.
As with its immediate predecessor, Trouble In Paradise, the Hays Office did not certify Design For Living for re-release after the Code took effect in 1934 and the film languished unseen in studio vaults for decades. Even now, it is available on DVD only as part of The Gary Cooper Collection, which also includes such titles as Beau Geste and The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer. It is well worth searching out.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
If top seed Carole Lombard expected a quiet second round, she was mistaken. Noisy upstairs neighbor Jean Arthur leads by four votes with 68 already cast.
I won a major award last November for my thoughts on Citizen Kane which you can read here. I won't rehash any of that now except to say that despite its revered status as the classic to end all classics, Citizen Kane is a terrifically entertaining and satisfying movie.
We've grown inured to the notion that in movies, forty-two year old actors should hook up with twenty-four year old actresses, but the fact is, if Bogart's Sam Spade had flipped for a young hottie, we the audience would have concluded that he was thinking with his libido and she was playing him for a sap.
Largely forgotten now, Miriam Hopkins was one of the sauciest actresses of the pre-Code age, excelling in light comedies and lurid melodramas alike and nabbing an Oscar nomination along the way. Her early sound movies are some of the best of the era, yet often proved too scandalous to be re-issued once censors began taking scissors to Hollywood's past. Coupled with the years lost while she languished on the McCarthy-era blacklist, and even film fanatics can admit to having rarely seen her work.
In the first of these, Maurice Chevalier plays a randy lieutenant in the Austrian army who beds down with an equally randy violinist played by Claudette Colbert. (Her band's name? "The Viennese Swallows." Ahem.) The two make beautiful music together, literally and figuratively, until by accident, Chevalier finds himself mistakenly flirting with a visiting princess—the prim, virginal Hopkins—instead of Colbert, threatening an international incident.
A movie fan of today who knows Hopkins's pre-Code work waits a little impatiently for the princess to bust out—knowing that when she does, it'll be worth it. But an audience of the time, not knowing Hopkins and what she was capable of, must have found her transformation from a prudish virgin to a cigarette-smoking, jazz-playing temptress just as shocking as Chevalier's lieutenant does.
The basic outline of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is familiar to us all—a scientist drinks a potion that turns him into a murdering beast with hairy hands and bad teeth. What tends to be forgotten is the why. Dr. Jekyll (here pronounced with a long "e," as in "gee whiz" rather than the familiar rhyme with "heckle") is striving for the perfectability of man, using science to distill out our bestial dark side, freeing the angels of our better nature to pursue more virtuous callings.
Here, Hopkins plays Ivy Pearson, saloon singer, prostitute, and physical embodiment of Jekyll's base desires. The character is not in the novel, but is so perfect, you wonder why not. Taking full advantage of the pre-Code era's permissiveness, there's no question that Ivy is a prostitute and Hopkins doesn't try to soften her. Her Ivy is both lovely and—what is the word?—skanky at the same time. Her play for Jekyll is coarse and obvious, pulling up her skirts to show her legs, offering to be his slave. Even the priggish and pompous Jekyll feels the pull of the animal, and his shame is what drives him to try to cleanse himself of his base nature, resulting in the experiments that divide him.
Trouble In Paradise is the story of a pair of sophisticated lovers, Gaston and Lily—Herbert Marshall and Hopkins—who romance and thieve their way across Europe, only to find their happiness threatened by a beautiful young widow who also happens to be the target of their latest scam.
Just the plot I've described so far would provide the makings of a good comedy (or spun in a different direction, suspense thriller), but Lubitsch ups the ante by creating genuine chemistry between Gaston and the widow. Suddenly Trouble In Paradise is no longer a simple story about the theft of money, but the theft of Gaston's affections as well, which realistically can't end well for somebody. The inevitable heartbreak adds what Andrew Sarris called "a counterpoint of poignant sadness during a film's gayest moments," and is what, I think, lifts this sparkling comedy to the level of pure genius.
If Trouble In Paradise, with its depictions of thieves living happily ever after, had pushed the limits of pre-Code permissiveness, Hopkins's next picture, Design For Living, blew right past them.
Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Despite her success on screen, Hopkins was not well-liked by her Hollywood peers and she bounced around several studios in a short number of years. She had several well-publicized battles with Bette Davis on the sets of The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance, Davis later declaring, "Miriam Hopkins was a bitch!" (That Davis was having an affair with Hopkins's husband, Anatole Litvak, was no doubt a primary cause of the friction.)
Hopkins grew in- creasingly unpopular as the decade wore on—in 1940, the Harvard Lampoon dubbed her "the least desirable companion on a desert island"—and she retired in 1943. She didn't appear in another movie for six years, then made her comeback in The Heiress as Olivia de Havilland's aunt, a performance the Golden Globe awards recognized with a nomination for best supporting actress. In 1952, however, Hopkins was accused of being a Communist sympathizer and again she was out of the movies, this time for nine years.
Hopkins also did a lot of television back when that meant appearances in live theater productions on shows such as Studio One and Lux Video Theater. She continued to work almost up to her death of a heart attack in 1972.
The Write Stuff Billy Wilder is tied with three other writers for the record for most writing Oscars (three wins, in three different writing categories). For what 1941 comedy starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck did Billy Wilder share a nomination with Thomas Monroe for Best Original Story?
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'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!"
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.
Patrick appeared in sixty-two movies between 1932 and 1948.
Patrick died of leukemia in 1980 at the age of sixty-nine.
Gary Cooper.
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.
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.
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).
After acquiring the film rights to the play, Lubitsch initially asked Broadway playwright Samson Raphaelson, fresh off the success of Trouble In Paradise, to handle the screenwriting chores. Raphaelson declined, I suspect because as a Hollywood screenwriter he knew he couldn't produce a script faithful to the original play, and as a creature of Broadway, had no desire to cross a man of Coward's reputation.
Despite criticism at the time, I think Lubitsch and Hecht were right to go off in another direction. The subject matter, with hints of bisexuality, was intensely personal and would have been daring stuff, even for a pre-Code movie. And although the play has its moments (I've read it, but never seen it performed), it is not now regarded as one of Coward's better efforts and is rarely revived. As Coward himself admitted, Design For Living "was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors."
As the movie opens, George (Gary Cooper) and Tom (Fredric March) are, respectively, an unsuccessful painter and an unsuccessful playwright—deservedly so judging by samples of their work. On a train to Paris, they meet Gilda (Miriam Hopkins), a commercial artist not the least bit embarrassed to earn a living painting advertisements of Napoleon in long underwear. She immediately recognizes the innate quality of both men and is determined to give George and Tom the pointers they need to become great artists while taking advantage of their soon-proven talents as lovers.
Ironically, a few years before, Lubitsch had before faced the same dilemma in real life—his wife Helene Kraus had an affair with his best friend, writer Hans Kraly—which resulted not in the sophisticated comedy of his movies but in a very public scene and an acrimonious divorce.
For the female lead, Gilda Farrell, Lubitsch turned again to Miriam Hopkins, who had starred in The Smiling Lieutenant and Trouble In Paradise. Hopkins is perfect in the part, never veering too far into either smug certainty or guilt-wracked introspection. Lubitsch always wrote interesting female characters, and Gilda is one of his best. We think of feminism and the sexual revolution as primarily modern movements, a product of baby boomer discontent, but in fact, many movies in the pre-Code era were about strong women insisting on sexual and economic freedom. Barbara Stanwyck's Lily Powers, who sleeps her way to the top in 1933's Baby Face, was the most ruthless incarnation of the pre-Code feminist, but Lubitsch's Gilda may well have been the strongest.
Design For Living doesn't hit as many notes as Trouble In Paradise, but it tackles the triangular dilemma presented by the former head on and comes up with a perfectly logical, if perfectly insane, solution. Had the pace and performances in Design For Living been a touch more manic, you could credit Lubitsch with inventing the screwball comedy, that distinctly American form of humor that features crazy situations and aggressively loony characters. As it is, you can see that a key component of the screwball style is an inherent lack of sympathy with the screwball character's plight—you're not rooting for him to solve his problem, you're waiting for him to grow up and realize he is the problem—and to the extent that he succeeds or fails determines whether he is the hero or the villain. While the distinction of creating the screwball comedy was reserved for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night and Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, both released a year later, Design For Living fits neatly within the tradition and should be mentioned when discussing this beloved art form.
As with its immediate predecessor, Trouble In Paradise, the Hays Office did not certify Design For Living for re-release after the Code took effect in 1934 and the film languished unseen in studio vaults for decades. Even now, it is available on DVD only as part of The Gary Cooper Collection, which also includes such titles as Beau Geste and The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer. It is well worth searching out.
Posts
