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[A reprint of a post I wrote previously about Jackie Cooper, who passed away on Tuesday.]
Between Jackie Coogan's turn in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 comedy classic, The Kid, and the advent of box office phenomenon Shirley Temple in the early 1930s, no child star was bigger or better than "America's Boy," Jackie Cooper.
Born in 1922, Cooper broke into movies at the age of seven, working in the Our Gang comedies at the Hal Roach Studios for $50 a week. Cooper became a star just two years later when he landed the lead role in Skippy, a film version of the day's most famous comic strip. (So popular was the strip, in fact, that Skippy brand peanut butter was named for it—or was it? Strip creator Percy Crosby filed suit and won a decision in the U.S. Patent Court, yet seventy-six years later, Skippy is still my peanut butter of choice.)
Skippy—the movie not the peanut butter—was the one where Cooper's uncle, director Norman Taurog, famously threatened to shoot Cooper's dog if the boy didn't cry on cue, then sent a production assistant outside with a gun loaded with blanks. Cooper heard the shot and predictably cried buckets. Only nine years old at the time, he's still the youngest actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a lead role.
Like most of us, he slept through the ceremony, although in his case, in Oscar-winner Marie Dressler's lap. "I was much more interested in not having to go to school that day than I was in the ceremony," he later admitted.
Cooper was even better a year later in the award-winning boxing movie, The Champ. Directed by King Vidor, The Champ is an unabashed tearjerker of the first water and turned Cooper and co-star Wallace Beery into the unlikeliest of screen teams. The pair made four feature-length movies together between 1931 and 1935.
Beery won an Oscar playing an alcoholic, over-the- hill boxer with delusions of grandeur, the kind of guy who wins a horse for his son in a crap game, then promptly loses it back again—twice! When he's not gambling, he's hungover in a fleabag hotel room over a saloon, haunted by what might have been and fueled by pipe dreams of another shot at the title. Cooper is the champ's son, who even at nine years of age is a classic enabler. He adores his father but has been disappointed too many times to lie to himself anymore, even as he lies to the Champ.
Cooper more than holds his own in his scenes with the more experienced Beery, for example, in an early scene when fight promoters call his father a drunk and a "palooka." Eyes glistening with a mixture of rage, disappointment and humiliation, Cooper holds his defiant pose for a moment, then his shoulders slump and he turns away.
"You don't believe what they said about me being drunk the night I lost the championship, do ya, Dink."
"No," says Cooper, slump shouldered, not looking at his father, and starting to clean up after him like he always does.
It's a formula that has served Hollywood well, right up to and including Mickey Rourke's 2008 comeback in The Wrestler, and won Frances Marion an Oscar for the screenplay, her second.
Cooper himself was rather dismissive of most of his early screen roles. "Very often on some of this stuff when I'd have to go to work. I'd just give the script a cursory glance. I had no training, and I was a quick study, so nobody knew how involved or not involved I was. But I look at that stuff now and I can see I wasn't involved, and I wasn't very good."
Cooper and Beery made three more films together, including Treasure Island. "They kept me in short pants as long as they could," Cooper said of his days as a child actor, "until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph."
Ironically, because of his own experiences, Cooper grew up opposed to children working full-time as actors. "No amount of rationalization, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses—what I lost—when a normal childhood is abandoned for a movie career.
His 1981 autobiography was entitled Please Don't Shoot My Dog.
Cooper left Hollywood during World War II, serving in the United States Navy where he attained the rank of Captain. After the war, the transition from child star to adult performer was difficult for Cooper, but he eventually wound up in television, both as an actor and as a director. As the latter, he won two Emmys for directing episodes of MASH (one of the funny ones) and The White Shadow. Maybe his most famous movie role after childhood was that of Daily Planet editor Perry White in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987.
Cooper retired in 1989. He has four children and lives in California.
Between Jackie Coogan's turn in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 comedy classic, The Kid, and the advent of box office phenomenon Shirley Temple in the early 1930s, no child star was bigger or better than "America's Boy," Jackie Cooper.
Born in 1922, Cooper broke into movies at the age of seven, working in the Our Gang comedies at the Hal Roach Studios for $50 a week. Cooper became a star just two years later when he landed the lead role in Skippy, a film version of the day's most famous comic strip. (So popular was the strip, in fact, that Skippy brand peanut butter was named for it—or was it? Strip creator Percy Crosby filed suit and won a decision in the U.S. Patent Court, yet seventy-six years later, Skippy is still my peanut butter of choice.)
Skippy—the movie not the peanut butter—was the one where Cooper's uncle, director Norman Taurog, famously threatened to shoot Cooper's dog if the boy didn't cry on cue, then sent a production assistant outside with a gun loaded with blanks. Cooper heard the shot and predictably cried buckets. Only nine years old at the time, he's still the youngest actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a lead role.
Like most of us, he slept through the ceremony, although in his case, in Oscar-winner Marie Dressler's lap. "I was much more interested in not having to go to school that day than I was in the ceremony," he later admitted.
Cooper was even better a year later in the award-winning boxing movie, The Champ. Directed by King Vidor, The Champ is an unabashed tearjerker of the first water and turned Cooper and co-star Wallace Beery into the unlikeliest of screen teams. The pair made four feature-length movies together between 1931 and 1935.
Beery won an Oscar playing an alcoholic, over-the- hill boxer with delusions of grandeur, the kind of guy who wins a horse for his son in a crap game, then promptly loses it back again—twice! When he's not gambling, he's hungover in a fleabag hotel room over a saloon, haunted by what might have been and fueled by pipe dreams of another shot at the title. Cooper is the champ's son, who even at nine years of age is a classic enabler. He adores his father but has been disappointed too many times to lie to himself anymore, even as he lies to the Champ.
Cooper more than holds his own in his scenes with the more experienced Beery, for example, in an early scene when fight promoters call his father a drunk and a "palooka." Eyes glistening with a mixture of rage, disappointment and humiliation, Cooper holds his defiant pose for a moment, then his shoulders slump and he turns away.
"You don't believe what they said about me being drunk the night I lost the championship, do ya, Dink."
"No," says Cooper, slump shouldered, not looking at his father, and starting to clean up after him like he always does.
It's a formula that has served Hollywood well, right up to and including Mickey Rourke's 2008 comeback in The Wrestler, and won Frances Marion an Oscar for the screenplay, her second.
Cooper himself was rather dismissive of most of his early screen roles. "Very often on some of this stuff when I'd have to go to work. I'd just give the script a cursory glance. I had no training, and I was a quick study, so nobody knew how involved or not involved I was. But I look at that stuff now and I can see I wasn't involved, and I wasn't very good."
Cooper and Beery made three more films together, including Treasure Island. "They kept me in short pants as long as they could," Cooper said of his days as a child actor, "until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph."
Ironically, because of his own experiences, Cooper grew up opposed to children working full-time as actors. "No amount of rationalization, no excuses, can make up for what a kid loses—what I lost—when a normal childhood is abandoned for a movie career.
His 1981 autobiography was entitled Please Don't Shoot My Dog.
Cooper left Hollywood during World War II, serving in the United States Navy where he attained the rank of Captain. After the war, the transition from child star to adult performer was difficult for Cooper, but he eventually wound up in television, both as an actor and as a director. As the latter, he won two Emmys for directing episodes of MASH (one of the funny ones) and The White Shadow. Maybe his most famous movie role after childhood was that of Daily Planet editor Perry White in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987.
Cooper retired in 1989. He has four children and lives in California.
No time for blogging today. Busy doing something close to nothing. Here's a look at those who almost got a Katie nomination for 1930-31 ... but didn't.
Jackie Cooper (actor, Skippy)
Bela Lugosi (actor, Dracula) (almost forgot him—MM, 11/2/09)
Irene Dunne (actress, Cimarron)
Louise Brooks (actress, Prix de Beauté)
Mary Astor (actress, Other Men's Women)
William A. Wellman (director, The Public Enemy)
Raoul Walsh (director, The Big Trail)
Luis Buñuel (director, L'Age d'Or)
Dwight Frye (supporting actor, Dracula)
Harry Myers (right, with Charles Chaplin) (supporting actor, City Lights)
Paul Ollivier (left) (supporting actor, Le Million)
Mae Clarke (supporting actress, The Front Page)
Virginia Cherrill (supporting actress, City Lights)
Marjorie Rambeau (supporting actress, Min and Bill)
John Monk Saunders (with wife Fay Wray) (screenplay, The Dawn Patrol)
For best supporting actor of 1929-30, I had my pick from several standout performances, among others, Louis Wolheim as a grizzled soldier in All Quiet On The Western Front, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as a cad with a conscience in Our Modern Maidens and Chico Marx as a particularly dim-witted con man in the comedy classic, The Cocoanuts.
Topping them all, though, was Wallace Beery as the unforgettable "Machine Gun" Butch Schmidt in the prison drama, The Big House, which was not just the best performance of the year, but the best Beery gave in a career that included work in classic movies such as Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight as well as an Oscar win for The Champ.
Yet as great as Beery was, he wasn't the studio's first choice for the role and it was only a sloppily-eaten plate of spaghetti that landed him the part at all.
The Big House is the story of three very different convicts thrown together by a deeply-flawed and indifferent correctional system: the young rich pretty boy, Kent Marlowe, played effectively by Robert Montgomery, recently sentenced to prison for vehicular homicide after a drunk driving spree; Wallace Beery as Butch, who is doing a life sentence for a trio of murders; and Chester Morris as John Morgan, a small-time forger, natural leader and the only man who can control Butch's homicidal tendencies.
In re- searching the back- ground for her story, screen- writer Frances Marion toured prison facilities and inter- viewed both prisoners and prison personnel, and while the screenplay exhibits her typical light touch, it is a scathing portrait of the American penal system. She won an Oscar for her efforts, becoming the first woman in a non-acting category to win an Academy Award.
Silent film star Lon Chaney was originally cast in the role of Butch but fell ill before shooting began and died later that summer. As his replacement, Marion persuaded MGM to cast Beery after seeing him eat spaghetti in the studio's cafeteria, saying later that something about the way he ate reminded her of the convicts she had interviewed at San Quentin.
Beery was a veteran of 183 silent movies, including The Lost World, Robin Hood, Beggars of Life and Buster Keaton's first feature length movie, Three Ages, but Paramount had dropped his contract as part of a wholesale purge at the end of the Silent Era and he hadn't worked in a film in more than a year.
Marion's choice turns out to have been inspired.
Although the story centers on Chester Morris, who must find personal redemption without betraying his fellow inmates, it's Beery who has the pivotal role. He must be menacing enough to present a very real danger while being charming enough to give the audience a rooting interest in his fate. Beery essays the part brilliantly, turning Butch into a hulking, conniving, yet likable sociopath who often seems perplexed at his own brutality.
"I shouldn't have slipped her that ant poison," Butch laments while reminiscing about his late love Sadie, "I should have just batted her in the jaw."
Beery is solid in his first few scenes, particularly when Montgomery's Marlowe gets off on the wrong foot by complaining to a prison guard that Butch has stolen his cigarettes, then takes command of the movie in a sequence that has been imitated and parodied many times since. At dinner in the prison mess hall, he explodes "I can't eat that stuff!" throws his plate, bangs his cup and starts a riot.
That a scene copied by everyone from James Cagney to Leslie Nielsen still holds its power nearly eighty later is a testament to Beery's ability as an actor.
The scene is typical of the movie as a whole, capturing the boredom and desperation of prison life, the casual cruelty, the lack of hope and purpose, yet so well-told and acted, that despite having a point to make, it never becomes a chore to watch.
The Big House is quite subversive, I think, as a study of the society that created such a prison system. The prison warden (Lewis Stone) is passive and ineffectual, rich kid Marlowe turns out to be a cowardly weasel, while two hardened criminals are strong, likeable and sympathetic.
The movie is also an indictment of a system that warehouses men in cells not much wider than Butch's shoulders without regard to the effect a sociopath such as Butch will have on a weak naif such as Marlowe, turning the later into a hardened criminal, a victim or both.
As Butch tells Marlowe on first meeting, "I'll learn you a lot of things before we're through with you in here." You just have to wonder whether they are the sorts of things we really want anyone to know.
During his years in Hollywood, Beery developed a reputation of being difficult to work with. Child actor Jackie Cooper (The Champ) called him "the most sadistic person I have ever known," and Jean Harlow, his co-star in Dinner at Eight, detested him. Louise Brooks, on the other hand, who could be scathing in her dismissal of those she didn't like, adored Beery, saying that while he was "the meanest bear alive on the set," he was "a honey bear" off it.
Maybe he was all of those things. Who knows.
In any event, after earning an Oscar nomination for The Big House, Beery co-starred with Marie Dressler in her Oscar-winning vehicle Min and Bill, won an Oscar of his own playing a broken-down boxer in The Champ, played key roles in Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight, and was unforgettable as Long John Silver in 1934's Treasure Island. He worked steadily right up until his death of a heart attack in 1949 at the age of sixty-four.
"When my time is up," Machine Gun Butch boasts in The Big House, "I'll still be standing on my feet." The same could have been said of Beery himself.
Between Jackie Coogan's turn in Charlie Chaplin's 1921 comedy classic, The Kid, and the advent of box office phenomenon Shirley Temple in the early 1930s, no child star was bigger or better than "America's Boy," Jackie Cooper.
Skippy—the movie not the peanut butter—was the one where Cooper's uncle, director Norman Taurog, famously threatened to shoot Cooper's dog if the boy didn't cry on cue, then sent a production assistant outside with a gun loaded with blanks. Cooper heard the shot and predictably cried buckets. Only nine years old at the time, he's still the youngest actor to be nominated for an Oscar in a lead role.
Beery won an Oscar playing an alcoholic, over-the- hill boxer with delusions of grandeur, the kind of guy who wins a horse for his son in a crap game, then promptly loses it back again—twice! When he's not gambling, he's hungover in a fleabag hotel room over a saloon, haunted by what might have been and fueled by pipe dreams of another shot at the title. Cooper is the champ's son, who even at nine years of age is a classic enabler. He adores his father but has been disappointed too many times to lie to himself anymore, even as he lies to the Champ.
"You don't believe what they said about me being drunk the night I lost the championship, do ya, Dink."
Cooper and Beery made three more films together, including Treasure Island. "They kept me in short pants as long as they could," Cooper said of his days as a child actor, "until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph."
Cooper left Hollywood during World War II, serving in the United States Navy where he attained the rank of Captain. After the war, the transition from child star to adult performer was difficult for Cooper, but he eventually wound up in television, both as an actor and as a director. As the latter, he won two Emmys for directing episodes of MASH (one of the funny ones) and The White Shadow. Maybe his most famous movie role after childhood was that of Daily Planet editor Perry White in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987.
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