Olga Baclanova: Three To See

One of the most enduring tropes of the early sound era is that of the silent film star who finds his career in ruins when his voice proves unsuitable for the new medium. Isn't that what Singin' in the Rain is all about?

More often than not, the tale of an actor's vocal woes was simply a cover story for a studio's own greed, spite or incompetence (see, e.g., Louise Brooks, John Gilbert and Clara Bow, respectively).

But in the case if Russian-born Olga Baclanova, the myth is right on the money.

A native of Moscow, Baclanova was a star of stage and screen in the early days of the Soviet Union, and received the title of Merited Artist of the Russian Federation, the USSR's highest honor for artistic achievement.

In 1925, Baclanova toured the United States with the Moscow Art Theatre then stayed behind to try her luck in Hollywood.

She made a handful of films in the two years before talkies — including a pair of classics (below) — then found herself, thanks to a thick Russian accent, limited to "exotic" parts and B-pictures.

Baclanova abandoned Hollywood for the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then permanently retired from the movies.

She died in Switzerland in 1974 at the age of 81.

Although her movie career was relatively brief, Baclanova made three classics which have stood the test of time:

The Man Who Laughs is a macabre little love story that begins with a decadent king's order to carve a permanent grin into the face of a boy whose father has been convicted of treason. The boy grows to manhood earning an unhappy but lucrative living as a circus attraction, shunning all human contact but that of the young blind woman who travels with him.

Through a series of twists plotted by the great Victor Hugo, whose novel L'Homme Qui Rit was the basis for this movie, the man (Conrad Veidt in a first-rate performance) finds himself elevated to Britain's House of Lords and ordered against his will to marry a brazen duchess (Baclanova) with a fetish for his ruined face.

Depending on who you believe, either Bill Finger and Batman creator Bob Kane concocted the Joker from a photograph of Veidt in full Man Who Laughs makeup; or illustrator Jerry Robinson conceived the Joker from a playing card and then fleshed out the character based on a photograph of Veidt that Finger provided.

In The Docks Of New York Baclanova plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.

Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.

It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie.

Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.

"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"

While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting as von Sternberg's later work featuring his greatest star, Marlene Dietrich, it's more relatable and moving. Here — before he descended into wretched excess and maybe even madness — von Sternberg was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.

Finally, you don't want to miss Freaks, which is wildest and most modern of all the horror movies that were released during the early sound era.

Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks."

In this one, Baclanova plays the cruel circus performer Cleopatra. She seduces and marries the star of a traveling carnival (little person Harry Ealres), hoping to loot his fortune. Things don't work out quite like she planned.



Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.

Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin — or anyway, it got under mine.

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards (1934)

What time frame constitutes the so-called "Golden Age" of Hollywood movies is open to debate, but to my mind, 1934 is a good starting point. It was the year that studios began enforcing the Production Code; Clark Gable grew his trademark pencil-thin moustache and won an Oscar; William Powell and Myrna Loy teamed up for the first time; Astaire and Rogers danced their way to stardom; Frank Capra and Howard Hawks invented the screwball comedy; and Bette Davis gave a blistering performance in Of Human Bondage that pretty much finished the job James Cagney started in The Public Enemy, putting a fork in the genteel British stage style that had dominated the early sound era. Not to mention that, on a technical level, sound recording had improved to the point that it's no longer an issue for a modern viewer.

When the Golden Age ended is a bit murkier. The artistic and commercial quality of Hollywood movies continued unabated at least into the post-war era, and then came the challenges of television, the Supreme Court's 1948 antitrust decision, foreign competition and the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. The studio system cracked up, the Production Code fell by the wayside and nothing was ever quite the same again.

Not that Hollywood wouldn't continue to make great movies in the 1960s and beyond (I'm no Luddite, nor am I a prude), but the economic model Hollywood studios followed changed radically and with it, so did the look, content and feel of the movies. In some ways, that's a welcome development. But we'll get to that when we get to that.

By the way, this is the first of what we might refer to as the "future" Katie Awards—which is to say, I haven't written about any of these movies yet. So a little context is in order.

As always I've picked three "best" picture awards in three different categories, but don't kid yourself, all winners are not created equal. The fact is every comedy/musical nominee of 1934 and nearly every foreign language nominee is better than the winner of best drama, The Scarlet Empress, at least in my book. Frankly, I have less affection for The Scarlet Empress than just about any picture I foresee handing an award to. My appreciation of it is purely intellectual as perhaps the ultimate example of the concept of "auteur theory" and I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge it. Doesn't mean I much like it, though.

The fact is that during the course of his celebrated collaboration with Marlene Dietrich, director Josef von Sternberg behaved less and less like a professional storyteller and more and more like a neurotic voyeur trying to possess what had already eluded him, and the movies he made with her became a peephole through which he watched as she paraded before him a progression of imaginary and not so imaginary lovers.

I'll give Sternberg this: his films are not the chilly, disinterested exercises of a theoretician—they are the fevered dreams of a director increasingly no longer in control of himself or his passions, the celluloid confessions of a man obsessed with a woman who no longer loves him, needs him or even thinks much about him except in moments of bemused contempt.

In later years, Sternberg liked to imply that Dietrich was a no-talent hack who existed only in the lens of his camera. That to me sounds like the ranting of a rejected suitor—Don José in Bizet's Carmen killing his ex-lover rather than letting anyone else have her—because what I see and what he evidently failed to see is the amused smile playing on Dietrich's lips as she toys with her director, allowing him to photograph her but never truly possess her. It's why she survived Sternberg's fetishistic excesses unscathed while he was destroyed—she was sharing a private joke with her audience at his expense. "Watch me make him jump through another hoop," she seems to be saying, even as she emerged from, say, the gorilla costume in Blonde Venus. The harder he tried to possess her with his camera, the more ridiculous the effort looked. Nobody was ever going to pin Dietrich down.

The other award I should mention is that for Louise Beavers in Imitation of Life. Modern viewers often have trouble wrapping their heads around what to our eyes looks like condescending noblesse oblige racism on the one hand, and passive "Uncle Tom-ism" on the other. What can I tell you. That which was subversive in 1934—a black woman as the secret brains of a lucrative business empire—is puzzlingly dated and racist now.

I think there are two ways of dealing with racism in the movies of the past: You can judge it by the standards of today and shun every performance by a black actor before, say, Sidney Poitier in 1967's In The Heat Of The Night, leaving your viewing habits even more lily-white than the lily-white Hollywood of the time; or you can watch these roles in context and judge them by how much the actor was able to do given the crippling limitations they worked under. Since option one would require me to ignore Louise Beavers, Nina Mae McKinney, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel, Eddie Anderson, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne, Dooley Wilson, Rex Ingram, and many, many others, I'm going with option two.

Mind you, I'm not grading the performance on a curve—I think Louise Beaver's gentle portrayal of a mother who sacrifices everything for an ungrateful daughter is the best supporting performance of the year regardless of the historical context—but I am cutting the role some slack.

If your conscience leads you to weigh these issues differently, though, I can't say you're wrong.

The rest of these movies you've probably heard of.

PICTURE (Drama)
winner: The Scarlet Empress (prod. Josef von Sternberg)
nominees: The Black Cat (prod. E.M. Asher and Carl Laemmle, Jr.); Imitation Of Life (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.); The Man Who Knew Too Much (prod. Michael Balcon)

PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Thin Man (prod. Hunt Stromberg)
nominees: The Gay Divorcee (prod. Pandro S. Berman); It Happened One Night (prod. Frank Capra); It's A Gift (prod. William LeBaron); The Merry Widow (prod. Ernst Lubitsch and Irving Thalberg); Twentieth Century (prod. Howard Hawks)

PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: L'Atalante (prod. Jacques-Louis Nounez)
nominees: Les misérables (prod. Raymond Borderie); Mauvaise Graine (prod. Georges Bernier); Shen nu (The Goddess) (prod. Minwei Tian); Ukikusa monogatari (A Story Of Floating Weeds) (prod. Shochiku Company)

ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Robert Donat (The Count Of Monte Cristo)
nominees: Harry Baur (Les misérables); Leslie Howard (Of Human Bondage and The Scarlet Pimpernel); Bela Lugosi (The Black Cat)

ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: William Powell (The Thin Man)
nominees: Fred Astaire (The Gay Divorcee); John Barrymore (Twentieth Century); W.C. Fields (It's A Gift); Clark Gable (It Happened One Night); The Three Stooges (Punch Drunks, Men In Black and Three Little Pigskins)

ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Bette Davis (Of Human Bondage)
nominees: Marlene Dietrich (The Scarlet Empress); Dita Parlo (L'Atalante); Margaret Sullavan (Little Man, What Now)

ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Myrna Loy (The Thin Man)
nominees: Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night); Carole Lombard (Twentieth Century); Jeanette MacDonald (The Merry Widow); Ginger Rogers (The Gay Divorcee)

DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Josef von Sternberg (The Scarlet Empress)
nominees: Raymond Bernard (Les misérables); Robert J. Flaherty (Man Of Aran); Yasujiro Ozu (Ukikusa monogatari (A Story Of Floating Weeds)); Jean Vigo (L'Atalante)

DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Frank Capra (It Happened One Night)
nominees: Howard Hawks (Twentieth Century); Ernst Lubitsch (The Merry Widow); Norman McLeod (It's A Gift); W.S. Van Dyke (The Thin Man)

SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Michel Simon (L'Atalante)
nominees: Edward Everett Horton (The Merry Widow and The Gay Divorcee); Sam Jaffe (The Scarlet Empress); Charles Laughton (The Barretts Of Wimpole Street); Peter Lorre (The Man Who Knew Too Much); Frank Morgan (Affairs of Cellini)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Louise Beavers (Imitation Of Life)
nominees: Alice Brady (The Gay Divorcee); Louise Dresser (The Scarlet Empress); Una Merkel (The Merry Widow); Merle Oberon (The Private Life Of Don Juan and The Scarlet Pimpernel)

SCREENPLAY
winner: Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, from the novel by Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man)
nominees: Robert Riskin, from a short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams (It Happened One Night); Jean Vigo and Albert Riéra (adaptation and dialogue), Jean Guinée (scenario) (L'Atalante); Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, from a play by Charles Bruce Millholland (Twentieth Century)

SPECIAL AWARDS
Man Of Aran (Documentary Feature); Joseph Walker (It Happened One Night) (Cinematography); Sergei Prokofiev (Poruchik Kizhe a.k.a. Lieutenant Kije) (Score)

A Dietrich Double Feature

Tonight is Josef von Sternberg night on Turner Classic Movies, and featured are a pair of pre-Code collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, Shanghai Express and my personal favorite, Morocco.

You can read a bit about the former here, and a full-length review of the latter here.

Here is tonight's schedule from TCM's website:

8:00pm [Romance] Shanghai Express (1932)
A beautiful temptress re-kindles an old romance while trying to escape her past during a tension-packed train journey.
Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong, Warner Oland Dir: Josef von Sternberg BW-82 mins

9:30pm [Romance] Morocco (1930)
A sultry cabaret singer falls hard for a Foreign Legionnaire.
Cast: Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou, Ullrich Haupt Dir: Josef von Sternberg BW-92 mins

11:15pm [Drama] Crime and Punishment (1935)
A young student murders for money then tries to escape his guilt and a brilliant detective.
Cast: Peter Lorre, Edward Arnold, Marian Marsh, Tala Birrell Dir: Josef von Sternberg BW-88 mins

1:00am [Crime] Shanghai Gesture, The (1941)
A gambling queen uses blackmail to stop a British financier from closing her Chinese clip joint.
Cast: Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Victor Mature, Ona Munson Dir: Josef von Sternberg BW-98 mins

2:45am [Adventure] Macao (1952)
A man on the run in the Far East is mistaken for an undercover cop.
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, Thomas Gomez Dir: Josef von Sternberg BW-81 mins

4:15am [Musical] King Steps Out, The (1936)
A young woman saves her sister from marriage to an emperor that she doesn't love.
Cast: Miss Grace Moore, Franchot Tone, Walter Connolly, Raymond Walburn Dir: Josef von Sternberg BW-85 mins

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

Marlene Dietrich began her career as a cabaret singer in Berlin and made several silent movies in Germany before rocketing to international stardom in Josef von Sternberg's noirish masterpiece, The Blue Angel. Dietrich's portrayal as the amoral and treacherous Lola Lola set the pattern for femme fatales for decades to come and had American audiences panting to see what all the fuss was about.

Morocco was the second of seven movies (eight if you count the German and English versions of The Blue Angel separately) with director Josef von Sternberg, but the first released in America—Paramount Pictures held back The Blue Angel for a year until it could launch Dietrich's Hollywood career with a more sympathetic role. Morocco proved to be a perfect vehicle for her, fully establishing the Dietrich persona—exotic, jaded, daringly androgynous (for example, she wears a tuxedo and kisses a woman; to quote Robert Osborne, "very European!")—lacking only the humor and self-parody she would later display in films such as Destry Rides Again and Foreign Affair.



Adapted by veteran screenwriter Jules Furthman from the stageplay Amy Jolly, Morocco is the story of a romantic triangle between a cabaret singer, her wealthy patron and a Foreign Legion soldier, who between them have experienced every kind of love but true love, and when at last it happens for each of them, they hardly know what to do with it.

Dietrich is the cabaret singer Amy Jolly (pronounced "Jolie," ala Angelina Jolie), down on her luck and traveling to Morocco for a job. On the boat she meets a wealthy playboy (the always dapper Adolphe Menjou) who as much out of habit as lust dangles jewelry in front of her—as the captain of the boat implies, the stop after Morocco is prostitution and if you're going to go, you might as well go in style—but Dietrich's Amy Jolly is too proud to jump at such baubles. Nevertheless, she turns to Menjou at a critical moment of need.

And all would be well but for the young, handsome soldier (Gary Cooper) sitting in the cheap seats at Dietrich's first performance. Predictably, the two are drawn to each other, at first simply because they are accomplished bed-hoppers who know they will look beautiful in each other's arms, but soon after because they discover in each other a longing for a past they can never reclaim.

"There's a foreign legion of women, too," confesses Amy Jolly, "but we have no uniform, no flag—and no medals." For these two, the single greatest act of passion they can perform is to not perform at all and to the surprise of all involved, genuine intimacy and tenderness develops, not just between the singer and the soldier, as you might expect, but between the singer and her wealthy patron as well.

The result is the warmest of the collaborations between Sternberg and Dietrich, maybe the only film they made together that suggests that the union of a man and a woman can produce something other than misery and obsessive, fetishistic self-destruction.

Morocco was a smash hit, earned four Oscar nominations (for actress, director, cinematography and art direction) and landed Dietrich the most lucrative contract in Hollywood. I should take time to mention the work of cinematographer Lee Garmes whose lighting of Dietrich was a key to the film's success. He positioned the key light above and slightly forward of her which (according to TV Guide's online review) "hollowed her cheeks, shadowed her heavy eyelids, and masked the dimensions of her wide nose." Dietrich was so pleased with the effect, she insisted on it for the rest of her career.

But despite the film's success, the set had not been a happy one. Sternberg focused his attention solely on making Dietrich look good to the annoyance of Gary Cooper, already a big star. Sternberg further underscored where his interests lay by speaking only German whenever Cooper was around.

The mutual animosity between director and star had no impact on Cooper's relationship with Dietrich though—shortly after filming commenced, the two began an affair that would continue for years. Despite the fact that she was living with Sternberg at the time, there was no slinking around for Dietrich. Reportedly, she and Cooper conducted their trysts in Sternberg's Hollywood home while Sternberg worked in the garden outside and silently seethed.

I share this anecdote, by the way, not because I am a fan of celebrity gossip but by way of explaining how the partnership of Sternberg and Dietrich, which began with such critical and commercial success, could wind up being a threat to both their careers. More and more, their collaboration became an exercise in voyeuristic excess, with Sternberg trying to control Dietrich with his camera in a way he couldn't control her off screen. And while these films have their champions (see, e.g., Kim Morgan on Blonde Venus or Roger Ebert on The Scarlet Empress), the public gradually turned away until they were turning away in droves.

Dietrich survived the fall by smirking her way through the worst of it—emerging for example from a gorilla costume in Blonde Venus with a half smile that seemed to say I'm so cool even this looks good on me—but Sternberg never recovered, earning only eight screen credits after his last picture with Dietrich (1935's The Devil Is A Woman) and even those credits are misleading, given that he was fired from at least two of those projects, Macao and the execrable Jet Pilot.



In 1939, after years of fading box office appeal, Dietrich reluctantly agreed to star in a comedy/Western, Destry Rides Again. The result was box office gold. Co-starring Jimmy Stewart as a pacifist sheriff armed only with folksy wit, saloon singer Dietrich parodied her own image so successfully she was able to reinvent herself as a comic actress and endear herself to audiences once again. (Madeline Kahn memorably spoofed the performance in Mel Brooks's comedy Blazing Saddles.)

After Destry, Dietrich's best performances were in a pair of Billy Wilder efforts, Foreign Affair, a romantic comedy set in postwar Berlin, and Witness for the Prosecution, a courtroom drama co-starring Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Elsa Lanchester. Many will also remember her cameo in Orson Welles's noir thriller, Touch of Evil.

Despite this impressive body of work, Dietrich was nominated for just one Academy Award, for the picture I've just written about, Morocco, losing to Marie Dressler. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the ninth greatest actress of all time.

After a supporting role in 1961's Judgment at Nuremberg, Dietrich retired from acting, making only one cameo appearance after that, in David Bowie's 1978 misfire, Just A Gigolo. She spent the final decade of her life living in seclusion in her Paris apartment and died in 1992.

Postscript: Be sure to look for a young Cary Grant in the clip from Blonde Venus. This was just his sixth movie and he isn't given much to do—as the New York Times put it in its 1932 review, "Cary Grant is worthy of a much better role." Like Gary Cooper, Grant was the object of Josef von Sternberg's jealousy; unlike Cooper, Grant didn't yet have the clout to do much about it.

Results Of The Latest Poll: Another Big Win For Lang!

The results are in from this week's Monkey Movie poll, Who would you choose as best director of 1930-31?

Fritz Lang who directed Peter Lorre in the serial killer classic, M, ran away with it, receiving 6 of the 10 votes cast. The immortal Charlie Chaplin picked up 2 for directing City Lights and René Clair (Le Million) and Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or) received one vote each.

Tod Browning who directed Dracula had admitted last week in a interview conducted strictly between the left and right lobes of my cerebral cortex that he feared he was just in this poll to round out the field and this proved to be the case.

Raoul Walsh, William A. Wellman and Josef von Sternberg were annoyed not to be in the poll at all and called for an investigation.

After the win, Lang and his (alleged) mistress, actress Joan Bennett, shared a celebratory cigarette on the set of their current movie project, the film noir thriller Scarlet Street.

"Winning this poll," said Lang at a hastily-arranged press conference, "means as much to me as winning the Katie Award itself. Well, almost. I mean, I'm not crazy. The Katie Award is big and will provide some real leverage at contract time. But this is nice, too."

By the way, perhaps I'm telling stories out of school, but the vote for René Clair came from none other than our own beloved Katie-Bar-The-Door. She felt Clair's work on Le Million was innovative, clever and warm, not to mention it's her favorite movie of the five listed here. She's right, of course. Le Million is on the short list for most pleasant surprises I've received while working on this blog and I give it my highest recommendation. But, well, I went with Lang for the reasons I've previously stated at length.

In any event, whoever you voted for, you're right, their work was the best of the year. A good year for directors all the way around.

A Musical Interlude: Marlene Dietrich In The Blue Angel

While I was working on my essay about the best picture of 1929-30, it occurred to me I've written about all of the nominees at some length—except for Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, the movie that made Marlene Dietrich an international star.

As stories go, it's nearly a carbon copy of Pandora's Box with Marlene Dietrich playing Lola Lola, a singer/prostitute who leads a stuffy college professor (Emil Jannings) to his destruction. Unlike Louise Brooks's innocent take on her spiritual sister, Lulu, Dietrich plays Lola Lola as more of a vampy femme fatale. Not bad, highly regarded.

There are actually two versions of The Blue Angel, shot simultaneously, one in English for American and British release, the other (Der Blaue Engel) in German for the rest of Europe. This was actually a common practice back in the day, it being technically easier at the time to shoot a scene twice than to dub the film with a foreign language. Which one you choose to see is up to you. Many cinephiles prefer the German version simply because Dietrich and Jannings are more comfortable with their native language, but it turns out I'm more comfortable with mine and so I am more likely to watch it in English.

Which, admittedly, makes me a philistine.

Anyway, the English language version introduced Dietrich singing what became her signature song, "Falling In Love Again," and I present it here for your entertainment.

So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Marlene Dietrich and "Falling In Love Again."

Best Supporting Actress Of 1928-29: Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters)

Those of you with sharp eyes and long memories are no doubt scratching your heads to see Anita Page listed here as the best supporting actress of 1928-29. Didn't I choose Olga Baclanova in Docks of New York that year? Well, yes. Yes, I did. But because of a technical glitch we in the trade call "changing my mind," I'm going back in time and choosing Anita Page instead.

The fact is, Anita Page's performance in Our Dancing Daughters still resonates for me nearly a year later whereas Olga Baclanova, despite a fine effort, has pretty much slipped the surly bonds of my memory, the only Katie winner I can say that of.

Moreover, Page's performance resonates with other movie fans as well, showing up more often on other "Alternate Oscar" lists than any other actress in the mythical supporting category for 1928-29 (supporting performances wouldn't be officially recognized until 1936).

Anyway, I have cobbled together a short essay about Anita Page from everything I've written about her over the course of the year and substituted it for the original essay on Best Supporting Actress of 1928-29, leaving the original essay about Olga Baclanova as an addendum.

Sue me.—The Mythical Monkey (2/10/10)

I have to confess, before I started writing this blog, I had never heard of Anita Page, but now that I've seen half a dozen of her movies and read a bit about her, it's clear that she was just as cute as the proverbial bug's ear and no doubt somebody you would have been lucky to know. Certainly Herschel House must have thought so—the Navy pilot was married to her for fifty-four years, until his death in 1991.

Mostly Page played sweet innocents who found themselves in a melodramatic load of trouble (see, for example, Our Modern Maidens), but her turn in Our Dancing Daughters as a self-absorbed, gold-digging be-yotch who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her was unforgettable and should have presaged a longer career. Louis B. Mayer, a warped frustrated old man, and Irving Thalberg, a warped frustrated young man, saw to it that it didn't.

Well, you take what you can get.

Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie. None of this is meant to be taken seriously—just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.

What's not to like?

Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.

In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

"Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said years later. "I say that because I did the acting. Joan Crawford danced her way through it. I acted my way through it."

Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age flapper phenomenon. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever. Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.

Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was infatuated with the young actress.

"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.

"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"

Our Dancing Daughters is one of those odd silent-sound hybrids of the very early sound era. Made not long after The Jazz Singer, the film has a soundtrack, including several prominently featured songs, but no dialogue, only title cards. I actually find this approach preferable to early talkies such as The Broadway Melody where, for example, Anita Page's dialogue competes with the rustling of her own dress.

Fortunately, sound technology improved rapidly over the course of a year.

MGM's The Broadway Melody, billed as the first "all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing" musical, was the top grossing movie of 1929 as well as the first sound picture to win the Academy Award for best picture, and further cemented sound's commercial future. The Broadway Melody was the top box office movie of 1929 and also featured "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."

Douglas Shearer out of necessity invented the concept of the "playback"—pre-recording a song that performers would then dance and lip-synch to—when the choreography on a huge dance number that had already been performed and recorded was deemed unsuitable. Rather than bring the orchestra back to the sound stage, Shearer figured out how to reuse the sound from the previous take, and the cast performed the dance number with its new choreography to a playback of the song. This technique became the industry standard for decades.

"I thought Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," she said later, "but Broadway Melody was Bessie Love's. I love good English, and I hated saying things like, 'Gee, ain't it elegant?' In my opinion, silents were much better than talkies. One thing you could have was mood music, which you could have playing throughout your scene to inspire you. The trouble with talkies was, they let you have the music, but they'd stop it when you had to talk, and that was always a let-down for me."

After The Broadway Melody, Page made two more movies with Joan Crawford, and appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable.

Her final movie for MGM was 1932's Prosperity, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. On the outs with studio head Louis B. Mayer after twice refusing to sleep with him (the second proposition made in the presence of Page's mother), Page served out the remaining years of her MGM contract on loan to poverty row studios, making such low-budget bombs as Jungle Bride and Hitch Hike To Heaven. It was an ignominious end for an actress who just a couple of years before had been second only to Greta Garbo as the studio's top draw.

Page left Hollywood and married Navy flyer Herschel House in January 1937. After his death, she began to make films again, mostly low-budget fare such as The Crawling Brain and Witchcraft XI. On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Page received a standing ovation at a special screening of The Broadway Melody. She was last surviving attendee of the first Oscar ceremony and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight.

(Original essay follows):
For the best supporting actress award, I've nominated a trio of superficially similar actresses—each blonde, beautiful, at the peak of their careers in 1928 or 1929, two playing hookers, the third playing a heartless gold digger—but who arrived on and departed from the Hollywood stage by very different paths. All of them turned in tiptop performances during what proved to be the last year when silent movies still had an outside chance of finding an audience and I'm sorry their careers, which cracked up for a wide variety of reasons, weren't longer or more celebrated.

The most visible of the bunch, at least at the time, was no doubt Anita Page whom I've nominated here for her performance as a gold digger who tricks Joan Crawford's millionaire boyfriend into marrying her in the Jazz Age flapper picture, Our Dancing Daughters. Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.

In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age phenomenon of young girls gone wild. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever. Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.

Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was reportedly infatuated with the young actress.

"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.

"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"

On the other hand, the least visible of my trio of nominees was Mary Nolan—and apparently she wanted it that way. Earlier in the decade Nolan, whose real name was Imogen Robertson, had been a Ziegfeld girl performing under the stage name "Bubbles Wilson." But she had the misfortune to fall in love with married comedian Frank Tinney who routinely abused her and finally beat her so savagely, she landed in the hospital.

She also landed in the tabloids, which battered her reputation nearly as savagely.

Robertson/Wilson fled the United States, and after two years working in the German film industry, returned to work under the name Mary Nolan. In Tod Browning's West Of Zanzibar, she plays a victim as ill-used as Nolan was in real life. Lon Chaney is crippled in a quarrel and takes revenge on Nolan, believing her to be the child of his late wife and her lover, not realizing she is in fact his own flesh and blood. First he forces Nolan to work in a brothel. Then he arranges for cannibals to burn her alive. Then he really gets mad.

Either of these actresses would be fine choices for a Katie but I'm reserving the award for the third beautiful blonde in this trio, Olga Baclanova, who co-starred in one of the best movies of the year, Josef von Sternberg's The Docks Of New York.

You might recall that I mentioned her as a potential supporting actress nominee for 1927-28 for her performance as a kinky countess with a fetish for the disfigured Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. In The Docks Of New York she plays Lou, an abandoned wife making ends meet as a prostitute in a waterfront bar.

Two of Hollywood's most successful writers, Jules Furthman and John Monk Saunders, wrote this story in the style of Eugene O'Neill, with all the action taking place in one evening and the following morning. A sailor on shore leave (George Bancroft) pulls a suicidal young woman (Betty Compson) out of New York's harbor and over the course of an evening, takes a liking to her and proposes marriage.

It sounds like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, an early stab at Pretty Woman, say, but everyone involved handles the story soberly and realistically and the movie reminds me more than anything of O'Neill's Anna Christie which would be adapted the following year as a vehicle for Greta Garbo's first talkie. Baclanova in particular breathes life into what could have been a stock character, playing Lou as a hardened cynic when plying her trade in the dive bar that sees most of the movie's action but as a beaten down survivor in private, defeated and without illusions.

"Do you think he can make you decent by marryin' you?" she asks Compson after hearing of Bancroft's proposal. "Until I got married, I was decent!"

Lou surprises herself and us with a pivotal act of violence in the film's third act that reveals just how much her estranged husband's thoughtless cruelty still hurts her.

Soon after this film, director von Sternberg would enter into the cinematic (and personal) relationship for which he is best remembered, the six films he made with Marlene Dietrich. These movies, while highly-regarded by cinephiles and showcasing some of Dietrich's best work, were increasingly characterized by wretched excess and a voyeuristic interest in Dietrich (Literally. In The Scarlet Empress, for example, the royal wedding night consists of the groom watching the bride through a peephole) that's inaccessible to most audiences.

While The Docks Of New York is not as visually interesting or cinematic as von Sternberg's later work, it's more moving and from my perspective more worthy of attention. Here, the director was still in touch with the needs and interests of his audience, still trying to tell a story, still trying to connect with real universal human emotions. I think it's possibly the best work of his career.

As for Baclanova and my other nominees, all three were pretty much out of the movies by 1936.

Anita Page, who only just passed away last year at the age of 98, said late in life that her career was unfairly sabotaged when she refused to sleep with producer Irving Thalberg and studio chief Louis B. Mayer (hopefully in response to separate propositions and not as part of some twisted, resentment-fueled three-way). She left Hollywood in 1936, but came out of retirement a few years ago to take small parts in a few low-budget horror films, including one, Frankenstein Rising, which is listed on the Internet Movie Database as being in post-production and due out later this year.

Mary Nolan made a handful of fine movies at the end of the Silent Era, including Desert Nights with John Gilbert, but she didn't adjust well to the demands of sound and was soon out of work. She developed a heroin habit and died penniless at the age of forty-two.

When talkies became the norm, Olga Baclanova's heavy Russian accent limited her to "exotic" parts and B-pictures. She made one more unforgettable movie, playing the cruel circus performer Cleopatra in the cult-film Freaks, the role for which she is probably now best known. She returned to the Broadway stage in 1933 and had at least one big hit, Claudia, which ran for two years. Baclanova returned to Hollywood briefly in 1943 to make a screen version of her Broadway hit and then retired from the movies permanently. She died in 1974.

Note: I want to mention one other actress, Dorothy Mackaill, who was blonde, beautiful and turned in a well-received supporting performance as a tough-as-nails bad girl in 1928.

Once thought to be lost, a lone copy of The Barker languishes in UCLA's Film and Television Archive, unavailable on VHS or DVD. The handful of people who have seen it cite Dorothy Mackaill's performance as possibly the best of the year and certainly the best and most complex in this Oscar-nominated movie. As of this writing, at least, I'll have to take their word for it.

If you're in the mood for a road trip, The Barker will be shown at Noon on August 8, 2009, as part of the annual Capitolfest film festival at the Capitol Theater in Rome, N.Y.