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A look ahead at the Monty's March Madness Favorite Actress Tournament, part of which we'll be hosting here at the Monkey.
Voting begins March 5.
Irene Dunne
Birth Name: Irene Marie Dunn
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Singers and Dancers" #1
Birth Date: December 20, 1898
Birthplace: Louisville, Kentucky
Height: 5' 5"
Film Debut: Leathernecking (1930)
Academy Awards: 5 nominations, 0 wins
Katie Awards: Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) (1936) (Show Boat and Theodora Goes Wild)
Three More To See: The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, I Remember Mama
versus
Luise Rainer
Birth Name: Luise Rainer
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Singers and Dancers" #8
Birth Date: January 12, 1910
Birthplace: Düsseldorf, Germany
Height: 5' 4"
Film Debut: Sehnsucht 202 (1932)
Academy Awards: 2 wins, Best Actress (1936) (The Great Ziegfeld), Best Actress (1937) (The Good Earth)
Three More To See: The Emperor's Candlesticks, The Great Waltz, The Gambler
The winner of this match-up will face the winner of:
Jeanette MacDonald
Birth Name: Jeannette Anna McDonald
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Singers and Dancers" #4
Birth Date: June 18, 1903
Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Height: 5' 4"
Film Debut: The Love Parade (1929)
Academy Awards: none
Katie Awards: Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) (1930-31) (Monte Carlo)
Three More To See: One Hour With You, Love Me Tonight, The Merry Widow
versus
Mae West
Birth Name: Mary Jane West
Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Singers and Dancers" #5
Birth Date: August 17, 1893
Birthplace: Woodhaven, New York
Height: 5' 1"
Film Debut: Night After Night (1932)
Academy Awards: none
Three To See: She Done Him Wrong, I'm No Angel, My Little Chickadee
I've already written about most of the Hollywood sex symbols of the pre-Code era—Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, Marlene Dietrich, or if you prefer, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo and Clara Bow. But before I put the era in this blog's rearview mirror, I should stop briefly to mention perhaps the most famous sex symbol of the age, Mae West.
Now let's be honest: although I nominated her for a Katie Award for her work in I'm No Angel, Mae West really doesn't work for me, not as an actress, not as a comedienne and certainly not as an object of fantasy. She took the role of sex goddess and dialed it up to "11," beyond vamp, beyond burlesque — playing so broadly, with the leer and the voice and the double entendres, that ultimately she became completely sexless, a threat to no one.
But maybe that's how she got away with it.
Born on August 17, 1893, in Brooklyn, New York, Mary Jane West started performing at the age of five and was a regular on the vaudeville circuit by the age of fourteen. In 1926, she had her first starring role on Broadway in a show she wrote herself, the subtly named Sex. The show sold over three hundred thousand tickets during its run but also resulted in a morals charge that landed West in the workhouse for eight days (with two days off for good behavior). The resulting publicity—she told reporters she wore silk underwear in prison—made her nationally famous.
West wrote other plays, but it was 1928's Diamond Lil that proved to be the turning point in her career. Set in the Bowery during the Gay Nineties, Diamond Lil is the story of a barroom singer who battles white slavers on the one hand and the Salvation Army on the other. Broadway audiences loved it and although she was already pushing forty—ancient for a budding Hollywood actress—Paramount Pictures signed her to a movie contract.
Hollywood's censors prevented West from filming Diamond Lil as written, and instead, a watered-down version was released as She Done Him Wrong, co-starring Cary Grant and boasting the oft-misquoted line, "Why don't you come up some time and see me?"
She Done Him Wrong was nominated for an Academy Award as best picture of 1932-33 and in 1996, the Library of Congress included it in the National Film Registry.
If you're going to see only one Mae West movie, I would suggest I'm No Angel, the follow up to She Done Him Wrong. Again co-starring Cary Grant, here Mae West plays a circus performer who gyrates for the (as she puts it) "suckers," but as with all of her movies, the story is irrelevant. You're paying to see Mae West play Mae West and she does it better here than anywhere else, singing such numbers as "They Call Me Sister Honky-Tonk," spouting double entendres and, unusual for the times, hamming it up with a Greek chorus of African-American actresses who function as her only true friends and confidants.
West's films go rapidly downhill after Hollywood's studios began enforcing the Production Code in mid-1934—not much point to a Mae West movie without the innuendo. The best of the bunch is probably My Little Chickadee, a 1940 pairing with W.C. Fields. In 1978, she made her last movie, Sextette, a cinematic disaster that put the bomb in bombshell.
West was married twice, but had her longest relationship with Paul Novak, her live-in partner from 1954 until her death in 1980. He was thirty years her junior.
Among her better-known quips:
"It's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men."
"When I'm good, I'm very good. But, when I'm bad, I'm better."
"A hard man is good to find."
"Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."
[To a policeman in 1936] "Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"
"Never let one man worry your mind. Find 'em, fool 'em and forget 'em!"
"When women go wrong, men go right after them."
"Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready for an institution."
[To read Part One of this essay, click here; for Part Two, here; and for Part Three, here.]
Beyond The Legend
Perhaps Jean Harlow was always more than just one of the legion of lovelies populating the backlots of Hollywood's studios. On looks alone—those platinum blonde tresses fascinated men and women alike—she had enjoyed box office success with Hell's Angels, The Public Enemy and Platinum Blonde, and frankly, less attractive actresses with even more limited talent than Harlow displayed in those early efforts managed careers that lasted for years. But Harlow didn't rest on her beauty, and worked hard to develop into, arguably, the finest comedic actress of the decade.
"I was not a born actress," she confessed without embarrassment. "No one knows it better than I. If I had any latent talent, I have had to work hard, listen carefully, do things over and over and then over again in order to bring it out."
She wasn't coy about her looks— you might as well ask the sun to be coy about the dawn— but unlike her con- temp- orary, Mae West, who played the vamp as broadly as a drag queen and reduced sex to a quick, cheap commercial transaction, Harlow acknowledged her appeal with a shrug then moved past it, as if to say, "Of course I like sex—what's that got to do with you and me?" and as a result was much sexier than Mae West ever dreamed of being.
"She has a walk that's a marvel," critic Gerald Weales wrote. "It contains little of the teasing seductiveness that Hollywood sex goddesses are supposed to display. Her sexuality is direct and matter-of-fact: she moves like an athlete."
Cary Grant had the same sort of thing. Yes, he was incredibly handsome, suave, sophisticated; yet he was so secure, he was willing to make a complete fool of himself (think of the scene with the chair in The Awful Truth, if you've been lucky enough to see it) and as a result is all the more handsome for it.
Same thing with Jean Harlow. She was beautiful but it's her sense of humor and lack of self-importance that you react to. That curvy little body winds up being icing on the cake.
"Harlow was rather like a boy," screenwriter Anita Loos observed. "She had no vanity whatsoever. Things which she did that seemed outrageous, she did because she had no feeling of any kind herself, so she didn't think they affected other people. Also, she had this extraordinary beauty which she'd been born with and had for her whole life, so she wasn't conscious of it. But utterly no vanity. None at all."
Off screen, she was much like the characters she played—not educated but not dumb either, sharp as a matter of fact; beautiful but not interested in her own beauty; funny and disarmingly down-to-earth, without guile or vanity; and cursed with a disastrous luck in men—with two chief differences: she hadn't scrabbled her way up from the working class, but had in fact been born to the purple in Kansas City's upper class society; and she hated wearing those tight-fitting gowns that designers such as Adrian always sewed her into, preferring sports clothes, loose sweaters and slacks.
"Underwear makes me uncomfortable," she said, "and besides, my parts have to breathe."
After the critical and commercial successes of Red Dust and Dinner At Eight, Jean Harlow leapt to the top of her profession, surpassing Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer as the most popular actress at MGM. And although Hollywood began enforcing the Production Code in 1934 and as a result toned down the more explicit sexuality of her movies, Harlow nevertheless remained an audience favorite. In fact, from 1932 until her untimely death in 1937, Harlow had at least one movie, and often two, finish among the top ten grossing films of the year.
Despite her success with critics and audiences, Harlow was never nominated for an Academy Award—comedic performances rarely are—but she did rank twenty-second on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 movie legends and forty-ninth on Entertainment Weekly's list of the all-time greatest movie stars.
In 1935, after the end of her third marriage, Harlow fell in love with William Powell, her co-star in the movie Reckless, and finally after years of turmoil, her personal life began to match the success of her professional one. The two secretly engaged although never married—in his early forties, Powell worried about being linked to such a young actress, and Harlow also claimed MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer didn't approve of the union.
In 1937, during filming of her sixth movie with Clark Gable, Saratoga, Harlow fell ill with a serious kidney ailment, which likely had gone undiagnosed for years, and died before the end of production. The studio finished the film with long shots of a stand-in and released the film with much fanfare. It was the highest grossing film of 1937. (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which has been re-released many times, eventually passed Saratoga as the year's top money maker.)
"She was the bravest girl I ever met," said Clark Gable.
Birth Name: Irene Marie Dunn
Birth Name: Luise Rainer
Birth Name: Jeannette Anna McDonald
Birth Name: Mary Jane West
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