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But only a bloviating narcissist determined to repeat his mistakes won't admit when he's wrong, and I was wrong to dismiss Norma Shearer without first seeing her pre-Code work.
In fact, before she got culture and started playing those maddeningly starchy good girls in bloodless MGM literary adaptations, Shearer turned in some of the best performances of the early sound era, playing — pardon my French — horny blue bloods too eager to get into a man's pants to worry about the impact on her social standing.
Thank God for pre-Code movies! All that misbehavior kids think they invented in the Sixties — sex, drugs, hot music, adultery, abortion — Hollywood was making movies about in the early 1930s, and making all that sin look like a helluva lot fun.
Too much fun as it turned out for the Puritans who get their mitts on the government from time to time. With censorship threatening their profit margins, Hollywood invented the Code, which not only banned onscreen depictions of all that naughtiness we're not supposed to enjoy but so obviously do, but also wholesome activities like a husband and wife sleeping in the same bed together, a fact of life every child in America was damn well aware of, else why bother to climb in there with them in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Who did they think they were fooling?
But I digress ...
I suspect Shearer's husband, the legendary producer Irving Thalberg, was only too happy to wrap his wife up in a shroud of respectability. Probably didn't want her audience to know the woman he had married was, in the words of the ever-classy Mickey Rooney, "hotter than a half-f***ed fox in a forest fire."
Well, some guys are like that.
As Walter Clemons once wrote for EW.com, "Thalberg was fatally afflicted with gentility. He cast his wife in movies with literary pretensions — O'Neill's Strange Interlude, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and as a mature Juliet in a suffocatingly tasteful rendition of Shakespeare. Norma gets a bad rap for these turkeys, but the reverence in which Thalberg's contemporaries held him is an unexamined delusion."
So what Norma Shearer movies should you see?
The 1939 comedy The Women would be an obvious choice — it's her best known film and it's a good one. But let's be honest, Norma is a bit of a sad sack in The Women — abandoned by her cheating husband, betrayed by her closest friends — and frankly, co-stars Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell blow her off the screen.
Instead, try these three pre-Code classics:
The Divorcee (1930) — When husband Ted (Robert Montgomery) has an extramarital fling, his wife Jerry (Shearer) retaliates with one of her own. Suddenly the gander, who always felt free to goose anything in a skirt, gets his feathers in a ruffle and files for divorce.
Separated, Ted drinks, Jerry parties, and neither is any too happy with the state of their affairs. Eventually, Jerry falls into the arms of a married man and ... well, there's enough here for a season's worth of Real Housewives, all of it unfolding in a brisk 84 minutes.
Shearer topped Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson, among others, at the 3rd Academy Awards for the only Oscar of her career.
A Free Soul (1931) — Even better than The Divorcee, in this sprightly 91-minute melodrama, free-spirit Jan Ashe (Shearer) falls for a gangster (Clark Gable in a star-making turn), discovering too late what kind of a man he really is.
When her ex-beau (Leslie Howard) comes to her rescue and winds up on trial for murder, Jan turns to her alcoholic father, a once successful attorney, hoping he can pull one more rabbit from his briefcase of lawyerly tricks.
Lionel Barrymore (at his hammy best as Jan's alcoholic father) won the Oscar for best actor, and Shearer picked up another nomination for best actress, one of five in her career.
Private Lives (1931) — In this faithful adaptation of Noel Coward's popular stageplay, two recently remarried divorcees, Elyot (Robert Montgomery, again) and Amanda (Shearer), find themselves honeymooning in adjoining suites at the same resort. The two ex-spouses are less interested in starting life anew than in tearing into each other, preferably with a wit so biting, the quips leave teeth marks.
And when the wit's not wounding enough, they use actual teeth!
You'd be tempted to call this a comedy of spousal abuse but for the fact that the two participants so thoroughly enjoy themselves. Elyot and Amanda are natural-born performers — drama queens, we'd call them — and after a season apart, they realize each is the other's best audience. They can't live together, but to live apart means they'd have to climb off their private little stages and start living with themselves — or more to the point, with their brand new spouses who, they quickly discover, bore them to tears.
In an essay for Bright Lights Film Journal, Dan Callahan called it "Shearer's finest, most well-rounded performance, and it's the only film that you can show to the uninitiated without fear of the dreaded Shearer-isms."
If you're only going to see one Norma Shearer movie, see this one.
Next up: Howard Hawks: A Baker's Dozen
Don't know whether Robert Montgomery qualifies as manly cheesecake now, but MGM certainly thought of him in those terms in the 1930s and cast him opposite Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo in dozens of movies.
You can read a bit more about him here.
I grew up thinking of Robert Montgomery as a movie tough guy, but watching all these pre-Code Hollywood movies recently, I was surprised to discover that MGM largely wasted him in the 1930s by assigning him an endless series of flaccid pretty boy roles supporting Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and pretty much any other actress who needed a handsome man to gaze vacantly at her while she did her thing.
Made me wonder if the same thing would have happened to Clark Gable if he hadn't been loaned out to Warner Brothers for a particularly nasty turn in Night Nurse, and then a couple of years later to poverty row studio Columbia Pictures for a little ditty called It Happened One Night, where he got to show, respectively, his roguish menace and comedic flair and win an Oscar in the process.
Anyway, here are a few facts about Robert Montgomery, some I knew, some I didn't.
● He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth but the life of privilege didn't last—his father jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and the family lost everything.
● While working as an actor in New York, Mont- gomery met then stage director George Cukor. It was Cukor who later convinced him to give Hollywood a try. Montgomery made his debut as an uncredited extra in 1929's The Single Standard. A year later he was co-starring with Norma Shearer in The Divorcee, a role that won Shearer an Oscar. That same year, he also had an important role in The Big House, a prison drama that won Frances Marion as Oscar for screenwriting.
● Montgomery received two Oscar nominations, the first for playing a murderer in 1937's Night Must Fall, the second playing a dead boxer in search of a live body in the comedy Here Comes Mister Jordan.
● He served in combat in the Pacific during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander.
● His official directorial debut was The Lady in the Lake in 1947 (two years earlier, he had directed some scenes in They Were Expendable during John Ford's illness). Based on a Raymond Chandler mystery, The Lady in the Lake was an experimental attempt to film the entire movie from the lead character's point of view. We only catch a glimpse of Montgomery in a mirror. The film received a mixed reception critically and was not a hit. He directed four more movies between 1947 and 1960.
● Montgomery was twice the president of the Screen Actor's Guild. He was active in politics as a Republican and advised President Eisenhower on his television appearances. Ike later commented that had Richard Nixon followed Montgomery's advice before the first televised debate with John Kennedy, Nixon likely would have "won" the debate and the election.
● He was the father of actress Elizabeth Montgomery, the star of television's Bewitched.
Here are five Robert Montgomery performances I can recommend to you:
1) The Big House—he's quite convincing as a rich, sniveling weasel who doesn't cope well when he's thrown into a prison cell with murderer Wallace Beery.
2) Private Lives—in this screen adaptation of the Noel Coward comedy, he plays Elyot, a man who would rather spar with his ex-wife (Shearer) than honeymoon with his current one.
3) Night Must Fall—playing a caretaker of Dame May Whitty's cottage, Montgomery isn't quite the nice guy he seems to be, and Rosalind Russell can't decide whether to kiss him or turn him over to the police.
4) Here Comes Mister Jordan—probably his best performance, here he plays a boxer frustrated with a celestial bureaucracy that has accidentally killed him before his time and then can't make things right. And you thought the Department of Motor Vehicles was a pain! (Warren Beatty later remade this as Heaven Can Wait.)
5) They Were Expendable—John Ford's classic downbeat war movie about the ones who were left behind. Inspired by the real-life heroics of John Bulkeley, Montgomery plays an American PT boat skipper battling both the Japanese and U.S. Navy brass during Japan's invasion of the Philippines. Co-starring John Wayne, this was not only the best movie Montgomery ever starred in, it's on a short list of the best movies ever to come out of World War II.
And here's one more, a movie I haven't seen, but would like to: Ride the Pink Horse. No, it's not a porn movie, it's a film noir directed by and starring Montgomery based on a script by the legendary Ben Hecht. Co-star Thomas Gomez received his only Oscar nomination for this one.
"If you are lucky enough to be a success," Montgomery once said, "by all means enjoy the applause and the adulation of the public. But never, never believe it."
That's it. That's all I've got. It's enough, isn't it?
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.
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