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I've written at length about director/producer Cecil B. DeMille (here, for example), one of the best and most influential of the silent era directors.
If you know him only from his bloated Bible epics of the 1950s, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. But the fact is, beginning in 1918 with Old Wives For New, DeMille reeled off a series of "nervously brilliant, intimate melodramas" and "sly marital comedies" (Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams) centering on the notion that grown ups engage in sexual relations and are glad that they do.
Ah, sophisticated sex comedies—God bless 'em. Here are three by DeMille to bring you up to speed:
Old Wives for New (1918)—In the first of his sex comedies, DeMille dispense with karma and moral judgment, and puts the fun back into sex, sin and every kind of bad behavior. People drink, lie, carouse and generally defy social mores, and not only suffer no consequences, they prosper. Murder goes unpunished, adultery is rewarded and divorce is presented as a sane and sophisticated solution to an unhappy marriage. Starring Elliott Dexter, Florence Vidor and Theodore Roberts.
Male and Female (1919)—DeMille added a young Gloria Swanson to the mix and both of their careers really took off. Basically, the cast of Downton Abbey gets shipwrecked on a desert island, with Swanson as a upper crust nitwit and Thomas Meighan as her butler. Of course, only the servants possess any useful survival skills. Upstairs is down, downstairs is up, in this sophisticated satire of the British class system. Also featuring Theodore Roberts and Bebe Daniels.
The Affairs of Anatol (1921)—Maybe the most famous of DeMille's comedies. Here, a bored husband (All-American heartthrob Wallace Reid) looks to spice up his love life with a series of what turn out to be disastrous affairs. By the time he returns to his senses, his wife (Swanson again) has embarked on an affair of her own. With Bebe Daniels (as Satan Synne!), Elliott Dexter and Theodore Roberts.
Have fun!
Apropos of nothing: while researching a project unrelated to this blog, I read up on Lily Langtry ("Lillie" in Britain, usually; "Lily" in America), and without giving her the full-blown Monkey treatment, here's a bit of what I learned:
Born in 1853 the daughter of a disgraced Anglican minister, Emilie Charlotte Le Breton married the wealthy Irish landowner Edward Langtry at the age of twenty and entered London society after sitting for a portrait for painter Frank Miles.
"I would rather have discovered Lillie Langtry than America," said Oscar Wilde. "I resent Mrs Langtry," added George Bernard Shaw. "She has no right to be intelligent, daring and independent, as well as lovely."
Known as "the Jersey Lily"—the official flower of her home island of Jersey—Langtry came to the attention of the Prince of Wales. "Bertie" to his friends, later King Edward VII, the Prince was overly fond of married women and made Langtry his unofficial official mistress, appearing publicly with her at Ascot and the theater, going so far as to introduce her to Queen Victoria.
Encouraged by the legendary actress Sarah Bernhardt, Langtry cashed in on her notoriety and launched a stage career. Although the critics were savage—"There was no denying it," wrote one, "Mrs. Langtry's legs were a total failure"—the public loved her. She toured America several times and acted more or less continuously until her retirement in 1915. Langtry made one movie, His Neighbors Wife, in 1913 (presumed lost).
Langtry was apparently so beautiful, the notorious Judge Roy Bean fell in love with a picture of her, naming his saloon the Jersey Lily. "The purtiest woman in the world," he said.
She and the Prince of Wales eventually had a falling out, according to legend because she dropped a piece of ice down the back of his shirt, but more likely because he couldn't afford her extravagant tastes. "I've spent enough on you to build a battleship," he once complained. "And you've spent enough in me," she allegedly replied, "to float one."
After that, Langtry broke a series of hearts. She became pregnant in 1880 and though it's unclear who the father was—although it certainly was not Edward Langtry—she convinced Prince Louis of Battenberg he was the father. Upon hearing the news, the queen had him assigned to the warship H.M.S. Inconstant. The royal family paid Langtry off and she moved to Paris with yet another man and gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Marie.
Langtry eventually divorced and remarried, became an American citizen, invested in race horses and wineries, and settled in Monaco, living in a house a discreet distance from her husband, Sir Hugo Gerald de Bathe.
As the man sang in the song, Lily died in 1929, but she still crops up periodically in the culture, most famously as played by Lillian Bond in the 1940 Oscar-winning film The Westerner. In addition, Ava Gardner played her in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean in 1972 and Stacy Haiduk portrayed her as the "immortal leader of a sect of vampires" in the, presumably, fictional 1996 television series, Kindred: The Embraced.
Unsubstantiated are claims that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based the character Irene Adler ("A Scandal in Bohemia") on Langtry, and that she inspired the Who's 1967 single "Pictures of Lily" about a teenage boy who, well, whatever to the pictures of Lily hanging on his bedroom wall. You can't prove it by me one way or the other. Sounds plausible, though.
Wait, what did I say about not giving her the full Monkey treatment?
Before Marlene Dietrich, before Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren or even Greta Garbo, Polish film star Pola Negri made the journey from Europe to Hollywood and found fame in America, the first European film actress to succeed on both sides of the Atlantic.
She was born Barbara Apolonia Chałupiec in what is now Poland in 1897, fashioning the name "Pola Negri" for herself (after Italian poet Ada Negri) during her confinement to a sanitarium for tuberculosis. After Russian authorities sent Negri's father to Siberia as a revolutionary, Negri and her mother moved to Warsaw where Negri studied ballet and eventually found success on the stage and screen.
During World War I, she moved to Berlin where she caught the attention of Ernst Lubitsch who signed her to a movie contract at Universum Film AG ("UFA"), Germany's best studio and, until the Nazis took power in 1933, one of the most influential in the world. After a half dozen low-budget films with other directors, Lubitsch in 1918 cast Negri as the lead in Die Augen der Mumie Ma—"The Eyes of the Mummy."
We remember Lubitsch now for his witty, sophisticated comedies, but during his early career in Germany, he alternated between broad farces and serious dramas. The former usually starred Ossi Oswalda, the latter, Negri. Despite its lurid title, The Eyes of the Mummy wasn't a horror picture but a tragic romance, the story of a young woman (Negri) rescued from the Egyptian tombs where her captor (Emil Jannings) has held her for years only to find him stalking her anew through the posh capitals of Europe.
The Eyes of the Mummy is a minor entry in the Lubitsch canon, and Negri is still a raw young actress (she was just twenty-one when filming began), but somebody connected with the film—the screenwriters, Lubitsch, Negri—knew something about the psychology of stalking from the point of view of both the stalker and the victim, and Negri is effective as a lusty child-woman slavishly devoted to whichever man possesses her at any given moment.
Better is Lubitsch's next collaboration with Negri, a film version of Prosper Mérimée's novel, Carmen. Adapted to film as early as 1907, the story of a soldier who throws over his family, his fiancee and his honor for a beautiful gypsy smuggler with tragic results has spawned dozens of versions over the years and was familiar enough to audiences that Charlie Chaplin could film a spoof of it, A Burlesque on Carmen, in 1915. Stripped of its Spanish setting, Carmen is essentially a retelling of Eve and the apple, and while I agree with Nero Wolfe's sidekick Archie Goodwin that "[n]o man was ever taken to hell by a woman unless he already had a ticket in his pocket, or at least had been fooling around with timetables," that doesn't mean this oft-repeated formula doesn't work; indeed, it forms the basis of much of literature, film noir and some of the more brutal aspects of many of the world's cultures.
The key to Carmen is, of course, the actress playing the title role. You have to believe that an honorable man would throw away his good name, a promising career and a faithful fiancee for a romp with a treacherous tramp. Although the print of Carmen has deteriorated beyond repair in places, it's still possible to see what both Don José and movie audiences saw in Pola Negri's Carmen—she's ripe and sensual, with large eyes full of promises she has no intention of keeping.
Better men than Don José have given up a whole lot more for a whole lot less.
"Love is disgusting," Negri herself later opined, "when you no longer possess yourself."
Negri and Lubitsch made a total of eight movies together, each better than the one before it. In addition to The Eyes of the Mummy and Carmen, they made Madame DuBarry (a.k.a Passion) and Rausch (both 1919), Sumurun (a.ka. One Arabian Night) (1920), Die Bergkatze ("The Wildcat") (1921), Die Flamme (1923) and Forbidden Paradise (made in Hollywood in 1924 for Paramount).
Negri's collaboration with Lubitsch made her an international star, and so great was her reputation that the U.S. finally dropped its embargo of German films (instituted during the war) just to satisfy popular curiosity. After the success of Carmen (released in the United States in 1921 as Gypsy Blood), Negri signed with Paramount and arrived in New York in September 1922.
She quickly supplanted Theda Bara as silent film's top sex symbol and while (thanks to the vagaries of film preservation) I can't compare Negri to Bara's most famous role, Cleopatra, if Bara's surviving film A Fool There Was is any indicator, Negri was lightyears beyond her in terms of projecting sexuality on the screen. Was Negri a great actress? I'm not sure. But judging from the reaction of audiences when her European films finally made their way to America, she was revolutionary.
The films with Lubitsch also represented Negri at the top of her popularity. Despite begging her to come to Hollywood, Paramount didn't really know what to do with Negri and as her star faded, she became even more theatrical and haughty, which poisoned her relationship to both the studio and her audience.
When in 1926, the press decided her engagement to the recently deceased Rudolph Valentino was a fabrication, the public was done with her. To her dying day, Negri insisted that the engagement was real and told the Los Angeles Times shortly before her death, "Rudy was the great love of my life. I remember him with great regret. Somehow, the fates changed what wasn't to be. You can't rage with anger against it, and even though you love someone, you like to be with them and want to marry them and hope that it will all work out this time ... but he died, just when we were engaged to be married."
She was also briefly engaged to Charlie Chaplin who jilted her soon after giving her a $15,000 engagement ring. Negri's revenge? She gave the ring to her Forbidden Paradise co-star, Rod La Rocque.
She later married a Georgian prince, Serge Mdivani, who left her for an opera singer after Negri lost her fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. After their divorce, Negri lived with Margaret West, a Texas oil heiress, until the latter's death in 1963.
"No one could believe that we were closest friends, that nothing sexual was involved," she wrote in her autobiography. "Yet it is true. She was as close a friend as I've ever had."
When talkies came in, Negri's thick accent relegated her to supporting roles. Despite a measure of success in such films as A Woman Commands—she had a hit with the song "Paradise"—she retreated to Europe and retired in 1943, making one last picture in 1964, The Moon-Spinners, at Walt Disney's personal behest. Her London press conference promoting the film was a sensation—she showed up with a live cheetah on a chain leash.
Negri died on August 1, 1987, in San Antonio, Texas. She was 90 years old.
"That's Typing" Tuesday, in which I share unpolished, unpublished writings from my vast store of unpolished, unpublished writings. On Tuesdays.
I've been busy working on my essay about Chaplin's Mutual Comedies. That, and taking care of the dog who has a hip flexor as a complication of her knee surgery. So I've got nothing.
And when you've got nothing, my good friend, Mister Muleboy, advises, post pictures of pretty starlets.
I'm paraphrasing.
I did hear from Lisa Rothstein in the comment section related to That's Typing Tuesday #8, a John Astin quote from The Addams Family ("I haven't seen so much activity since the night I hid the hornet's nest in Aunt Phobia's sleeping bag."). This is what she had to say:
John Astin also appeared, pre-Addams Family, in a 1962 sitcom entitled “I’m Dickens…He’s Fenster” that my husband, Jim Benson of www. TVTimeMachine.com and I’ll be bringing out on DVD this fall. Astin does a lot of physical comedy in the show, which also stars Marty Ingels, and is about two best friends and co-workers in a construction company where things rarely go right.
http://www.imdickenshesfenster.com and http://dickensandfenster.com to see clips and for more info about the DVD project.
How about that!
And now, on to pictures of some of my favorite silent actresses:
Anita Page
Clara Bow
Colleen Moore
Francesca Bertini
Greta Garbo
Louise Brooks
Norma and Constance Talmadge
Pola Negri
And Clara Bow again, so nice, we showed her twice.
Be sure to look for a Joan Blondell double feature on Turner Classic Movies early Thursday, June 9, 2011, with Night Nurse at 6 a.m. EDT, followed by Other Men's Women at 7:15.
I cited both of these movies when I chose Blondell as the best supporting actress of 1930-31. This is what I had to say, in part:
If any one person has come to personify in my mind the glorious excesses of Hollywood's pre-Code era, it's Joan Blondell. She was sexy, she was sassy, and stripped down to her skivvies as she invariably was, she was always on the make. She had big blue eyes that rivaled those of Bette Davis, but unlike Bette's eyes, which always promised a knee to the groin if you got too close, Blondell's eyes promised a good time—if you measured up. And with very few predecessors to point the way, she had a gift for projecting moral ambiguity on the screen that set her work apart from the black-and-white caricatures her peers presented. Her very real talent was too often taken for granted but it really shone during the Early Sound Era when the brakes of censorship were off and if you want to know what film historians mean when they talk about "pre-Code" movies, you need look no further than Joan Blondell.
Movie audiences wouldn't see this much explicit behavior on screen again until Hollywood abandoned the Code altogether in 1968 and suffice it to say the Joan Blondell movies I've cited here—Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse—violated just about every aspect of its prohibitions, showing murder, revenge, the use of liquor, undressing scenes, scenes in bedrooms, adultery, impure love, semi-nudity, transparent clothing and God knows what else in ways that made all of those things seem like pretty good ideas. Throw in the cruelty to children and surgical operations that were central to the plot of Night Nurse and you've pretty much covered every aspect of the Code except venereal disease and the ridicule of religion.
No wonder these movies were so much fun to watch.
The first movie on my list, Sinners' Holiday, is typical of Blondell's pre-Code work, showing off both her no-nonsense sex appeal and talent for playing working class women. Set on the Coney Island boardwalk, Blondell here plays a photographer's model who gets mixed up with James Cagney and his penny ante bootleg liquor operation with tragic results. Although playing what are clearly supporting roles, Blondell and Cagney provided the movie's energy, blowing their higher-billed, better-paid co-stars off the screen, and drawing the attention of critics and moviegoers alike. Maybe it was their talent for making stock characters seem like real people—the eye is drawn to that on the screen that reminds you of something real, and both Blondell and Cagney imbue their characters with a reality otherwise sorely lacking in this pedestrian tale.
Sinners' Holiday was based on a stage play, Penny Arcade, that featured both Blondell and Cagney. The play only ran three weeks, but in the audience was Al Jolson (of The Jazz Singer) who was so impressed with the supporting work Blondell and Cagney turned in, he bought the film rights to the play for $20,000 and sold them to Jack Warner on the condition that he cast Blondell and Cagney in their original roles. Jolson had never met either performer, but he had an eye for talent. Sinners' Holiday was Blondell's fifth movie, co-star James Cagney's film debut, and for both performers it proved to be a promise of great things to come.
Blondell and Cagney teamed up again just three months later for Other Men's Women, the story of a love triangle involving a married couple and the husband's best friend. That neither Blondell nor Cagney, again relegated to supporting roles, figure into the affair should tell you all you need to know about the production's chief weakness. But the movie still works as a showcase of both stars' talents and is a prime example of the sort of things a pre-Code movie could get away with that movie audiences wouldn't see again for thirty years.
Blondell is slinging hash behind the counter at a railroad diner in this one, and with her eyes and with her voice, she draws a convincing portrait of a tired, jaded working woman, a real tough cookie. When she asks the customers "Anything else you guys want?" you can feel the slap in her voice and when one of them eyes her as she bends over and answers "Yeah, gimme a big slice of you on toast" she tells him with a look that let's him know she's heard it all before and is immune to his nonsense, "Listen, baby, I'm A.P.O.—Ain't Puttin' Out!"
Blondell's pining for the railroad engineer who's forgotten he's promised to marry her when he gets back into town—pining, that is, without love and without feeling any need to be particularly chaste while she's waiting. She blows him the raspberry and when he later rips her her dress, she gives him a slap he no doubt felt down to his heels; if Blondell pulled her punch, it was the most convincing pulled punch in movie history.
The star of Other Men's Women is a young and beautiful Mary Astor, who just as in Red Dust, can make you believe a guy would throw over a Joan Blondell or a Jean Harlow for her. But Blondell is the most convincing performer in the movie, and that includes Cagney in his last role before he became a star (by the way, what a swell movie this might have been if director Wellman had thought to cast Cagney as the lead). Blondell could play saucy in her sleep and hers is the performance you'll remember from this one.
After the January premiere of Other Men's Women, Blondell made nine more movies in 1931 (she made ten in 1932 and eight the year after that), her best roles coming in Night Nurse and Blonde Crazy, two of the best Code-busting movies ever made. The latter, with Blondell's famous bathtub scene, came out too late in 1931 to be eligible for a Katie here, but Night Nurse and its parade of lingerie just squeezed in with a July premiere in New York.
In Night Nurse, Blondell again has a supporting role, this time to Barbara Stanwyck who plays a nurse trainee paired with a more experienced nurse (Blondell) who specializes primarily in ways to skirt the strict rules against men, booze and late nights boozing with men.
"I'm sure in your heart you love it," says the eager Stanwyck.
"Sez you," sneers Blondell.
The movie is not eight minutes old before the actresses are out of their clothes. Blondell picks out a uniform for Stanwyck then watches as she undresses, sizing up the competition. William A. Wellman—this is the same guy who gave us a quick glimpse of Clara Bow's bare breasts in Wings—directs the scene in his typically leering style. "Oh, don't be embarrassed," says Dr. Smooth-Weasel when he saunters in. "You can't show me a thing. I just came from the delivery room."
Then Stanwyck plants her foot in Blondell's lap so Blondell can help Stanwyck off with her stockings. To their credit, the two actresses handle the scene so casually it almost doesn't occur to you to wonder what director Wellman thought he was up to. Almost. Stanwyck and Blondell spend an awful lot of the movie dressing and undressing, and in the case of Stanwyck, who at this point in her acting career was as green as wet wood, it helps disguise the fact that she didn't quite know what she was doing. In Blondell's case, it just seems a natural aspect of her gum-chewing, hip-swiveling character.
The plot is pure gangster melo- drama. In a part originally written for James Cagney (who, with the unexpected success of The Public Enemy, was now too big for supporting roles) (and yes, Blondell was in that Cagney effort, too; in the first five years of their careers, they made seven movies together), Clark Gable starves the children of his rich society lover so he can get his hands on their trust fund. Stanwyck and Blondell stumble across the scheme when they sign on as night nurses at the rich woman's estate and the rest of the plot concerns the plucky Stanwyck's attempts to thwart Gable, a charismatic brute who doesn't mind knocking a woman cold with a right cross.
Despite the role's size, the best performance in the movie once again belongs to Blondell. What I like most about her, in this movie and elsewhere, is you can't easily read her character. Does she have a heart of gold or a heart of brass? Usually, it's both, with the mix, depending on the role, sliding along the continuum toward one end or the other but never fully arriving—as with most people. This is her strength as a character actress, I think, and maybe her weakness as a lead: Hollywood typically likes its stars to be all one thing, a hero or a villain you can root for or against. With Blondell, well, you're never quite sure.
Take Night Nurse, for example. For Stanwyck, nursing is a calling and she's ready to risk her career to stop Gable. For Blondell—"I don't know a thing, I just work here"—nursing is a job and sticking her neck out is no way to keep the paychecks coming. In other words, Blondell is us the way we really are, Stanwyck as we like to pretend we are, and we go to the movies to pretend.
Joan Blondell worked very hard for a very long time but with a few exceptions—most notably in 1945's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn—she flew under the radar. Like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Arthur, she excelled at playing working class women. Like Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, she was genuinely sexy. But after a couple of successful starring roles, she was largely relegated to supporting status.
Between film, stage and television, Blondell worked steadily from 1930 to her death in 1979, receiving a Tony nomination in 1958 for The Rope Dancers and two Emmy nominations for the television series Here Come The Brides. She received her only Oscar nomination, a supporting actress nod, for the 1951 movie The Blue Veil, and won the National Board of Review's award for the best supporting actress of 1965 for her performance as Lady Fingers in The Cincinnati Kid.
"I don't know what the secret to longevity as an actress is," she once said. "It's more than talent and beauty. Maybe it's the audience seeing itself in you."
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I are back from the beach—that's Katie on the right.
Except for a couple of moments on a borrowed computer to answer a couple of comments, I didn't do any blogging at all—the last four entries were prepared in advance—and I'm way behind on both my movie watching and blog reading. I'll try to catch up over the weekend.
I did see that we picked up some new followers here at the Monkey—welcome!. I've added them to the blogroll, so you'll see a couple new sites when you scroll down the page. And I see that Movie Nut 14, our favorite trivia answering machine, tagged me with fifteen questions on her blog, Defiant Success.
1. Movie you love with a passion.
2. Movie you vow to never watch.
3. Movie that literally left you speechless.
4. Movie you always recommend.
5. Actor/actress you always watch, no matter how crappy the movie.
6. Actor/actress you don't get the appeal for.
7. Actor/actress, living or dead, you'd love to meet.
8. Sexiest actor/actress you've seen. (Picture required!)
9. Dream cast.
10. Favorite actor pairing.
11. Favorite movie setting.
12. Favorite decade for movies.
13. Chick flick or action movie?
14. Hero, villain or anti-hero?
15. Black and white or color?
I encourage fellow bloggers such as Who Am Us, Thingy, Zoe and Mister Muleboy—and anyone else so inclined—to cut and past the questions into their blog, or into the comments section below, and answer them. No penalties if you don't though. We pitch a guilt-free tent here at the Monkey.
My answers, by the way:
1. Passion about? Whichever movie I'm currently researching, in this case the comedies Chaplin made for Mutual in 1916 and 1917.
2. Vow not to see? None, as long as it's reasonably affordable.
3. Left me literally speechless? Schindler's List.
4. Recommended movie? On the right side of the page, click on the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards and The Silent Oscars.
5. Watch them in anything? Many, such as Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, and just lately, Charlie Chaplin.
6. Don't get? Angelina Jolie.
7. Want to meet? Buster Keaton.
8. Sexiest? For Katie, it's Cary Grant. For me, Diana Rigg.
9. Dream cast? That would be Casablanca. Flawless cast.
10. Actor pairing? William Powell and Myrna Loy.
11. Movie setting? Around whichever musical instrument is appearing in whichever Howard Hawks movie I'm watching—for example, the piano in Only Angels Have Wings or To Have and Have Not, the guitar in Rio Bravo.
12. Favorite movie decade? 1940s. I think.
13. Chick flick or action movie? Put on Charade, which is both.
14. Hero, villain or anti-hero? Whatever Bogart is. Reluctant hero, I guess.
15. Black and white, or color? Yes, definitely.
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