Tag Archives: Joan Crawford

‘All This, and Heaven Too’

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Original poster.

Original poster.

Warner Bros.’ big prestige picture of 1940 was an historical romance called “All This, and Heaven Too.” At the time, it was the most expensive picture Warners had ever produced. Sixty-five exterior sets and thirty-five interiors were built specifically for this production. It’s a long, sumptuous, romantic picture, told almost entirely in flashback; if you’re willing to overlook a considerable amount of silliness, it’s a comfortable and absorbing affair; several moments in it are exquisitely beautiful, but there is much about it that I find grating and unfortunate — most notably the numerous occasions when the writing and acting veer off-course and land deep in the thickets of camp.  At its best, the writing is excellent, which prevents the camp excesses from giving me the dubious pleasure I get from, say, camp classics such as “The Damned Don’t Cry” and “The Bad Seed.”  Those pictures are so uniformly crummy that the crumminess is what makes them fun to watch. Quite the opposite with “All This, and Heaven Too”: it could have been a great picture, but it’s undermined by its many lapses of judgment and taste.

Most of the acting falls somewhere between good and excellent, but two performances (one important: Barbara O’Neil, one not: Richard Nichols) are staggeringly terrible. Perhaps it’s a bit mean-spirited to pick on little Richard Nichols (who was only four years old at the time), but he was in five pictures in 1940 (including “Kitty Foyle,” for which Ginger Rogers won that year’s Oscar for Best Actress), and in all of them, he is excruciating. The following year, he had a rather more important part as Lars-Erik in “A Woman’s Face,” where he’s imperilled not only by Joan Crawford, who intends to kill him for the money he stands to inherit, but also by that Teutonic super-villain par excellence, Conrad Veidt, who takes over the assignment when Miss Crawford proves too squeamish to finish the job. Everyone who watches old movies has one child actor he dislikes more than all the others: Margaret O’Brien infuriates many people of her own generation (I’m not crazy about her myself — in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” she proved she couldn’t dance or carry a tune — but she was a reasonably good actress, and she grew up to be a smart, interesting woman); I know a lot of baby-boomers who loathe various members of The Brady Bunch and are especially poisonous about Susan Olsen, who played Cindy (and who can blame them?); but for my money, Richard Nichols is the nadir of cutesy-pie child awfulness (edging out Judy Nugent by a coyly wrinkled nose). It is perhaps worth repeating what I’ve said in the past: I never blame bad child performances on the kids who give them, but on the swine who coach them and teach them to behave unnaturally before a camera. At all events, young Master Nichols made his last picture in 1944 and I thank him for it.

Based on the novel of the same name, “All This, and Heaven Too” tells the story of Henriette Deluzy Desportes (Bette Davis), a French governess who spent time in the notorious French prison, la Conciergerie, after having been implicated in the murder of her employer’s wife, the Duchesse de Praslin (Barbara O’Neil). M. le Duc (Charles Boyer) was charged with the murder of his wife; Mlle. Desportes was alleged to have been his mistress and therefore was implicated in the murder. The story is based on a real-life scandal that, according to a sentimental view of history, brought down the government of King Louis-Philippe in 1847. This isn’t entirely false, but history is always rather more complicated than it appears in romance novels and Warner Bros. pictures. The July Monarchy was already on the verge of toppling, and this scandal did much to inflame popular indignation against the government, but the monarchy did not fall because the combination of a loveless aristocratic marriage and a pretty governess ended in murder.

Bette Davis, who plays “Mlle. D . . . ” (as she came to be known in the newspapers of the day), could play a social climbing mistress with murder in her heart while standing on her head. In this version of the story, however, Davis plays against type: Mlle. Desportes is entirely innocent of any wrongdoing . . . even to the point of becoming a camp version of maidenly perfection, forbearance and modesty. She and M. le Duc are clearly in love, but they never speak of it, nor do they ever come close to committing the slightest transgression. Rachel Field, who wrote the best-selling novel, was the grand-niece of Henriette Deluzy Desportes; in her telling, the governess is perfect, while Mme. le Duchesse is a neurasthenic monster who richly deserves to be murdered savagely. Here she is on the brink of getting what she’s got coming to her. Barbara O’Neil’s entire performance is pitched at approximately the same level. I hardly need add that she was nominated for an Oscar. It’s the sort of performance voters seem to like. I file it under the heading “Come into Camp.”

Whenever this picture is shown on TCM, there’s nearly always a mention about O’Neil’s range as an actress: the year before this, she played the soft and gentle mother of Scarlett O’Hara. In that one, she made no impression whatever; in this one, she’s a drag queen from a Charles Busch travesty, but without the compensation of also being funny. It’s a hard performance to forgive, though it’s not entirely her fault. So much of the rest of the picture is sensitive and emotionally complex, that the presence of this English panto villainess at its center throws a monkey wrench into the story’s works. O’Neil makes no attempt to understand this woman’s violent temper: there’s no trace of an emotional process in her performance, no evolution of jealousy as it festers and turns into full-scale madness. Instead, she plays a foregone conclusion: she’s an aristocratic virago without rhyme or reason.

Though I believe Bette Davis is the greatest, most versatile of all the movie stars to come out of Hollywood, she’s never at her best when playing Patient Griselda: she handles such roles persuasively enough, and nearly always finds interesting ways to play restraint and dignified disappointment, but temperamentally, such parts don’t give her enough to do: she was always better at expression than repression. In this picture, I’m afraid she more than occasionally trespasses into camp, but in her case, it is almost entirely due to the excessively artificial language of noble suffering that Casey Robinson has written for her. Here are two of her best scenes, both with Charles Boyer, who is wonderful — though his thick accent often makes him difficult to understand. His penultimate line in this scene is Casey Robinson at his best. Robinson apparently thought so, too, because the line comes back two more times before the pictures concludes — not a disastrous mistake, but certainly a regrettable one. (Max Steiner did the beautiful score: he was never at a loss for a melodic line that was both beautiful and appropriate.)

And here is Davis at her best in this picture. She and Boyer got along well enough, but she fought with Litvak, who was a good friend of Boyer’s. (Litvak directed Boyer in the French picture, “Mayerling” two years earlier.) I think this is the best scene in the picture. Everything is right with it. Robinson’s writing is elevated, but not fulsome.

Henry Daniell, that ubiquitous Nellie from the Studio Era, is on hand to snarl and make prissiness looking menacing; Jeffrey Lynn is bad in an impossible part; Ann Gillis as Emily Schuyler, the vicious little pupil who sets schoolmistress Bette Davis a-talking about her life-story, is campily amusing (“Mam’selle, can you tell us how to spell Conciergerie?”): she’s the template for all the venemous little girls in flouncy dresses (Veda Pierce, Rhoda Penmark, et al.) to come. But she, too, pulls the story in the direction of camp, much to the picture’s detriment.

Awesome Awfulness

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Original poster: 'Beauty and the Beast.' Barry Sullivan's character is called Beauty in the picture; she's the beast.

Original poster: ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ In the picture, Barry Sullivan’s scarfaced character is called Beauty; Joan Crawford is the Beast.

Since I have, of late, kept things on a fairly high plane, today I’d like to roll about in the muck a little, just to keep things honest. A while ago, I posted “Good Songs in Cruddy Pictures” (Part I and Part II) and a piece called “Howlers,” about bad dialogue in high-minded trashy pictures; today, I thought I’d show some cruddy scenes from cruddy pictures. In fact, they’re all from terrible pictures that I can never get through in one sitting, but I like every one of these scenes for a variety of reasons.

The first four clips are overtly camp, which is a form of humor I don’t usually go for. Generally, I’m more likely to endure camp than to laugh at it. And even the sort of camp that does make me laugh — “The Fountainhead,” for instance — wears out its welcome in a big hurry. In small doses, however, I find certain kinds of camp very funny.

So let me start with the camp and get it out of the way. I like these scenes a lot, but believe me, I’m not proud of myself.

Queen Bee

You don’t need to know anything more than Joan Crawford is playing a bitch. Well, it’s the fifties and that’s all she played in that decade. All the evil that surrounds her is in reaction to the monkey-tricks she’s pulled on the other characters before the picture started. She’s plenty crazy when she comes sailing into this, her first scene — but she gets a whole lot crazier before the ninety-five minute picture is over. “Queen Bee” (Columbia, 1955) is written and directed by Ranald MacDougall, who wrote the far superior Crawford melodrama, “Mildred Pierce.” But that was ten years earlier, when they were both younger and had more sense.

“Now I’m ready for people”; “Hello to both of you” . . . God, isn’t that bad writing? Who talks like that? Not even Joan Crawford talks like that. In the scene immediately following this one, Fay Wray, who plays the demented Sue McKinnon, says to another character, “It pleasures me to see you.” In a later scene, Barry Sullivan also says “It pleasures me” about something he likes. Perhaps it’s a common Southern expression, but I’ve never heard it outside of this picture. It doesn’t put me in mind of Southern hospitality; it makes me think of blowjobs. The young woman is Lucy Marlow: Columbia Pictures expected big things from her . . . and didn’t get ’em.

Here’s another clip from “Queen Bee.” It’s shorter and, in its own way, funnier than the previous one. Is there anything more vulgar than Joan Crawford when she gets high-tone? “Mildred Pierce” worked for her because even as she climbed the social ladder, we never were expected to think she had class or sophistication — only that she could hold her bourbon. In “Queen Bee,” she’s supposed to be sophisticated, sexually alluring and mean as a rattlesnake bite . . . She does rattlesnake tolerably (though unimaginatively); the first two are far beyond her extremely limited powers of impersonation, but she slugs away at it with all her might and main. Result: camp.

Give that sound effects man an Oscar! Best too-loud slap ever.

In this one, Joan Crawford goes all Citizen Kane on the cups and dollies. The dialogue she has to work with is terrible, but she doesn’t do it any favors.

And one more clip from “Queen Bee.” It’s the best rotten dialogue in the whole picture. Just look at her act . . . she pivots twice in a single scene. Nobody in real life ever pivots: only bad actresses pivot (in auditions, they also kneel, but only if their knees crack on the descent — I don’t know why). Joan Crawford is not content to be merely a bad actress: she pivots twice. Is she acting or figure skating? It’s hard to figure . . . did she know how bad she was? Did she think what she was doing was good? Or merely marketable? Or was she intentionally camp? My instinct tells me the choices she made were a combination of ambition, selfishness, superstition, stupidity, hard work and bad taste. But whatever it was, it led to some hilarious performances.

“You’re like some fancy kind of disease!” Well, he didn’t say he hated her. That’s John Ireland, poor bastard.

Sunday Drivers

I don’t think these next two clips count as camp — they’re just damned silly, and they both come from crummy mid-high-minded trashy pictures about, of all things, the picture business. Both of them involve public menaces behind the wheel of a car; both make unintentionally hilarious use of process shots; both are from glamorous pictures directed by Vincente Minnelli. The first is from “The Bad and the Beautiful” (Metro, 1952). Lana Turner is behind the wheel. She’s just been jilted by Kirk Douglas. Get this crazy broad off the road.

The second is from “Two Weeks in Another Town,” which was made ten years later, same director (Minnelli), same producer (John Houseman), same writer (Charles Schnee), same star (Douglas). This one’s about how Kirk takes over an Edward G. Robinson picture in Rome after Eddie has a heart attack. The trouble is Kirk is fresh out of the nut house, so the stress of the shoot gets him all bollocky, then his ex-wife, Cyd Charisse, shows up and pushes him over the edge. So he gets into his sporty little number and goes for a therapeutic little spin around the hills of Rome.

These last three clips are from the mid-sixties. They all have a specific atmosphere that appeals to me. It’s an atmosphere that comes from out-of-touch big studios trying to be hip, trying to appeal to the younger generation and failing completely. For instance, whenever a big studio like Metro wrote hippies into a story, they got it all wrong — in the same way that Noël Coward and Cole Porter, late in their careers, got it wrong when they tried to write parodies of the rock ‘n’ roll tunes that had, virtually overnight, turned them into dinosaurs: they didn’t know the idiom well enough to parody it, and they had too much scorn for it to make the parody agreeable. The studios were the same when it came to the presentation of youth culture in general and hippies in particular. They thought they were appealing to the Pepsi Generation by featuring young characters in their pictures, but then the fogey writers and directors made sure that their teenage and twenty-something characters were invariably selfish, foolish, posturing hypocrites.  And the writers never, ever got the current slang right — they simply were not hep to the jive, daddy-o.

Under the Yum Yum Tree

I don’t think this next clip qualifies as camp, either. It’s technically accomplished schlock. It doesn’t even fall under the cliché “They don’t make ’em like that anymore” because they didn’t make ’em like this back then, either. It’s the peculiarity of it that I find so entertaining . . . I like Jimmy Van Heusen’s tune and Sammy Cahn’s dopey lyric and the choreography that looks like an ad for FDS. I like James Darren’s faux-Sinatra voice. The rest of “Under the Yum Yum Tree” (Columbia, 1963) is unspeakable garbage. But, oh, I do like the song. Five years ago, I attempted to show this number to my impressionable three year-old goddaughter when she and her mum were in town for a visit. Mum put a stop to it at once. She didn’t want her little girl polluted with such rubbish. Anyhow, my goddaughter will be eight on August 3 of this year, so I thought I’d drop the offending number into this post, that it may always be available to her, now that she has achieved the age of reason.

Frederick Brisson, the producer of “Under the Yum Yum Tree,” was married to Rosalind Russell from 1941 until his death in 1984. An unprepossessing man, he was widely known as “the Lizard of Roz.” How awful for him.

Made in Paris

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

And speakin’ of awful, howzabout this cherce nugget? It’s “Made in Paris” (Metro, 1966). Have you ever seen this picture? This is the sort of pop-schlock Metro put out in the mid-sixties — and it’s the sort of pop-schlock that almost put Metro out of business for keeps. In the sixties, Metro turned out a lot of this sort of squaresville peek-a-boo crap, then couldn’t understand why people stayed home. Until a few weeks ago, I never even heard of this one — though I seem to remember its photograph was on the side of a milk carton back in the late seventies. My sister-in-law Deirdre is a big Ann-Margret fan, so she almost certainly knows this picture . . . but does anyone else? Anyhow, the picture is awful — so idiotic, it makes the Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedies look like Preston Sturges by comparison. But this opening sequence has a lot of pizzazz. The streets, as you will see, are strictly Metro backlot — the very streets that Gene Kelly roller-skated on.

I like the fashions by Helen Rose. I like the score, too. I like the Crêpes Suzette. I do not like Chad Everett, but I do like what happens to him. Count Basie, man! Dig that. I love how he’s Metro’s idea of being hip. I’m always glad to see and hear Count Basie, but in 1966, when this picture was released, he was hardly catnip to the younger generation, which the studio clearly hoped he’d be. And take a look at the opening credits, which are a perfect example of mid-sixties Metro. The tune is by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, who were definitely hot in 1966, but the hipster who sings it? Trini “Lemon Tree, Very Pretty” López! Notice, too, that the picture features a song by that master composer of pop tunes, Mr Red (“Good night and God bleth”) Skelton. Georgie Stoll, who scored this swingin’ picture, had been at MGM since 1937 . . . ! (Classicists may be amused or dismayed to see in the credits that the production company responsible for this prurient shit had the effrontery to name itself after the Muse of Music, Euterpe, who in ancient times was often called “the giver of delight.”)

Here’s an interesting fact: the last contract player at Metro was none other than Chad Everett. The studio that once boasted “More stars than there are in heaven,” ended up with a single actor under contract, and he was Chad Everett. Cue the last stanza of “The Hollow Men” . . .