Tag Archives: Claude Rains

Classic Christmas Comedy: ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’

Big Lord Fauntleroy

Here are two versions of the scene in which Maggie tells Whiteside that she’s leaving him. In the movie version, Bette Davis is straight-forward and earnest, but she’s not the least bit funny. It’s not her fault: without the reaction of a live audience, there’s not a lot an actress can do above saying the lines in a reasonably credible way. Besides, except for the one zinger at the end of the scene, Maggie doesn’t have any punchlines. Still, when I watch this scene, I can’t help feeling that instead of driving the scene forward, Bette Davis keeps letting the air out of its tires. This happens throughout the course of the entire picture. Davis isn’t bad, she’s boring; Woolley is bad and boring.

But now have a look at what the wonderful Harriet Harris does with the same material. What’s most striking about the Roundabout’s production is this: for the first time, Maggie Cutler has fully as much personality as all the zanies who are Sheridan Whiteside’s friends.

Maggie’s outburst occurs about two-thirds of the way through Act One. In the Roundabout production, it was the second time a character exited to a big round of applause. After Maggie’s exit, nearly every major exit by a principal character was accompanied by loud applause. I’ve never seen anything else to match it.

Enter Beverly Carlton

Here is Reginald Gardiner as Beverly Carlton, a thinly disguised Noël Coward, in the screen version. I’m always glad to see Reginald Gardiner, but he holds back in this picture — he’s far more vibrant and funny in “Christmas in Connecticut”; he’s also more amusing (though probably for the wrong reasons) as Ginger Rogers’ hag-ridden husband in “Black Widow.”

Here is Byron Jennings as Beverly. It’s not often that I like to hear American actors attempt English accents (for some reason, American actresses fare a little bit better), but I like Jennings’ accent a lot. This is almost certainly because Noël Coward himself essentially invented his own accent, which — though it was certainly that of an Englishman — was not like anyone else’s. Jennings’ accent as Beverly Carlton is a nice riff on Coward’s invention, and as such, I think it works splendidly.

A Respite from Hilarity

In this next clip, Beverly performs a song specially written for the show by Cole Porter, who created a dead-on parody of Coward’s musical and lyrical style. Porter was great pals with Monty Woolley, who had been one of his professors at Yale. He wrote the song as a favor to his friend and the two authors, who thanked him with a gold cigarette case. I hasten to add that this is most definitely not a great song: it’s a brilliant parody of the second rate. It’s show-offy in precisely the way that Noël Coward so often was. In Stephen Sondheim’s book about lyrics, “Finishing the Hat,” he mentions that he “cordially but intensely dislike[s]” Coward’s lyrics and condemns them for coming in only two flavors, brittle and sentimental; according to Sondheim, when Coward’s sentimentality is in full flower, his lyrics veer into nonsense. Guilty as charged, I’m afraid. Cole Porter’s parody catches precisely Coward’s brittle flippancy, the sentimentality and artificiality of his lyrics, with their crowds of internal rhymes (e.g., “Softly a fluid/Druid/Meets me” — that slays me!), predicates that nonsensically precede their subjects (e.g., “Up to the stars/I climb”), and most devastatingly of all, Coward’s humdrum melodic invention, gussied up with chromaticism to give the banal melody “class.” Sondheim writes that Coward’s harmonic language is something he avoids like “dengue fever.” Well, at least he didn’t say he hates it.

“What Am I to Do?” is not in the picture, which I consider to be a serious miscalculation. To explain why, I must digress for a moment. Nine years before “The Man Who Came to Dinner” was a hit on Broadway, Moss Hart collaborated with Kaufman for the first time, on a farce about Hollywood called “Once in a Lifetime.” In the earliest out-of-town tryouts for this play, the first act was a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, but the laughs suddenly died halfway through Act Two, and Act Three played to ponderous and sepulchral silence. Many drafts later, Kaufman and Hart managed to keep the laughs going through the whole of Act Two, but Act Three still played to the crickets. Eventually, Kaufman became so discouraged he withdrew from the show (temporarily), and it died (temporarily) out of town. It was Sam Harris, the show’s associate producer (later, the sole producer of “The Man Who Came to Dinner”), who gave Hart the solution to the mystery of the disappearing laughter. Here is Moss Hart’s account (from his tremendously entertaining memoir, “Act One”) of what Harris told him:

I wish, kid, that this weren’t such a noisy play. . . . It’s a noisy play, kid. One of the noisiest plays I’ve ever been around. . . . Just think about it. Except for those two minutes at the beginning of the first act, there isn’t another spot in this whole play where two people sit down and talk quietly to each other. Is that right, or isn’t it? . . . Maybe noisy is the wrong word. But I’ve watched this play through maybe a hundred times, and I think one of the main things wrong with it is that it tires an audience out. It’s a tiring play to sit through, kid. . . I can almost feel them begin to get tired around me. That stage is so damn full of actors and scenery and costumes and props all the time they never get a chance to catch their breath and listen to the play. Sure they laugh, but I think they’re longing to see that stage just once with maybe two or three people on it quietly talking the whole thing over. Give them a chance to sit back themselves and kind of add the whole thing up. Once this show gets under way nobody ever talks to each other. They just keep pounding away like hell and running in and out of that scenery. It’s a noisy play, kid, you take my word for it.

Hart came up with the idea of jettisoning the most expensive set in the show and inserting one short, crucial scene at the beginning of Act Three — more bittersweet and nostalgic than funny . . . and quiet. This one short scene gave the audience a respite from the sidesplitting hilarity, Kaufman came back on board, and “Once in a Lifetime” became a smash hit. A much-needed respite from hilarity is exactly the effect of Beverly Carlton’s musical number: it’s charming in its own right, but in context, it becomes something approximating the Sublime. No, it’s not a great song: it’s faux-Coward, so it can’t be great. The point is that it captures the essence of Coward; it’s not first rate: it’s charming, nonsensical, flippant, bittersweet, irresistible. I’ve never been able to tell for sure whether or not Byron Jennings is actually accompanying himself on the piano, but when I saw the show, the sound definitely came from the instrument, not from a loudspeaker, and he certainly looks as if he’s playing it. Whatever the truth is, the possibility that he’s his own accompanist adds an unexpected virtuosity to his performance that makes it unforgettable.

Oh, hell, I like Byron Jennings’ performance so much, here’s the rest of it.

“The first baby will be named Beverly” is in the original script. “Then I hope it’s a girl” is new. I don’t know who came up with the line, but it’s terrific. For a topical play from 1939, the script has been left remarkably intact. Even in Kaufman’s day, when he directed his own plays, he had to call rehearsals in the middle of a run to “take out the improvements” (his expression) that the actors had incorporated. On one occasion, Kaufman stopped in to catch a matinee performance of the first act of “Of Thee I Sing,” the first musical to win a Pulitzer Prize, after it had been running for a few months. At the intermission, he sent a telegram to William Gaxton, the leading man: “WATCHING YOUR PERFORMANCE FROM THE LAST ROW STOP WISH YOU WERE HERE” . . .

Here’s another important element that was left out of the picture. The story of Elias P. Crockfield does not advance the plot, but it is our first (and really only) glimpse of Whiteside’s sentimental radio persona. And, like Beverly Carlton’s song in the second act, it follows a lot of break-neck comedy and gives the audience a chance to catch their breath. Lane’s performance of the speech is not as marvellous as much of the rest of his performance, but at least he approximates the idea well enough to get the job done. It’s a shame Claude Rains never played this role. I can’t imagine anyone who could handle Whiteside’s overt sentimentality and venomousness more deftly.

Enter Lorraine Sheldon

“The Man Who Came to Dinner” is notable for the number of characters in it who are based on celebrities of the day (i.e., 1939), with no attempt to conceal the identities of their real-life counterparts. Sheridan Whiteside is clearly based on the owlish radio personality, Alexander Woollcott; Beverly Carlton is unquestionably based on Noël Coward; the character Banjo is obviously based on Harpo Marx. I have been startled to discover that it is widely believed that Lorraine Sheldon is based on Gertrude Lawrence. Many sources, including the Library of America’s edition of Kaufman’s plays, blandly offer this as a matter of fact. Au contraire: she’s much closer in personality and background to Tallulah Bankhead. Lorraine Sheldon is not exactly like Tallulah Bankhead, either, but she certainly has much more in common with Bankhead than she has with Gertrude Lawrence. At any rate, an actress is bound to get more laughs playing Lorraine as if she were Tallulah than as if she were Gertie. Jean Smart (a very shrewd and capable comedienne) plays the role exactly as if she were Jean Smart, and that seems the best plan of all: she’s hilarious. She has two long moments on the telephone in Act Two that are about as broad and funny as anything I’ve ever seen. Out of context, I’m afraid they won’t mean much, so I’ll show you her entrance instead, which is plenty great.

Lorraine Sheldon has almost nothing at all in common with Gertrude Lawrence. Lawrence had two of her greatest successes with Noël Coward (“Private Lives” and “Tonight at 8:30”), and while her friendship with him was not without its bumps — both were highly temperamental — she was never his sworn enemy, as she is in “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” (On Lawrence’s opening night for “The King and I,” Coward sent her a telegram that read: “A WARM HAND ON YOUR OPENING.”) Nor did Lawrence ever chase “panting, from castle to castle,” an English nobleman. This latter distinction belongs to Tallulah Bankhead, who had an on-again off-again affair with Napier Stuart, Lord Alington, for many years. Most tellingly, like the fictional Lord Bottomley, Bankhead describes Alington (in her autobiography) as having “an almost repulsive mouth.” (Bring on the Roquefort cheese.) Like Lorraine Sheldon, Bankhead was American-born and was for a time considered one of the great actresses of the American theatre; Lawrence was primarily a star in Britain. And while Bankhead, like Lorraine Sheldon, was famous for her sexual rapaciousness, Lawrence was not. (Chico Marx was introduced to Bankhead at a party, but only after he was warned to behave himself in the presence of Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead’s daughter. Chico: “Miss Bankhead.” Tallulah: “Mr Marx.” Chico: “You know, I really want to fuck you.” Tallulah: “And so you shall, you old-fashioned boy.”)

In case you’re wondering, Dorothy di Frasso was an American-born café society Fascist, who married an Italian count and was close friends with Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. “Kit” (Katharine) Cornell was widely considered, in the thirties and forties, to be the finest actress on Broadway. Cornell gave Christopher Plummer a break early in his career; he was extremely fond of her, but insists that she was not, and never could be, a great actress. Beatrice Lillie was a famous (and famously scrawny) comedienne. Jock Whitney was a philanthropist, investor, U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom (under Eisenhower) and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. Sybil Cartwright is a fictional character. This Roundabout production was scrupulous about keeping in place nearly all of the original dropped names. Most of the versions I’ve seen (including the motion picture) alter the names to more current or better-known ones, which only makes the chatter less glamorous, without making it more meaningful to the general public, who are unlikely to recognize half of the names, anyway. One name that the Roundabout production changed bears mentioning: “Have you kidnapped someone, Sherry?” “Yes: that was the Lindbergh baby.” The line gets a laugh, which is what it’s supposed to do, and it’s just waspish enough for Woollcott to have said. I don’t believe, however, audiences in 1939 — seven years after the kidnapping — would have liked such a joke. Unfortunately, the victim mentioned in the original script is “Charley Ross,” a name that few people are likely to recognize. In its way, a Charley Ross joke is even more objectionable than one about the Lindbergh baby, but also (therefore) funnier. Charley Ross was the first nationally famous kidnapping victim. The four year-old Charley and his five year-old brother Walter were kidnapped from their front lawn in a wealthy section of Philadelphia in 1874. Walter was released, but Charley was held for ransom and never returned. The case was never solved. In the play, Dr Bradley appears to be about seventy years old, which makes him the same age Charley Ross, had he survived, would have been. It’s impossible to know what Kaufman would have thought about the alteration. On the one hand, I’m sure he’d hate to lose the laugh; on the other hand, I have a hunch he wouldn’t have considered the Lindbergh baby an acceptable substitute. I’m willing to accept it for the laughter it excites and for its astringency.

The Stage Design

One of the great pleasures of the Roundabout revival was the gorgeous set by Tony Walton. Here he is, describing how he came up with the look.

As it happens, I have a younger brother who designs sets for the student shows at the college where he teaches scenic and costume design. Some years ago, when I learnt that his school had presented “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” I asked him how he approached the set. He told me that he operated on the assumption that the Stanleys, in whose home the action takes place, were social-climbing vulgarians. “How did you demonstrate their vulgarity?” I asked. “Oh, I made the books match the drapes.” “My God,” I said, “that’s brilliant! Did the set get a laugh?” He took a pause worthy of Kaufman and Hart, then answered, “No, but all the faculty wives wanted me to decorate their homes.” I don’t mind playing straight man to a line as clever as that one.

‘Juarez’: German Expressionism Down Méjico Way

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Original poster.

I can’t claim it’s a great picture, but “Juarez” (Warner Bros., 1939) is a lot of fun. It’s probably much better than it has any right to be. Claude Rains as Louis-Napoléon is funny every second he’s on screen.

Here’s his first scene; it opens the picture. Rains was rarely so hammy as he is in “Juarez,” but the vigorous way he attacks the lines is exactly what his scenes call for. In this barely disguised expository scene, he’s saddled with the nearly impossible task of playing both Emperor of France and Chorus (i.e., telling us that which we need to know, but which his onscreen colleagues know only too well). He solves the problem by hamming it up to a fare-thee-well. I find it hilarious the way he flashes his eyes and emphasizes his royal displeasure by making full-arm jabbing motions at the members of his cabinet — with an overlong cigarette burning at all times. And keep your ear peeled for the first time Rains says “Monroe Doctrine.” As a boy, Rains had a terrible stammer that he worked hard to overcome, but he never quite mastered the letter “R,” which, when he was insufficiently vigilant, came out as a “W.” “Monroe Doctrine,” which is often spoken of in “Juarez,” presents an almost insuperable obstacle to him, with those two R’s in such close proximity: in this instance, it comes out as “Monroe Doctwin” (or nearly so: there is a hint of an “R” in there). This is funny in itself, but because he follows it with one of his lunging swordsman’s gestures, crying in a loud voice: “YOU!” — it’s even funnier. (It is a testament to Rains’ hard work that he only slips up once or twice on “Monroe Doctrine,” and only when he has a full head of steam up.) Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score also adds to the comedy. (To my ear, it sounds like orchestral acid indigestion: one can imagine its accompanying Elmer Fudd’s discomfort after, say, swallowing a bowl of mashed potatoes that Bugs Bunny has laced with chilies, nitroglycerin and alum.) As the Empress Eugènie, Louis-Napoléon’s dragon-lady helpmeet, Gale Sondergaard is also superbly funny. That such was almost certainly not her intention makes no difference at all: she’s a riot. Claude Rains drives every scene he’s in; because he’s such a tremendous clown, everyone who comes into his orbit automatically becomes either his comic conspirator or his stooge — including Bette Davis, as you will see for yourself in a minute.

Rains doesn’t appear again for almost an hour, and when he returns he puts on a good show. The image of him astride that wooden horse makes me laugh before he even opens his mouth. And of course, he’s still got one of his overlong ciggies going. That’s Hugh Sothern who plays the American Ambassador, John Bigelow, a representative of William Seward. Sothern looks so much like Seward, it’s a shame he never played the man. He only appeared in two dozen pictures, mostly in westerns — he played Old Hickory in two pictures (“The Buccaneer” and in one short). He’s good in this small part, but Rains wipes the floor with him, and all the while he’s atop that wooden horse.

Here’s his great scene with Bette Davis, the first one they ever played together. You can see from the still below that hers is not (ahem) a subtle performance: how could it be, with Rains’ shoveling up mountains of comedy for her to play against? She was extremely shy around him during the shooting of this picture. When she appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, she described it this way: “He was the King of France, who loathed Carlota, and I was a kid and petrified of Mr Rains. So I thought he hated me; I didn’t know he was playing the character. I thought he thinks I just STINK — what am I gonna do? But eventually we worked together quite a lot; eventually we became really great friends. We were really great friends.” What Davis didn’t tell Cavett (and no reason that she should have done) was that, like many of his co-stars, she fell madly in love with Rains, a feeling he did not return. She often sought refuge with him after the smash-up of her latest love affair or marriage, but he never gave her a tumble romantically. “Frankly,” he said, “I’m terrified of her!”

The ending of that scene, when Carlota’s fragile mind cracks and she goes tearing off helter-skelter into the void, is visually the most interesting moment in the picture, though there are many interesting cinematographic moments scattered throughout. The cinematographer is Tony Guadio: he was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Gregg Toland for “Wuthering Heights.” The director, William Dieterle, brought German Expressionism to Old Mexico, and the combination is often arresting — even stunning. The final shot in the picture — Carlota, now forever lost in the steepy night of lunacy, while the sun streams in on her — is also a stunner. Twenty years passed before I saw the picture for the second time; it was the one image that I never forgot. Such moments are enough to make me forgive a lot of misfires. Much of this picture uses distinctly Germanic lighting, which looks like ghost stories told round the campfire with flashlights under chins. Some of it is pretty arbitrary and foolish, but when it works, it works brilliantly — trouble is, it doesn’t work often enough. (Dieterle’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” photographed by Joseph August, uses the campfire bit even more luridly and often.)

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! Bette Davis as the Mad Carlota.

Although Bette Davis feared that Claude Rains hated her, she seems never to have given a second thought to Brian Aherne, who played her uxorious husband, the Emperor Maximilian von Habsburg. The thin-skinned Mr Aherne roundly detested her. Some years later, he observed, “Surely nobody but a mother could have loved Bette Davis at the height of her career.” In their scenes together, he gazes at her tenderly — love-besotted — while she rarely looks at him except as a means of putting exclamation marks on the ends of her sentences, or sometimes in the middle of them. She was a very great actress; her performance in “Juarez,” however, is not one of her best. It is certainly one of her busiest.

The biggest surprise in “Juarez” is that Brian Aherne gives a first rate performance. For once, his tree-top height and fey superiority don’t work against him. In comedies like “The Great Garrick,” he’s too diffident and self-conscious to be droll, and in drama, he’s too lightweight to be taken seriously. He’s rather good in the late-fifties sudser, “The Best of Everything,” but only by accident, I expect. In that one, he plays a boozy, ass-pinching, over-the-hill paperback editor — boozy, he can do; ass-pinching, less so — but in “The Best of Everything,” his reminiscences of long-ago days with Fitzgerald and Perkins, of how with them he heard the chimes at midnight, are what work best in his performance; they’re strangely effective, precisely because you don’t believe a word of them. His inability to make the tawdry third-rate stuff seem credible works in his favor. This must surely be an accident: I make no doubt that we’re supposed to believe his tales of his youthful triumphs and escapades; we’re supposed to pity the man because his success came too early and has been followed by an unbroken string of failures and humiliations: we’re to imagine that he became a soak somewhere along his sad and messy descent into has-been-hood. But Aherne’s performance suggests that he’s a glassy-eyed boozer because he’s a never-was, and that he never knew any of the literary celebrities who are the supporting players in his tippler’s tales of salad days that never were. At any rate, it’s a more interesting story that way. And I like to give second-raters like Aherne the benefit of the doubt. I’m also well-disposed toward Aherne because he wrote a charming book about George Sanders entitled “A Dreadful Man.” (Indeed he was.)

In “Juarez,” however, Aherne’s feather-weight superciliousness and scarecrow physique are perfectly suited to the Emperor Maximilian, an unwitting puppet of Louis-Napoléon. Maximilian is the most interesting and complicated character in the story — perhaps the only one who isn’t a Classics Illustrated cartoon. Maximilian’s unimpeachable integrity and unshakable belief in absolute monarchy as the wisest form of government are undermined by his incompetence as a leader and naïveté as a politician. When he learns that he has been duped by the petit-bourgeois French king, his agony is incredibly moving, but his attempts to set things right are doomed to fail, even pathetic. It takes a weak sister like Aherne to make this predicament tragic instead of merely ridiculous. For Maximilian is a ridiculous character, with his Viennese dandyism ludicrously out of place under the burning eye of the Mexican sun. Quite apart from the fussiness of his attire, he sports the most extravagant tonsorial fashion: the Emperor Maximilian and that year’s other cinematic would-be autocrat, the Cowardly Lion, appear to give their royal custom to the same barber.

Separated at Birth? 1939: The Year of Royal Oddballs; the Emperor of Mexico, da King of da Fores'.

Separated at Birth? 1939: The Year of Royal Oddballs; the Emperor of Mexico, da King udda Fores’.

Aherne’s performance was the only one in “Juarez” to receive an Oscar nomination, but he lost to horrible Thomas Mitchell, who won for his performance as the drunken sawbones in “Stagecoach.” Poor Brian Aherne! How terrible to lose to a performance so low as that one!

Since the picture is called “Juarez,” I suppose I should mention Paul Muni, who plays the title character. Oh, God . . . Well, he’s less terrible than usual. He plays the role under many pounds of makeup. In some scenes, he looks like the shorter brother of Boris Karloff as the Monster in the first two Frankenstein pictures. He looks as if Wile E. Coyote had dropped an anvil on his head. As Benito Juarez, Muni is a whole lot less animated than was his wont; in many scenes, he indicates gravitas by becoming nearly catatonic. It’s beyond me how he can be absolutely motionless and say almost nothing, yet still come across as an incorrigible ham. And to tell the truth, I dislike the guy so much, I haven’t been willing to do enough homework to unravel this mystery — I’d rather accept it as an unknowable perplexity than put myself through the punishment of figuring out how he does it. Of course it’s possible that I’m too prejudiced against him to accept that his performance is not hammy. But I sincerely doubt it. His makeup does a lot of hamming for him: his eyebrows have been concealed under some sort of prosthetic skin, and a pair of furry nubbins, like a black caterpillar cut in half, have taken their place. Muni manages to pull the corners of his mouth down so low that he often reminds me of the churlish apple tree on the Road to Oz.

Separated at Birth? Los Dos Sourpusses: Paul Muni and twin.

The nadir comes when he interviews a spirited young peón named Pepe (Manuel Díaz in his only movie role), who is so animated, one may be forgiven for imagining his name is Peppy. Juarez asks the young shepherd boy how his dogs fought off the depredations of a ferocious timber wolf; Pepe tells him the tale of the war of attrition against the marauder, with much exasperating pantomime: Muni’s slit eyes go evermore slitty till he says, “Jes, Pepe! Dat is de right way to fight a wolf!” And from this interview, the President of Mexico derives his ingenious strategy for the campaign which will eventually rid his beloved republic of the European overlords. It’s damned silly stuff. And I may say, not Muni’s fault. But why not blame him anyway?

The screenplay is by John Huston, with help from Æneas MacKenzie and Wolfgang Reinhardt, and is based in part upon a play by Franz Werfel and a novel (“The Phantom Crown”) by Betina Harding. In the circumstance, this has not proved to be too many cooks, though the quality of the script varies from scene to scene. Huston & Co. get through a lot of exposition in a hurry — it’s not good, but at least it’s fast, which is more than can be said of most historical pictures from the Studio Era. Muni’s scenes veer toward sanctimoniousness and sentimentality, but I’m unprepared to say whether this is the fault of the actor or the writers; it is probably a combination of both. Rains’ scenes are the funniest, though I doubt they’re intended to be; Aherne’s are the most touching — especially those with his Mexican cohorts who stand by him when the French withdraw their support. His romantic scenes with Davis aren’t entirely satisfactory, partly because she doesn’t bother to work with him and partly because I find it hard to take the tune that underscores their love scenes, “La Paloma,” seriously as a harbinger of tragedy. The orchestration is beautifully reminiscent of Puccini; the unidentified singer is a mezzo with a fast, tight vibrato (very much of the old school); she sings it ardently and with perfect simplicity, but the tune is — I don’t know — too familiar, too on-the-nose; it has underscored too many corny scenes of gay caballeros and their dreamy, hot-blooded señoritas Down Mexico Way.

The supporting cast includes a lot of famous actors, who give solid support. John Garfield plugs away at his role, but is miscast and affects an unfortunate accent that comes and goes without warning. It doesn’t help that we are treated to the sight of him in prison eating a raw ear of corn like an animal . . .

Oh, for corn sake, Porfirio! John Garfield as General Dìaz.

Oh, for corn sake, Porfirio! John Garfield, being all insolent and bestial as General Díaz.

Here’s an exchange between Garfield (as General Porfirio Díaz) and Aherne: the Emperor Maximilian visits the captured Díaz in prison to seek his help in restoring peace and order to the country. Garfield slices the baloney as thin as his talent will permit, but he’s quite hopeless. I don’t buy a word of it. His little stabs at a Mexican accent — on “Benito Juarez” and “constitution,” for example — make the whole thing seem idiotic, yet for all its silliness, I still find it mildly rousing: I know what it’s supposed to do, and am able to indulge Garfield’s incompetence. (I’d much prefer to see Gilbert Roland as Díaz, though he was perhaps far too aristocratic for the role.) Much of the picture is in approximately the same vein: constantly aiming high and missing the mark. But I like the ambitiousness of it. And in some scenes, it actually works just as it’s supposed to do.

Díaz: How can I help you?
Maximilian von Habsburg: By bringing peace to Mexico.
Díaz: Only one man can bring peace to Mexico: Benito Juarez.
Max von H: What is he, Benito Juarez, that he inspires men such as yourself, General Díaz? Tell me.
Díaz: What is he? He’s an ugly little man in a black frockcoat. He is Benito Juarez. He was born in misery, to live on a few grains of corn a day. He labored for an education; he used it to help his own people, and they elected him as a representative. He was imprisoned and exiled by a dictator, but he helped to destroy the dictator and free Mexico. He wrote the constitución. He became President of Mexico. He ruled it justly and well. Till traitors and landowners and speculators brought the French to depose him and put you in his place! YOU! Maximiliano von Habsburg!

I particularly like Gilbert Roland as Colonel Miguel López; Roland was one of the few Mexicans in the large cast. He looks great in military uniform and has authority and real finesse in a fairly underwritten part. He’s a perfect foil for Brian Aherne and Bette Davis, and a handsome devil.

Hola, guapo! Gilbert Roland as Col. Lôpez.

Hola, guapo! Gilbert Roland as Col. López.

Davis always had a soft spot for Roland: when she was first making her way in Hollywood, over at Universal in 1931, she was hired to be a “test girl,” which position sometimes required her to lie on a divan and be kissed by dozens of hopeful young actors. Kissing onscreen is a complicated business; not everyone can do it right so that it looks smooth and romantic. The first day on the job, she said she almost died of embarrassment — but the one young actor who was a marvellous kisser was Gilbert Roland. He got the part. Eight years later, they worked together in “Juarez”; they have only a few brief exchanges, but she has better chemistry with him than with Aherne.

Joseph Calleia, as the villainous vice president, Alejandro Uradi, who has designs on Juarez’s presidency, is almost as hilarious as Claude Rains, and like Rains, he steals every scene he’s in.

The Claude Rains Fan Club

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