Tag Archives: Jane Cowl

Arms and the Hams: ‘Stage Door Canteen’

Original poster.

Original poster.

There were a lot of morale-boosting musical revue pictures made during World War II. They featured as many big stars as could be crammed into a two-hour running time and usually had a gossamer-thin plot to give a bit of organization to the various numbers. “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” “This Is the Army,” “Hollywood Canteen” and “Stage Door Canteen” all followed this plan. “This Is the Army” was originally produced on Broadway and is the only one that was filmed in color. But “Stage Door Canteen” is the one that I feel holds up the best. Unhappily, the picture has not been restored or remastered, so the quality of the image and the soundtrack have suffered more than the others.

“Stage Door Canteen” begins on an army transport train as it speeds toward the New York City area. This clip introduces us to the soldiers known as Dakota, California, Jersey and Texas aboard that train as it rumbles across Ohio. Several years ago, when Alfred Uhry was the guest programmer on TCM, he selected this picture and singled out this scene as having special meaning for him. I wish I could remember his exact words, but he mentioned that when he saw the picture as a boy, the girls on the train platform in their clear vinyl raincoats looked to him like angels. I confess I hadn’t thought of that before, but now whenever I see this scene, I wonder how I could have missed that image. They do look like angels as they take the GIs’ letters and hand out free packs of cigarettes. The tune that’s being played on the harmonica is “Don’t Worry Island,” which shows up later in the picture, played by the Freddy Martin Orchestra.

Soldiers Come to Town

There’s a weird linguistic usage that is often employed in these wartime pictures: young men and women constantly refer to themselves in a slangy form of the third person, especially when they talk about their hopes and future plans. Technically speaking, this is a rhetorical device known as antonomasia, in which an epithet substitutes for a proper name (for example, the substitution of “that paperhanging son of a bitch” for “Hitler”). Antonomasia is generally used to refer to others. The usage that I’m describing is unusual because the characters who employ the device use it to talk about themselves. In this particular scene, there are two examples of this curious use of antonomasia: “Sometimes a fella feels like he’d like to write to somebody,” (read: “Sometimes I’d like to write to a girl”) “Kinda makes a guy wish he had a nice girl he could kiss goodbye,” (read: “I wish I had a girl to kiss goodbye”). Odd as the usage is (or at least as odd as I think it is), it is common to many plays, screenplays and songs written in the thirties and forties; it shows up repeatedly throughout “Stage Door Canteen.” I’ve never been able to tell if this is simply a stylistic convention of the period, or if people actually spoke that way in those days. It sure sounds corny, but I can’t help liking the sincerity with which such lines are delivered. It’s a distancing device, intended to let “just folks” heroes and heroines express ideas about themselves that the authors worry are more exalted than their characters’ stations in life warrant. It allows them to be highfalutin and common at the same time. Sort of.

Delmer Daves wrote the script. (He also wrote and directed “Hollywood Canteen.”) “Stage Door Canteen” is no less corny than the other morale-boosting revues, but perhaps because it’s from a small studio and set in New York City, it’s less slick and seems more heartfelt. Of course I don’t take “Stage Door Canteen” as an accurate picture of how it actually was, but I like to think it’s how it must have felt. It’s also quite well acted by the non-celebrity actors and actresses, few of whom managed to have much of a career after the War.

Heartbreak

One unusual element that “Stage Door Canteen” has is heartbreak; it has heartbreak in spades. Other pictures in this genre avoided anything approximating grim reality. Here are two examples:

The Royle Treatment (a/k/a The Heave-Ho)

This scene comes early in the picture. I’ve always been crazy about Selena Royle, but I must say the girl, Marion Shockley, is also wonderful. It’s a shame she didn’t have a bigger career, and much of it prior to this picture was frittered away on a wretched series of shorts about an intrepid heroine by the name of Torchy. I’ve seen several of them on TCM; they are dreadful. Shockley was married to Bud Collyer, who was for many years the host of “To Tell the Truth,” and the voice of Superman(!) on the old cartoon series.

The Valiant Brother versus the Blankety-Blank Japs

In this clip, Jean, one of the young hostesses from the Canteen, reads her brother’s letter aloud to her roommates (they’re also hostesses). The actress is a Warners contract player named Marjorie Riordan. Pay particular attention to the gorgeous underscoring, which is used beautifully, perfectly: it supports the emotionalism without forcing it; when the development settles down, the tune that emerges is “We Mustn’t Say Goodbye,” a ravishing melody, which we will hear Lanny Ross sing about a half hour after this scene. Notice, too, the nice composition and lighting.

Marjorie Riordan’s biggest role came a year later, when she played the adult daughter of Claude Rains and Bette Davis in “Mr Skeffington.” In the fifties, she became disenchanted with the acting profession, which she found intellectually unsatisfying. She went back to school to study the psycho-dynamics of stammering before she moved on to the field of clinical psychology. I mention this because her reading of the letter suggests that, quite apart from her talent as an actress, she’s extremely intelligent. The text of the letter is full of sentimental clichés and is specifically intended to jerk tears. But Riordan fights the tears; occasionally she is nearly overcome by emotion as she reads, but then she pauses for a moment and continues in an even voice. It’s a remarkably skillful and restrained performance, and it often moves me to tears but never makes me feel as if I’ve been had. She was 22 years old when this scene was shot, but her technical skill is that of a much more experienced actress.

I’m also impressed by Cheryl Walker, who plays Eileen, a seemingly heartless Broadway hopeful. She’s the one character in the picture who goes through an emotional and psychological transformation, and she does it beautifully and believably. Unfortunately for Cheryl Walker, like most of the other young unknowns in this picture, her career never took off.

Brushes with Greatness

The biggest selling attraction in the Cheer Up the Home Front genre was always the crowds of famous movie stars, singers and musicians. Another thing that sets “Stage Door Canteen” apart from the others (aside from the higher quality of young actors) is its large number of theatrical stars and New York personalities, many of whom rarely made motion pictures.

A Few Moments with the Lunts

This clip is not terribly interesting, except that it’s one of the rare screen appearances by the Lunts (a/k/a Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne), who were unquestionably the most celebrated and well-liked married acting couple for most of the mid-twentieth century. They were famous for their ability to keep performances fresh after a thousand performances and two years of touring the sticks. (A famous acting lesson tells of how Lunt once complained after a performance: “Why have they stopped laughing when I ask for a cup of tea? The line used to get a big laugh . . .” Fontanne replied, “Because you’re asking for it. You used to ask for a cup of tea.”) They even come close to making this inferior-grade stuff seem witty and fresh.

Katharine Cornell

“Stage Door Canteen” is the only motion picture Katharine Cornell ever appeared in. She did a couple of live television shows, but no other pictures. In her time — running from the twenties to the mid-fifties — she was one of the two or three most celebrated stage actresses in America. She was talented and extremely well-liked. She gave Christopher Plummer his first big break on Broadway. Here is a shrewdly observed passage about “Kit” Cornell from Plummer’s excellent memoir, “In Spite of Myself”:

Guthrie [McClintock, Cornell’s husband/business partner/director/manager] could never turn Miss Kit into a great actress. No matter how skillful his presentation of her — she remained always the same — fine, noble, sympathetic, in everything she portrayed. But by bringing those qualities of hers to the surface he had, intentionally or not, turned her into a great star and a great “boss.” She ruled her little kingdom like a queen and as she worshipped goodness to obsession, so she believed everyone in it to be good. When one of her lambs decided to stray from the path of righteousness, she simply refused to believe it; and if some outsider dared criticize her “brood” she turned a deaf ear and a cold shoulder.

Listen to her speak Shakespeare, and she is almost equally reluctant to let one of her iambs stray. (That’s a joke, not a dig.)

Plummer must surely be right: Cornell was probably not a great actress, but she is, as he says, “fine, noble, sympathetic.” I love the whole idea of her, and I think she speaks the lines beautifully. Like Jane Cowl, Lynn Fontanne and several other actresses of that era, Cornell offers a glimpse of what “great acting” looked like before the Method changed American acting almost overnight. Cornell is obviously way too old to be swanning about on a moonlit Veronese balcony, but she’s incredibly poignant and romantic. On the other hand, whenever I see this one scene she did for the movies, I can’t help thinking of her private life and of what Ethel Merman once said about Mary Martin to an admirer of Mary Martin, “Ya know, she’s a big dyke!” Speaking of which:

The Merm Marches through Berlin

Here’s Ethel Merman at the peak of her Broadway popularity, singing a jingo tune. I particularly like the lines “The Devil put on a diff’rent face/Came to plague the human race . . .” When did it become unfashionable to demonize the enemy? I suspect it was probably around the time of the Mỹ Lai massacre, but I’m only guessing. At any rate, because the technique hasn’t been used in decades, when I come across an example of it, it always gives me a little thrill of conscience-stricken pleasure. This clip begins with a youngish Georgie Jessel, some years before he became America’s Toastmaster General. His celebrity mystified me when I was growing up, but now I find his brand of low-brow Jewish humor absolutely hilarious.

Merman was not much of a looker . . . ever. This picture was made in 1943; twenty-three years later, when she starred in a revival of one of her biggest hits, wags along the Main Stem dubbed the show “Granny Get Your Gun.” The stories about her saltiness are almost numberless. Here’s my favorite. During the month or so that she was married to Ernest Borgnine, a Hollywood big shot producer invited her to lunch. When she came home afterwards, Borgnine was watching TV. “How’d it go?” he asked, uninterested.

“SWELL!” she said, “He said I have the eyes of a teenager, the complexion of a twenty-year-old and the legs of a twenty-five-year-old!”

Borgnine’s face grew dark. “Howbout yuh sixty-year-old cunt?”

“You were never mentioned.”

Gracie Fields Sings of Japs and Jehovah

This is surely the weirdest pairing of numbers in the whole picture. British star of stage and screen, Gracie Fields, emerges from a wooden crate, sings a jingo tune, “Three Jap Planes,” then, almost without pausing for breath, goes into “The Lord’s Prayer.” I like both performances enormously; Frank Borsage staged “The Lord’s Prayer” nicely: the soldiers all rise to their feet as soon as they hear prayer in the smoky air, then bow their heads when she sings “Amen” — except for one young soldier in the center, which I take as evidence of inclusiveness not usually found in pictures of the period. Wearing her cardigan like a cape, Gracie Fields looks like a beefy, road company Deborah Kerr in “Tea and Sympathy.” I haven’t an ounce of religion in me, but I find the scene very touching. The astonishing bad taste and the depiction of the sneaky, unsportsmanlike Jap give the semi-religious sentimentality enough astringent wrongness to keep it from cloying. (“The Lord’s Prayer” was cut out of the British release. Hmm.)

The effort to demonize the dirty, skulking Jap was even more intense than it was for the lousy Kraut/Hun bastard. It was everywhere. In Hollywood pictures, high ranking Nazis were portrayed as rakish, debonair devils (Conrad Veidt, for example: venomous, but extremely attractive and witty); the Japanese were invariably portrayed as a terrifying, brutal sub-species with beaver teeth and thick, steel-rimmed spectacles. “Fibber McGee and Molly,” one of the most popular wartime radio shows, sold bonds with the slogan, “Every time you buy a bond,/You slap a Jap across the pond.”

Ah, so! They don't make posters like this anymore . . .

Ah, so! They don’t make posters like this anymore . . .

Though Gracie Fields never caught on in America, she was a huge star in England, and one of the most beloved women of her time; in Britain, she was invariably referred to as “Our Gracie.” When she became gravely ill in 1939, the story was front page news all over England. She was born in 1898, over a fish-and-chips shop in Rochdale, Lancashire. When she left England to be with her husband in America (Italian-born, he was declared an enemy alien in Britain when Italy joined the War), she was vilified in the British press as a traitor. They never mentioned the amount of work she did entertaining Commonwealth troops. When she toured British munitions factories during the War, most of her audiences were initially hostile, but (according to eyewitness accounts) in every case, she completely won them over by the end of her second number. Witnesses say that the effect she had on British audiences was terribly moving.

Ray Bolger

Bolger is a rather freakish talent: he’s a spazz attack in tap shoes and he raises exuberant brainlessness to a high-ish art. I don’t think I’ve ever liked him better than I do in this number. (I’ve excised the whole of his comic interlude between his two dance routines: it’s worth seeing, but it makes for a longer clip than serves my purpose here. The complete version can be found on YouTube.) His tapping is fiendish, fast and funny; his hold on the audience is extraordinary — you can see that these guys love him. And like “Seinfeld” decades later, his entire act is really about nothing. I find this routine irresistibly charming — it’s so incredibly cheerful and committed, extravagant and idiotic. The song is by Rodgers and Hart.

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy

Perhaps it’s due to my early exposure to Michael Redgrave’s harrowing portrayal of a ventriloquist in “Dead of Night,” or perhaps it’s the lifeless limbs and haunches that make me find puppets so unsettling, but whatever the reason is, I’ve always recoiled from them and all their pomps. Nevertheless, Charlie McCarthy really makes me laugh even while he gives me the creeps; when I was a child, he scared me batshit. I continue to hate Mortimer Snerd: I find nothing at all funny about the agonies of self-consciousness suffered by this horny-but-timorous mental defective with Jheri Curl locks and Jerry’s Kids limbs.

I first began to like W.C. Fields when I heard him, on a recording of an old Chase & Sanborn Hour, invite Charlie McCarthy to come to his place to take a piggyback ride on his buzz-saw. I’d have liked him even better if he’d extended the offer to McCarthy’s longtime companion, Mortimer Snerd. I’m amused by the way Bergen flings them away when he’s through with each in his turn: he slips the suddenly cataleptic Charlie off his arm and pats his shoulder lovingly, but Snerd he roughly tosses over backwards. I wonder if Edgar Bergen didn’t have a shame-faced crush on the cruel Charlie and find Snerd’s slavish adoration oppressive, while Charlie despised them both — a tab show “No Exit.”

Lanny Ross

Completely forgotten now, Lanny Ross was an amazing fellow. As you will hear, he has a beautiful tenor voice, full of ardor; his intonation and phrasing are perfect. He sang for the Yale glee club and took a law degree at Columbia University, and paid for everything with the money he made from his singing engagements. I find him very appealing. He has unmistakable class.


Wow, this song always knocks me out! I couldn’t believe that it didn’t win that year’s Oscar for Best Song — that is, until I saw what the competition was that year. A partial list of the nominations: “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe,” “My Shining Hour,” “That Old Black Magic,” “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” and the winner, Alice Faye singing “You’ll Never Know.” “We Mustn’t Say Goodbye” is a terrific number, but it wasn’t robbed.

Katharine Hepburn Does Her Bit

The young unknowns in “Stage Door Canteen” are generally as good or better than the celebrities they support. Take a hinge at this scene at the very end of the picture. Eileen, as if competing for the goody-goody prize, outdoes her Canteen girlfriends by marrying Dakota, whom she’d been snubbing through most of the picture. But before they can get them colored lights goin’, he’s shipped off to Europe, where, presumably, he’ll personally murder that paperhanging son of a bitch. Here’s what happens when Katharine Hepburn overhears the virgin bride’s lament. Hepburn gets through the material with authority and speed, but the real heart of the scene is in Cheryl Walker’s performance. Hepburn does most of the talking, but Walker gives the star her full attention and responds beautifully.

“Days without end, amen,” says Miss H. To which I reply, “Days without end . . . ahem.”

Young Ambition’s Ladder: ‘Payment on Demand’

Original Poster. It's not wrong, exactly, but makes the picture seem tawdry in a way that it is not.

Original Poster. It’s not wrong, exactly, but makes the picture seem tawdry in a way that it is not.

“Payment on Demand” (RKO, 1951) is one of the best Woman’s Pictures that I’ve yet encountered. There are several strong performances in it, beginning with the one given by Bette Davis. She plays Joyce Ramsay, an ambitious, social-climbing wife, jilted in middle-age by her ungrateful husband, David (Barry Sullivan). The many stages of a one-sided marital dissolution present Davis with a field day for outrageous hamming; instead she gives a performance of restraint and dignity: it’s a big performance, all right, but is in no way outlandish. This is the first picture she made after her contract with Warner Bros. ended. The last one she made for them (under protest) was the appalling “Beyond the Forest,” which contains the line made famous by Edward Albee: “What a dump.” It was an undignified end to an illustrious association between a great actress and a fine studio; in “Beyond the Forest,” she was camp all the way, but that’s what the material demanded — and she gave the picture what it needed . . .  good and hard. In this one, she is not camp. It’s not her best performance, but she’s damned good in it.

It’s almost gruesome to think of Joan Crawford in the same role. Come to think of it, you can see her in a similar part: have a look what she does in “Queen Bee” and you’ll see what happens when an actress goes for the hysteria and bathos rather than the wounded pride of an ambitious and intelligent woman. Both pictures are about ruthless social climbers, but as Davis climbs, she becomes grander, more sophisticated and genteel; Crawford’s idea of breeding is all about being affected and humorless. It’s easy to accept Bette Davis as a social register matron; Joan Crawford wouldn’t know gentility if it vomited on her Adrian gown. “Payment on Demand” has a better script than “Queen Bee” (though it’s hard to separate the badness of “Queen Bee” from the badness of Joan Crawford), and it has a much better leading actress.

The Peculiar Device

After David tells Joyce he wants a divorce, she revisits her past in a series of flashbacks. The director, Curtis Bernhardt, employs a strangely theatrical device throughout the first half of the picture, which was shot in 1950, the year after “Death of a Salesman” had created a sensation on Broadway. Over the years, Jo Mielziner’s extraordinarily atmospheric set for “Salesman” has become almost as famous as the play itself. In his design, some walls were non-existent, and others could be transparent, translucent or opaque, according to how they were lighted. During the present-day scenes, all of them, whether transparent or not, represented actual walls, and audiences accepted them as such. But during Willy’s flashbacks, the transparent walls lost their literal meaning: characters walked through them as if they weren’t there, and by violating the convention established for the present-day scenes, they established a new and different semi-reality, a form of ambiguity that is peculiar to the theatre. Onstage, the device was used to great effect: it created a clear sense of what was “real” (a relative term in live theatre) and what was memory or fantasy; more importantly, it underscored the slackening of Willy’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality and past from present.

Jo Mieziner's rendering for his set design for 'Death of a Salesman.'

Jo Mielziner’s rendering of his scenic design for ‘Death of a Salesman.’

Original production of 'Salesman.' Lee Cobb and Mildred Natwick in the foreground.

Original production of ‘Salesman.’ Lee Cobb and Mildred Natwick in the foreground.

“Payment on Demand” borrows this device, but only half-heartedly: all of Joyce’s flashbacks are announced by the appearance of frames of empty walls, but nobody ever walks through them. These transitory scenes begin in shadow, as if on a stage set before the lights have come up, with shadowy figures in the foreground, and frames of walls silhouetted against a half-lit background — sometimes ominous Wagnerian clouds scud across the empty surfaces. When the lights come up to full and we can recognize the characters in the scene, the clouds disappear and the walls become opaque. It’s an interesting, even surrealistic, effect. But there’s a problem: having once established that the opaque walls are really nothing more than theatrical “flats” (i.e., lightweight muslin stretched over frames), it becomes hard to accept them as being real walls, no matter how opaque they appear to be.

This device works exceptionally well in the theatre, where the mutually agreed upon “fourth wall” (i.e., the invisible barrier between the audience and the live actors, who pretend they’re not being looked at, even as they pause while they wait for laughter and applause to subside) and the plainly visible lighting grids and equipment automatically establish an artifice that calls for the suspension of disbelief, which is a fundamental element in the enjoyment of live theatre. Nobody really believes what they see on stage is actually occurring to real people. Besides, unlike Willy Loman, Joyce Ramsay is not losing her mind, but is simply remembering events from the past; moreover, she remembers her own past accurately and unsparingly. Anyhow, reality in a motion picture is different from that in the theatre: when you establish that the walls are not real in a movie, then where is the action supposed to be taking place? On a stage? If so, why isn’t there an audience on the screen? If the action is not happening on a stage, then where is it? A similar device was used for the recent screen adaption of “Anna Karenina,” but the theatrical stage settings were the most significant thematic element in Tom Stoppard’s screenplay. For better or worse, he employed the device as a metaphor for the rigidity of the social structure of Imperial Russia, in which everyone was expected to play within the confines of his scripted part, as actors must do in a well-made play. But in “Payment on Demand,” the device is little more than an oddity; it serves no function that I can detect, other than as a means of separating present-day scenes from remembered ones. But who the hell remembers his past as scenes from a stage play? The device might be less peculiar if the characters were show folk, but they’re not: they’re businessmen, lawyers and café society parlor snakes.

Bette Davis, Barry Sullivan: Out for a spin in a transparent car.

Bette Davis, Barry Sullivan: Out for a spin in a semi-transparent car.

Let me say plainly that I’m only ambivalent about this device; I’m not entirely against it. On the one hand, it tends to exaggerate the artificiality of the acceptable writing and better-than-acceptable acting; on the other hand — well — it’s interesting and often creates a strange and beautiful atmosphere. Visually speaking, the effect is most startling in a scene where Sullivan and Davis go out for a drive: we see the night sky and all the stars above them, and reflections, in the rear side windows, of the trees they pass. I find the image quite beautiful, but it’s so distracting that I forget to pay attention to the dialogue . . . so I’m ambivalent about the whole idea. I wish it worked better than it does. And I fear it doesn’t really work at all, except as a curiosity that separates “Payment on Demand” from a host of other Woman’s Pictures and as an excuse to stage some nice tableaux. The three pictures below show one of the most dramatic uses of the device, when Joyce and David attend their first lavish party for the swells. Jane Cowl is in the center of the bottom picture; she’s holding a cigarette in one hand and shaking Bette Davis’ hand with the other.

Payment Transparent Cowl 01
Payment Transparent Cowl 02
Payment Transparent Cowl 04

Jane Cowl

A few words about Jane Cowl, who plays society doyenne, Mrs Emily Hedges. She was a famous, even legendary, actress in her day. But as with so many theatrical celebrities, her fame evaporated almost before her corpse was stiff, and long before her bones were rotten. Like her contemporary, Edith Evans, she was not a great beauty, but her intelligence and charm were such that she made audiences believe she was. She set a record by playing over a thousand consecutive performances of Juliet on Broadway. About her performance, George Jean Nathan wrote, “hers is not . . . the best Juliet that I have seen, but she is by all odds the most charming.” She was known for playing “lachrymose” roles and was often described as having a “voice with a tear.” Jane Russell was named after her. (Figure that one out.) Here’s our introduction to her.


Leaving aside the ostentatiously theatrical oddity of the flashback device, “Payment on Demand” contains a fair amount of other nonsense. (Nonsense is as common in Woman’s Pictures as are infidelity, tears and death.) For example, there’s a flashback in which Joyce and David are supposed to be in their early twenties (or even their late teens); both of them impersonate youth by pitching their voices in a key about a fifth higher than their usual ones; both sound ludicrous: she sounds like Holly Hunter after five hot rum flips and he sounds like one of those kids who go to school, as Chris Rock once put it, “a half hour late, in a little-ass bus.” But I’m prepared to be lenient in the matter: it is a very short episode and reminds me pleasantly of an idiotic Saroyan one-act I was once in, when I was young and very much in love; it comes early and is best forgiven and forgotten. The flashback is necessary, and double-casting younger actors would have only made it worse: what other actress could play Bette Davis?

The Ladies Who Lunch

The day after David moves out of the house (and into the athletic club, which is what men did in those days), Joyce goes to lunch with her catty girlfriends. What follows is a staple of the Woman’s Picture genre: a hen party for well-to-do idle females who drink too much in the middle of the day. This one, I think, is particularly satisfying. The best-known actress in the coven is Natalie (“Gilligan’s Island”) Schafer. She plays Joyce’s cattiest and most voluble friend, Mrs Edna Blanton. Schafer was the fourth of Louis Calhern’s five wives. She survived nine turbulent years before they called it quits. (Ilka Chase, Calhern’s first wife, lasted a spare nine months.) Bear this in mind when you have a look at the clip; it adds depth to Schafer’s performance, which, out of context (and perhaps in context, too), may well seem camp. It’s unfair, but it’s hard to take seriously any line spoken by Lovey Howell.

After Joyce hears gossip about The Other Woman (another staple of the Woman’s Picture genre), she springs into action. First, she seeks professional help from a divorce attorney named Ted Prescott (the redoubtable Otto Kruger) and his operative, a no-nonsense bedroom dick, Mr Pinkins (Mack Williams). As always, Kruger has a cigarette going.


When Prescott lights a second cigarette for himself and offers one to Joyce, his first is still burning. Eternally smirking and surrounded by smoke, Kruger once again could easily be mistaken for Lucifer himself. He offers sagely conservative advice to his client, but this is Otto Kruger, man! He knows she won’t listen, so he makes sure that she gets “complete” coverage. In other words, the sky’s the limit.

Poster for French release. A much better title, which unfortunately doesn't translate into English well.

Poster for French release. A much better title, which unfortunately doesn’t translate well into English . . . ‘Madame Ambition,’ maybe . . . ?

The scenes dealing with the divorce settlement are remarkably frank for the time, and are among the best in the picture. Joyce’s demands are extreme and she is implacable. She broke a lot of rules and betrayed a lot of friends to make her husband a success: he wouldn’t have gone nearly so far without her ruthless ambition, and now she intends to get what she feels is owed to her. The scenes Sullivan plays with Davis in the middle of the picture are the best work he ever did. To complicate matters for Joyce, she’s still in love with David, who is not merely tired of her, but also sickened by her lack of ethics and her insatiable ambition; he repudiates the dirty tricks she played behind his back to move them up in the world and make them welcome in the salons and gaming rooms of high society. He knows he’s indebted to her, but when he learns of the means by which she climbed ambition’s ladder, he is disgusted by her callousness and dishonesty. Joyce is as devious as Regina Giddens, the villainess Davis played in “The Little Foxes” nine years earlier, but she’s a much more complicated woman.

‘First I Had a Dog, and Then an Old Widower, Then a Lady Companion’

Worn out by the legal wrangling, Joyce goes on a cruise while she waits for the divorce to become final. One port of call is in Haiti, where she visits the now-divorced Mrs Hedges. This is the last scene that Jane Cowl ever played. I think she’s remarkable. So remarkable, in fact, that I had seen the picture several times before I realized that her dialogue is not first-rate — it’s not even top-shelf second-rate stuff, like Maugham or Hellman. But Jane Cowl makes it sound brilliant and profound; as Claude Rains so often did in second-rate parts, she brings to it great sensitivity, sadness, wit and intelligence. Every second of her performance is full of life and rich with biographical information about the woman she’s playing. In her few minutes in this forgotten and neglected picture, I get a sense of what great stage acting looked like a hundred years ago — for Cowl’s career began in the ‘teens, and she represented a technique that went back another thirty years at least. She is a natural heir of Sir Henry Irving’s leading lady, Dame Ellen Terry, who was the great-aunt of Sir John Gielgud. They all have in common wit and sadness and easy tears, along with a virtue all too rare these days: a beautifully expressive voice that is a pleasure to listen to, for its own sake. I have great admiration for Jane Cowl, and in this, her final scene, she quietly but firmly tears it up. Wait till you hear what she does with the line, “First I had a dog, and then an old widower, then a lady companion.” Quite stunning.

Wow, isn’t she wonderful! I just never get used to her in this scene. Where are you gonna find an actress like this today? The closest I can imagine is Olympia Dukakis if she’d gone to finishing school. Well, never mind — that kind of part isn’t being written anymore. But this character type is one I’ve recognized in pictures since my earliest childhood — I’ve always been drawn to the batty old broads in pictures. When an old actress grows soft and sentimental and plays this sort of woman as a Sweet Old Darling (Helen Hayes and Gloria Stewart spring to mind), I can’t bear it. But when an actress of Jane Cowl’s shrewdness, experience and talent gets hold of such a part, it’s magic. The willowy and unattractive gigolo, Arthur, is played by James Griffith, who made a career playing low-lives and shit-heels, including Judas Iscariot (“Day of Triumph,” 1954). Poor Mrs Hedges! It’s terrible to imagine how she must feel waking up each morning next to that.

Jane Cowl played Kit Marlowe in the original Broadway production of “Old Acquaintance,” which Davis played with great distinction in the movie version. In “Mother Goddam,” Davis wrote, “I was unbelieving that I was playing scenes with her. I was nervous.” The two old pros have wonderful chemistry together, though I do wish the director had contrived to get both of them in the same shot more often — real chemistry happens only when two actors are seen together; back-and-forth close-ups don’t do full justice to great acting.

Cowl also wrote several hit plays with Jane Murfin; the most famous was “Smilin’ Through.” “Payment on Demand” was her last role in pictures; she is better than the material, but both she and Davis elevate it and make the picture well worth seeing.

The score by Victor Young is exquisitely beautiful. In my opinion, he was possibly the most gifted melodist of all the major Hollywood composers.