Tag Archives: John Gielgud

‘Johnny Apollo’: Twenty Bucks and a Mink

Original poster.

Original poster: a rare instance of the poster exactly matching the tone of the picture it advertises.

Although there are plenty of gangsters and criminal pursuits in “Johnny Apollo” (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1940) it is a Papa Drama first, a Love Story second, and a Gangster Picture third. When the story opens, Wall Street tycoon Robert Cain Sr (Edward Arnold) has just been indicted for embezzlement. For Cain, it means scandal, disgrace, ruin and a stretch in the pen; for his son (Tyrone Power), it means paying for his father’s sins and a descent into a life of crime. You can read a more complete overview of the plot by clicking here.

Ty and Dotty Meet Cute

This scene should give you a good sense of the overall tone of the picture. As Lucky DuBarry, actress/saloon singer and part-time chippie, Dorothy Lamour lays on the tough girl stuff with a heavy hand, but for this picture, I think that’s a virtue. Her lack of subtlety and shrewdness makes Lucky increasingly poignant as the picture progresses.

I’m particularly fond of the scoring in this scene, with “Melancholy Baby” being played on a cheerfully rinky-dink honky tonk piano. I also like the way that the two characters, both of whom have loved ones cooling their heels in jail, play the scene looking at each other from behind bars.

On first viewing, I felt that Lamour was working too earnestly at the hard-bitten shtick. On further reflection, however, I think it’s not Lamour, but Lucky, who is trying too hard to be tough, and she overdoes it because she’s not terribly bright. In fact, she’s a bit of a lunkhead. She’s only got two settings: hard-boiled and half-baked. When she’s irritated, she puts on her tough girl act; when she’s sentimental, she gets sloppy and dreamy-eyed. But mainly, Lucky’s too sensitive for her own good and she needs the tough girl pose to protect herself. The problem is she’s not clever enough to fool anyone. That’s what makes her poignant. For instance, she says “Hey, look: get a load of the robin!” with an emphatically snotty tone of voice, as if she finds the innocence of nature something to sneer at. But immediately after she says it, she closes her eyes tight and crosses her fingers like a little girl. “Yer supposed ta make a wish.” The point is, she really is making a wish because she’s superstitious. Dope that she is, she overplays the baloney-on-wry patter, then undermines it by being overtly sentimental. Who knows how much thought Lamour did or didn’t put into this? Frankly, it doesn’t matter: all I care about is that it works. I find her enormously touching. Lucky’s lament — “That’s why I’m starvin’ ta death in a mink coat that I wouldn’t dare sell!” — tells her entire story in a single line. She never lets up on the world-weary downward inflections, and she looks with disapproving boredom at the world with her eyelids at half-mast, but you can tell that she’s got a good heart and is hungry for affection. And she’s got a little yen for this handsome sap, which is going to grow into something serious. For now, she’s in charge, because she’s not yet in love.

Johnny Meets Brennan the Shyster

There’s a sentimental cliché about lawyers in pictures that goes back to the earliest days of the talkies and maybe into the silents: the attorneys we’re supposed to like are usually drunks. I have no idea why the cliché continues to this day: I’ve worked in and around law firms for almost thirty years, and in all that time, I’ve never known a single attorney who was a loveable sot, or even an unloveable one. Anyhow, the drunken shyster in this one is played by Charley Grapewin, and he’s terrific. How I wish there were truth in this Hollywood fiction: I’d like it if this sort of soak were indeed a regular fixture in the legal profession. I’d like to hear a tosspot declaiming Latin poetry and Victorian bombast after returning from a liquid lunch.

The Latin quote, “. . . neque semper arcum/Tendit Apollo” (“Apollo does not always strain his bow”; which means, approximately, “Even the gods sometimes kick back”) is from Horace’s Ode II.X — and is slightly misquoted. I don’t know why it is, but whenever Hollywood writers spruce up their dialogue with passages from the Ancient Romans, they almost invariably choose Horace, and nearly always quote him wrong. Hooray for Hollywood. There’s another quotation in the scene worth mentioning. Grapewin, while on the brink of passing out, declaims the last three lines of this passage, which he also misquotes:

. . . Around her form I draw
The awful circle of our solemn church!
Step but a foot within that holy ground
And on thy head — yea, though it wore a crown —
I launch the curse of Rome!

Then he says, “Shhhh! I’m teaching my elephants Shakespeare.” This must surely be an inside joke. For that line is most decidedly not Shakespeare. It’s from the famous late nineteenth century verse drama, “Richelieu,” an old war horse that Edwin Booth made famous. The playwright was none other than Edward Bulwer-Lytton, he of “The Last Days of Pompeii” and “It was a dark and stormy night” notoriety. Darryl F. Zanuck, who was the head of Twentieth Century-Fox and the producer of this picture, began his independent producing career just a few years earlier. The first picture he produced was “Richelieu,” and it starred the then-famous old ham, George Arliss. Anyhow, I think it’s a sweet joke to have Charley Grapewin mistake Bulwer-Lytton for Shakespeare. (This reminds me, incidentally, of a funny exchange between Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in “Charade”: She: “Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said, ‘When strangers do meet in far off lands, they should e’er long see each other again’?” He: “Shakespeare never said that!” She: “How do you know?” He: “It’s terrible. You just made it up.” She: “Well, it sounds right . . .” Oh, no it doesn’t.)

This Is the Beginning of the End

I love the way Dorothy Lamour sings this torchy tune by Mack Gordon, and I like the arrangement. This tune comes about halfway into the picture and casts a romantic haze over much of the rest of the action that follows it. The lighting is also gorgeous: notice how cinematographer Arthur C. Miller has lighted Lamour and Power so that there’s a seam of silver running along their jawlines. They’re both extremely attractive people, but Miller makes them look like gods.

Lucky in Love

Lamour looks like a woman in love: her eyes never leave the man she loves, and you can tell that she’s no longer confident in his presence.

Dancing for Nickels and Dimes

Meanwhile, with his father still in the bighouse making boilers, our hero keeps getting sucked deeper and deeper into gangland activities. He spends a lot of time at Mickey Dwyer’s Paradise Club, where he watches Lucky perform ratty numbers like this one.

The tune (by Lionel Newman) and lyrics (by Frank Loesser) are lively and fun, but my God, how terrible that dance routine is! The girls are actually pretty good, but the steps are so vulgar, awkward and undignified that one gets the impression that the girls are to blame; the uncredited choreographer has gone out of his way to make them look like lousy hoofers. I wouldn’t have it any other way: for once, a picture features a dance number of the low quality one would expect to find at a low dive like the Paradise.

Lucky Talks Ethics to Mouthpiece

If just about any other actress in the world played this scene, it would be camp. But this is where Lamour’s straight-ahead, no-frills performance really wins the day. She doesn’t go in for any tricks; she doesn’t try to play more than exactly what the lines say.

She speaks every line with complete conviction. Bette Davis would probably play too many angles; Barbara Stanwyck would be too intelligent and strong to be entirely sympathetic. But Lamour talks tough because that’s the language she knows, but even while she uses snappy streetwise patter, she’s completely guileless. And old Charley Grapewin has beautiful chemistry with her. “Well, anybody that plays ball in your league has got to play a pretty fair brand of ball.” It’s probably the nicest thing anyone ever said to her, and you can see from the way the tears shine in her eyes how much the compliment means to her. The underscoring is “This Is the Beginning of the End,” and if the orchestration is more than a little woozy and soppy, so are the characters in the scene, and it’s the sort of music they respond to. I don’t deny that it’s all fairly crummy and obvious, but I love it. The material may be second rate, but you can see that the actors’ hearts are in it and they play it for all they’re worth. I find the scene irresistible.

As Far as Twenty Bucks and a Mink Coat’ll Take Me

The first time I saw “Johnny Apollo,” it was the afternoon feature on a local New York television station. I came upon it near the end, just about five or ten minutes before this next scene. I was well acquainted with Edward Arnold as a turbulent gasbag from the Capra pictures — sort of a poor-man’s Adolph Menjou (both were born on February 19, 1890) — but this was my introduction to Dorothy Lamour. (I’ve always been allergic to the Road pictures.) The way she handles herself in this scene made a positive and lasting impression on me. She also speaks what continues to be my favorite line in the picture.

Her performance had a specific importance to me when I first saw it: I was a full-time student in a university acting program where Lee Strasberg’s version of The Method was in full vigor. Without going into detail, I quickly discovered that The Method and I were not destined to get along, and now I was stuck taking a lot of acting classes that taught a technique that I came whole-heartedly to despise. Lamour’s style would have been harshly denounced by the Method teachers I worked with, but I felt she was not only far more natural in her actressy way than any of the girls in my classes, but she was more fun to watch, and like Mussolini, she kept the trains running on time. Most of all: she was infinitely touching. She holds herself together, while keeping herself perfectly framed within the cross-hatched grille that separates her from the prisoner. She does the acting so the audience can do the crying. Well, it’s the old lesson Dame Edith Evans gave to John Gielgud after one of his tear-soaked performances: “Johnny, if you would cry less, the audience would cry more.”

A few hours after I saw the end of “Johnny Apollo,” I had to be at a rehearsal for a show. As luck would have it, an opportunity arose for me to reply to somebody’s question with “As far as twenty bucks and a mink coat’ll take me.” Another cast member, who was two years my senior, immensely wealthy, incredibly glamorous and impossibly out of reach, had also seen “Johnny Apollo” that afternoon, and loved it. He was bursting to talk to somebody about it, but none of his friends had seen it. So, as has often happened in my life, simply by quoting a line of dialogue that had struck a chord, I stumbled into what became an important friendship. He was by far the greater connoisseur of this sort of movie, and his enthusiasm for B pictures with smart-aleck dialogue was the beginning of my love of trashy pictures. I remember we both took the line as an arrant bit of Hollywood camp. Yes, it is camp, but because Lamour speaks it with complete sincerity, I find that it’s much better and more satisfying than mere camp. And for me, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, which was cut short: he died young, in the first wave of the AIDS epidemic, and now I cannot see “Johnny Apollo” without thinking of him. I make no doubt, the very idea that “Johnny Apollo” would summon up the memory of him years after he had shuffled off this mortal coil would have made him roar with laughter.

The Beginning of a Beautiful Career: Claude Rains in ‘The Invisible Man’

Invisible Man Poster

Claude Rains made his Hollywood debut in “The Invisible Man” (Universal, 1933). In an irony worthy of the man himself, he played the leading role in a picture he doesn’t appear in, and it made him a star overnight. Every time I watch “The Invisible Man,” Rains’ performance reminds me why he will always be my favorite actor. In scene after scene, I find myself thinking, “Who else would even dream of reading the line that way? Who else could read it that way?” One of the hallmarks of Rains’ acting style is his stupendous gift for infusing humdrum dialogue with life and wit, for making “heavy ignorance aloft to fly” — but he’s hardly the only actor with such a gift. Walter Huston, a great leading man who became one of Hollywood’s finest character actors, put it this way: “Hell, I ain’t paid to make good lines sound good. I’m paid to make bad lines sound good.” Spinning leaden text into gold is what great actors are supposed to do. Many fine actors — William Powell, Melvyn Douglas, Ralph Richardson, to name but three — rival the Immortal Claude at making bad writing sound better than it is, though none surpasses him. Some great actors — Olivier, Gielgud, Plummer, for instance — nearly always make bad material worse by failing to conceal their contempt.

Keeping under wraps: Claude Rains as Dr Jack Griffin, the Invisible Man.

Keeping under wraps: Claude Rains as Dr Jack Griffin, the Invisible Man.

I know of only one time when Claude Rains made a bad part worse (as the pixieish father of “Four Daughters”). His mistake was to play up the sickening coyness, instead of playing against it. Some years later, when it was remade as a Frank Sinatra/Doris Day musical, “Young at Heart,” cadaverous, bleary-eyed, thin-skinned Robert Keith played the role. Keith was a journeyman hack, but he played that one rotten part better than Rains; Keith had no imagination and very little skill, so he said his lines quickly and got out of the way. In “The Invisible Man” Rains never puts a foot wrong. It’s one of the greatest debuts in movie history and one of his very best performances.

What he does in “The Invisible Man” is quite remarkable. On the surface, he gives a first rate rendition of a cartoon Mad Scientist, but beneath this cartoon exterior Rains brings seething emotional intensity. Rains slices the ham very thick in this one, but his technique is such that he can deliver one line like a Victorian actor/manager and then speak the next one with such simplicity that he seems perfectly natural. He modified his style over the years, but not greatly. He was old-fashioned in the way he worked out line readings and pauses — David Lean claimed he could see Rains counting out the beats for some of the pauses he took in “The Passionate Friends” — he approached his dialogue in much the same way as a musician approaches phrasing. On the other hand, his technique had much in common with Stella Adler’s: the use of imagination, careful analysis of the script, making interpretive choices according to their “worthiness for the stage.” Rains was the embodiment of Adler’s favorite admonition: “Don’t be boring.”

Enter Claude Rains

“I want a room and a fire.” Those are the first words Claude Rains ever spoke in a motion picture. James Whale shoots him from below, which makes his entrance immensely impressive. And a few moments later, you hear The Voice — with all the velvet and gravel in it. There’s not another voice I’d rather listen to.

Rains always said that the sound of his voice was mostly due to the damage done to his throat and vocal cords by a gas attack while fighting in the Great War. Rains entered the London Scottish Regiment as a Private, along with Basil Rathbone, Ronald Colman and Herbert Marshall; at war’s end, he had risen to the rank of Captain. The gas attack left him nearly blind in one eye for the rest of his life.

The fabulously antic landlady is Una O’Connor, who gave essentially the same performance throughout her entire career. Her publican husband is Forrester Harvey.

Rains Gets the Heave-Ho

One of the only objections H.G. Wells had about the adaptation was that his scientist, as written by R.C. Sherriff and portrayed by Rains, was mad from the moment he arrived, rather than slowly going out of his mind. It’s certainly true that in the screen version, Dr Jack Griffin (in the book he’s known only as Griffin) has a volatile temper from the moment he enters the inn, but it doesn’t look like madness to me. I’d say he becomes increasingly erratic over the course of several weeks. His mind begins to crack when the landlord tells him to pay up and get out.


“I implore you to let me stay! I beg of you!” he cries with the heavy tremolo and sob of a stentorian Nineteenth century ham pitching his bathos to the last row of the gods. I can hear the ghost of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (Rains’ first theatrical mentor) in the way he delivers that line. The old-fashioned declamatory techniques he uses, the showy theatricality of his acting style (what Christopher Plummer calls, with a graceful sweep of the arm, “the Grand Manner!”) and, above all, his white hot intensity make it an audacious performance. When you remember that this was his first Hollywood picture (and only his second picture ever: the first was a silent he made in England in 1920), his audacity is almost beyond belief: how easily it could have gone wrong! And that’s the second hallmark of Rains’ acting style: outrageousness, backed by superb technical skill and absolute commitment. In “The Invisible Man,” the violence of his first outburst is so explosive, it’s hard to believe he’ll be able to surpass it. He does. As a demonstration of technical skill, Claude Rains’ sustained temper tantrum in “The Invisible Man” is hard to beat. He may be the only actor I’d ever want to see play Timon of Athens.

The Rains Cackle

In this next clip, the local constable (E.E. Clive, in a very funny performance) comes to the inn to restore order and to ask, “‘ere, wot’s all this, then?” E.E. Clive always lifts my spirits. This is the first time we get to hear the full Rainsian cackle. Once he begins to cackle, that’s when it is clear that his most sovereign reason is now blasted with ecstasy.

You can hear torment in his famous cackle, which has been endlessly imitated. Mimics usually can reproduce Rains’ pitch and volume accurately enough, but nobody ever gets the brain fever and the fury that is in Rains’ shrieking laughter. It’s grandly theatrical — funny and thrilling at the same time — but there’s great passion in it too.

Rains of Terror

These next two clips show Rains hatching his very nasty schemes. His authority absolutely amazes me. William Harrigan is the terrified wretch whom Rains is pressing into service. Harrigan is very good, but the plain fact is that even though you can’t see Rains, you can’t take your eyes off him.

Rains Goes on a Power Trip

In this clip, Rains speaks to his fiancee about his plans. Though besotted with love for him, the young woman can plainly see he is barking mad. My favorite line is Rains’ response to her speech that begins, “Jack, I want you to let my father to help you. You know how clever he is.” Or, more accurately, his response is my favorite line reading. It’s a perfect example of the way Rains has of putting great zest and pizzazz into a line of no great merit.

“Your father, clever? You think he can help me? He’s got the brain of a tapeworm, a maggot!” The energy and heat Rains puts into that line gives me a thrill every time I hear it. His scorn for her father’s intelligence is so ferocious, and his indignation at the comparison is so extreme — all I can do is laugh. What makes it even more hilarious, he is, after all, speaking of her father. Calls him a tapeworm, a maggot. What is he, nuts? The girl is Gloria Stuart.