Tag Archives: Louis Calhern

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.

‘Executive Suite’: Life and Death at the Top

Executive Suite Poster:  Funny, but completely misleading.  That chick with Bill Holden is supposed to be June Allyson -- she looks more like va-va-voom Elaine Stewart from 'The Bad and the Beautiful.'

Executive Suite Poster: Funny, but misleading. That chick with Bill Holden on the upper left is supposed to be June Allyson — she looks more like va-va-va-voom Elaine Stewart from ‘The Bad and the Beautiful.’

Metro’s classy 1954 boardroom drama, “Executive Suite,” never gets the respect it deserves. The picture is engrossing from the first moment till the last shot.  It opens with sounds of traffic and pedestrians over which veteran television anchorman, Chet Huntley, announces:

It is always up there, close to the clouds, on the topmost floors of the sky-reaching towers of big business. And because it is high in the sky, you may think that those who work there are somehow above and beyond the tensions and temptations of the lower floors. This is to say . . . that it isn’t so.

Executive Suite Titles

BONNG!

Immediately after, you hear a great bell in a clock tower roll out a big, sonorous D:  BONNG!  EXECUTIVE SUITE

Then another BONNG!  WILLIAM HOLDEN; BONNG! JUNE ALLYSON; BONNG!  BARBARA STANWYCK BONNG!. . . and so on through the all-star cast.  It’s incredibly portentous, and even a little bit silly, in a nice way.

The director, Robert Wise, stages the opening scene in an unusually imaginative way for a big studio picture:  the POV puts us in the shoes of Avery Bullard, dynamic president of the Tredway Corporation (a furniture manufacturing concern).  He has just finished a meeting on Wall Street and is now on his way back to his headquarters in Pennsylvania.  First, he stops in at the Western Union office in the lobby.  We see only his hands as he writes out the following:

Avery Bullard sends his final wire.

Avery Bullard sends his final wire.

He hands it to the telegrapher.  We hear him say “Straight wire.”  He pays, we go out onto the street with him (we’re still in his shoes), he hails a taxi . . . then the son of a bitch drops dead of a stroke in the midday sun.  His wallet flies out of his hand as he falls; a passerby scoops it up, pockets the cash and throws his billfold away in a wire trash basket.  From this opening sequence till the last frame, it’s a non-stop joy ride, skillfully directed and acted, cleverly plotted and scripted.

Fredric March, William Holden, Walter Pidgeon:  Contenders three:  conniving bean-counter, crusading hero, weak sister.

Fredric March, William Holden, Walter Pidgeon — Contenders three: conniving bean-counter, crusading hero, weak sister.

The sudden death of Bullard leaves the top position at Tredway open for five ambitious veeps to snarl over, which makes up the balance of the picture.  Along with all the corporate jiggery-pokery and hanky-panky, it also offers a prescient commentary about the wrong path down which American business was heading in the post-War boom years, and (ahem) still is. The depiction of how businessmen work their swindles and advance their careers is necessarily simplified and steamed-up — but the central argument of the picture is sound.  It’s one of the most enjoyable movies I know.  I liked it the first time I saw it, but repeated viewings have made me like it more and more. Most unusually, the movie has no score other than the loud tolling of the clock that is housed in Tredway Corp.’s gothic deco headquarters (known as “The Tower”).  The movie’s climax is a board meeting at 6:00 p.m. the following day, so throughout the movie, dramatic scenes are punctuated by the tolling of this clock, which lets us know how near we are to the dramatic conclusion.  It’s an all star cast headed by William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Louis Calhern, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters and several others, and they really know how to slice the bologna thin.  As the late Bullard’s secretary, Nina Foch, in the smallest of the starring roles, gives the busiest performance.  She’s quietly, desperately in love with the man she worked for.  Apparently, he never knew.  Foch makes sure as hell we do . . .

Foch -- rhymes with bosh:  Miss Foch's hands work busily a day . . .

Foch — rhymes with bosh: Miss Foch’s hands work busily a day . . .

She was the only cast member to be nominated for an Oscar, of course.  She lost.  (At the time, she was married to that puling ghoul from the Actors Studio, James Lipton.  Strike two . . . )

The script is by Ernest Lehman (who also wrote “North by Northwest” and “Sweet Smell of Success”), so it’s full of hard-boiled dialogue that’s a pleasure to listen to for its own sake.  Lehman didn’t get a nomination, unfortunately.  That year George Seaton’s adaptation of Clifford Odets’ “The Country Girl” (also starring William Holden) won best adapted screenplay.  Another Holden picture was also nominated, “Sabrina.”  “Executive Suite” was robbed.

The picture is full of great star turns.  Shelley Winters is more controlled than usual and is quite touching as the lovelorn secretary of her married boss, Paul Douglas, who always looks like an ad for Alka-Seltzer.

Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters:  'Honey, it'll be all right.'  Oh, no it won't.

Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters: ‘Honey, it’ll be all right.’ Oh, no it won’t.

I could watch Louis Calhern in anything — he’s one of Peter Arno’s beefy businessmen, half-mast eyes on a martini & palm on a blonde’s caboose. Here’s a test:  look at the four images below and see if you can tell which one is the real Louis Calhern.  I chose these pictures, and even I have trouble picking him out of the lineup.

Number One:

'Fill 'er up.'

‘Fill ‘er up.’

Number Two:

Sizzling Platter

Sizzling Platter

Number Three:

'Look, I told you I was busy.  Wait for me at the bar . . . at the bar!'

‘Look, I told you I was busy. Wait for me at the bar . . . at the bar!’

Number Four:

Makes you kind of pleased to be an American, doesn't it?

‘Makes you kind of pleased to be an American, doesn’t it?’

If you guessed Number Three, congratulations.  If you were here right now, I’d shake you a nice, bone-dry martini.  I’ll have much more to say about Louis Calhern at another time, in another post.  For now, have a look at this clip.  He always earned his salary fair and square.

William Holden is the hero of this picture, an idealistic industrial designer named Don Walling.  Near the end of the picture, he delivers a long speech before the board of directors in which he lays out the wrong direction American business is heading.  Holden handles the material masterfully.  This may be the first picture in which Holden really came into his own as an authoritative voice of reason.  After this picture, at any rate, Holden was never again a boy — even when a script required him to be.  He gives a fine performance in “Picnic,” which came out a year later — in that one, he looks great, sounds great, is great, but he’s also at least fifteen years too old for the role:  he’s a man, not a callow youth.  Holden is such a likable, attractive presence, one is willing to overlook the miscasting, but the story hardly makes sense with a man in a part written for a boy.  But the role of Don Walling is tailor-made for him . . . and incidentally, no actor ever wore a business suit better than Bill Holden.

Jiggery pokery at the top of The Tower.

Jiggery pokery at the top of The Tower.

But the performance I especially love is Fredric March’s.  As Loren Shaw, Tredway’s comptroller, March is the embodiment of sweating duplicity — a man who lives for his charts and matrices:  a skulking, heartless spinner of webs and counter of beans; the only evidence of his humanity is his visible discomfort whenever he’s in the presence of the people over whom his ambition hopes to vault.  Every time his integrity or honesty is challenged, he breaks out in a sweat as he parries the thrusts, and he habitually strokes the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other as he speaks.  He’s Uriah Heep and Richard Nixon stuffed into one gray flannel suit.  He follows every confrontation with his colleagues (which is to say whenever he comes into contact with them) with the same ritual:  he wipes his palms with his handkerchief, then dabs his lips with it, before he returns it to his pocket.  After one such collision, he disposes of the handkerchief after soiling it and retrieves a new one from his desk drawer:  his drawer is full of them.  But he’s really at his funniest when he has to express sympathy or compassion — his bloodless insincerity is a marvel to behold.

March as Loren Shaw: 'That's priced merchandise - it serves a definite purpose in the profit structure of this company. We're not cheating anyone.'

March as Loren Phineas Shaw: ‘That’s priced merchandise — it serves a definite purpose in the profit structure of this company. We’re not cheating anyone.’