Tag Archives: Magnificent Obsession

Sugar Daddy: Notes on Otto Kruger

Otto Kruger in 'Cover Girl': One of his rare non-villain roles -- even so, we root against him.

Otto Kruger in ‘Cover Girl’: One of his rare non-villain roles — but we still root against him.

In 1905, when Otto Kruger was still a very young man, he earned his living by playing the piano for silent movies. He was an accomplished pianist as well as a violist and cellist, but when he left Toledo, Ohio, to attend Columbia University, he decided to become an actor instead of a musician. If he was as fine a musician as he was an actor, it was the music world’s loss. What a shame he never seems to have played an instrument in any of his motion pictures!

Here’s how Kruger once described his career to an interviewer: “For a while I played sad husbands. Then I got nothing but lawyers, and during the War, I specialized in Nazis . . . Then they had me play sugar daddies.” I can’t think of a better overview of his career than his own. The lawyers he played were nearly always crooked; most of his business tycoons were blackguards in pinstriped suits. Kruger’s villains nearly always wore stripes (pin or chalk), but never horizontal ones.

‘Saboteur’: The Nazi in White Tie

Here he is in one of his best known roles: Tobin, the Nazi spymaster, in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” (Universal, 1942):

Robert, the butler, who saps Bob Cummings at the end of his patriotic spiel, is wonderful old Ian Wolfe, who had an amazingly long movie career (from 1934 to 1990), throughout which he seemed to stay the same age. “Dick Tracy” was the last of his 294 pictures.

‘711 Ocean Drive’: The Dyspeptic Mob Boss

One of Kruger’s best baddies is in an unjustly neglected crime drama, “711 Ocean Drive” (Columbia, 1950). In this one, he’s Carl Stephans, the milk-drinking kingpin in charge of a national wire service, and as mean as they come. His very first line is one of the funniest in the picture. (I love the ceiling in this scene and laugh at the ludicrous cityscape backdrop. That’s real Poverty Row stuff we’re looking at: Columbia’s B-pictures were shot for next to nothing.)

Carl Stephans: Man or Kitten?

“Ugh, ghastly stuff! If I hadn’t picked up this duodenal worrying about our affairs, I’d be able to eat like a man instead of a kitten.” I love the way he pronounces “duodenal” as “dwadinuhl” (it’s a legitimate pronunciation, but I’d never heard it before). Kruger’s character is the most interesting in the picture: he’s an arch-fiend, but he’s also a fraidy-cat with a weak stomach. Don Porter is Larry Mason, the henchman to his immediate right; Bert Freed is the four-eyed lug to his left. His glasses are too small for his head — the earpieces don’t come close to touching his ears. Nice touch, that: it makes his head look bigger than it is.

Kingpin Vows Revenge

Here he is, coming from Larry Mason’s funeral; Mason was rubbed out by a rival from within the syndicate. Trouble is, the one who had him whacked is Mal Granger (Edmond O’Brien) — he’s the guy making time with Mason’s widow (Joanne Dru). She doesn’t know Granger’s guilty, but Carl Stephans has a sneaking suspicion — as he makes clear.

What Makes Sammy Sweat?

And here he is sweating poor little Sammy White, who played a lot of nervous schlemiels in the fifties — perhaps most famously as Lana Turner’s long-suffering agent in “The Bad and the Beautiful.” Pay attention to the way Kruger jumps when Sammy gets slapped, then his reading of “Besides . . . that’s Peterson’s department.” On the page, that line doesn’t seem like much, but just listen to what Kruger manages to do with it. He turns it into a three act play. What an actor!

Along the way, Kruger played some good guys, but he played so many rat bastards that to see him in a good guy part is almost as disorienting as to see Lana Turner play a great actress (e.g., “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Imitation of Life“): so unconvincing as to be a joke. Actually, I prefer Kruger’s good guys and red herrings because such parts are always underwritten and his unflappable insincerity adds more body, depth and interesting weirdness to those characters than they really deserve . . . and of course, the mismatch between his evil persona and a good guy part always makes me laugh. As a baddie, he’s so believable that after you’ve seen him as a Nazi fink or a crooked shyster, his honest characters never seem entirely on the level. When he plays a rock-solid citizen, I always expect all sorts of creepy crawly things to skitter out from under his feet as he walks. Kruger must surely be the most debonair bounder ever to come out of Toledo, Ohio.

‘Magnificent Obsession’: The Pious Humbug

'Magnificent Obsession': Kruger awakens the sleeping Rock Hudson. Religious instruction to follow.

‘Magnificent Obsession’: Kruger awakens the sleeping Rock Hudson. Religious instruction to follow.

Of the few dozen performances of his that I’ve seen, my favorite by a long, long chalk is his turn as the simpering, sermonizing do-gooder, Edward Randolph, in “Magnificent Obsession”  (Universal-International, 1954). It’s impossible to know if Kruger had any idea how funny his performance is: he’s Lloyd C. Douglas’ mouthpiece (though the character doesn’t exist in the book or in the 1935 picture); it falls to him to give out with Douglas’ sanctimonious pay-it-forward rigmarole every time he shows up. Kruger plays it straight — none of it would be funny if he didn’t. I find it impossible to divorce his performance from all those venomous reprobates he played so often and so well. As Edward Randolph, therefore, Kruger presents a very strange, quasi-alien personage — a cardigan-wearing just-folks aristocratic weirdo with a pipe in his mouth, a homily on his lips, and a choir celestial to punctuate the pious humbug he spouts. He assures the Widow Phillips (Jane Wyman), “You don’t talk much about this belief . . .” but then for the rest of the picture, he never shuts up about these secret teachings. (In the novel, this information is carefully set down in code in a manuscript called “Dr Hudson’s Secret Journal”:  pssst . . . pay it forward — don’t pass it on!)

Here are three clips from that performance.

Edward Randolph Hints at the Secret Belief

Can you believe the nerve of this guy?  “You don’t talk much about this belief. When somebody’s ready for it, they accept it.  Perhaps Wayne felt you weren’t quite ready . . . or, Mrs Phillips, that you were pretty perfect without it.” This is the first time he’s ever met the woman: how the hell would he know why her late husband kept his most cherished beliefs to himself while he gave his money away to deadbeats, thus leaving his youngish widow to drag along in leanest penury? And how does he know that she’s “pretty perfect”? To my ear, what he says sounds like a veiled insult followed by the worse insult of blatant flattery. Had Otto Kruger not played so many cold-blooded, smiling villains, it’s unlikely I’d be so ready to read malice in his benign observations.  But intentional or not, this ambiguity makes his performance a lot more interesting and certainly much funnier.

Randolph Lays It on the Line for Rock

I find it striking in the following clip how similar some of this saintly fellow’s patter is to that of Tobin’s in “Saboteur,” especially when he speaks of learning about “how to get what I want.” That’s what I mean when I say I can’t separate his saints from his sinners. His good and evil characters all want what they want, and will go to great lengths to get it; they smirk when they talk and speak in an oleaginous, authoritative voice; they habitually place great stress on the alliteration and consonance in their sentences (e.g., “the moron millions,” “probably the most important part,” etc.), which casts a shadow of artifice and insincerity on everything they say.

Randolph Cheerleads His New Convert

“You’ll find this furnishes your motive power!” Say what? God, I think that’s hilarious . . . “furnishe[s your] motive power” is straight from the novel. The expression is not explained in the book, either, but is presented as if it were a well-known concept.

The picture comes to a fittingly preposterous climax, in which former playboy/rotter Rock Hudson, having reinvented himself as America’s pre-eminent brain surgeon/philanthropic moneybags, performs a spectacular, never-before-attempted operation to restore Jane Wyman’s sight. Kruger watches the procedure from on high, like an Olympian deity gazing down upon a battle during the Trojan War. Frank Skinner’s underscoring is a souped-up variation of Chopin’s Etude Op. 10, No. 3 in E major.

Holy Toledo! Demi-god Kruger shines graciously upon a gentle brain-man (Dr Rock Hudson).

Holy Toledo! Demi-god Kruger shines graciously upon a gentle brain-man (Dr Rock Hudson).

The same year Kruger appeared in “Magnificent Obsession,” he also played a small part in 20th Century-Fox’s CinemaScope Technicolor semi-noir mystery called “Black Widow” (a very bad picture that I can’t get enough of — it has become my Less-than-Magnificent Obsession). On the DVD’s excellent commentary track, film historian Alan Rode describes Kruger’s performance as “sugar daddy lite.” Yes, that’s so. One of the final pre-production memos from Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck to Nunnally Johnson, who wrote, produced and directed the picture, included an instruction to dress Kruger in a silk dressing gown to “get a slight suggestion of sex interest” into Kruger’s role (he plays a stage actor with the improbable name Gordon Ling). In “Black Widow,” he’s the guiltiest looking red herring I’ve ever seen.

Otto Kruger, Van Heflin in 'Black Widow.'

Otto Kruger, Van Heflin in ‘Black Widow.’

If Kruger’s Gordon Ling were on trial in “12 Angry Men,” they’d find him guilty as charged; not even Juror Eight (Henry Fonda) would say a word in his defense. There’s not a reason in the world to suspect Gordon Ling of anything criminal, except that Kruger makes him seem so absolutely untrustworthy that it’s impossible to believe he hasn’t been up to some kind of deviltry. He reminds me of an old Arnie Levin cartoon that appeared in “The New Yorker” back in the nineties.

Cat Canary

The sinister oiliness of Kruger’s charm, his sphinxlike smirk, and the menacing glint in his eye always give me the sense that the sugar daddies he plays have seen and done a lot of unsavory things, and that they have decidedly unorthodox methods of satisfying their shameful lusts. One can easily imagine any one of his reprobates having a fully equipped sex-dungeon down in the sub-cellar and more than a few children buried under his porch.

‘Sex and the Single Girl’: The Last of Otto

Here’s Kruger in the first of two scenes he has in “Sex and the Single Girl” (Warner Bros., 1964), the last picture he ever made. He’s the head of a sex institute — not a stretch. The picture is terrible; he is hilarious. In the interest of time, I edited the clip with a very heavy hand, to leave out patches of dialogue that don’t involve Kruger. I paid no attention to making smooth edits, yet my re-edit is no more abrupt or jerky than the original. The picture was obviously thrown together in great haste. It’s unbelievably amateurish for a star-studded (Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall) release from a major studio.

‘Dirty Delusions of Grandeur’ — I Don’t Like This, I Don’t Like It At All

Listen to how brilliantly he reads the first line. He’s so much funnier than anyone else in the room. He acts Natalie Wood off the screen and he doesn’t even stand up from his desk to do it. He breaks a cardinal rule of acting — he emphasizes nearly every word — but he gets away with it.

Last Scene of All/That Ends This Strange Eventful History

                            . . . Last scene of all
That ends this strange eventful history . . .
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7

This is Kruger’s last half minute on film. Perhaps it’s a shame that this fine actor should end his career in such a terrible picture, but I prefer to think of it as a touching Pyrrhic victory: in the worst drivel, he’s still great. Kruger’s claim to fame (if he has one) is his ability to give interesting performances in bad pictures. After this picture, Otto Kruger suffered a series of strokes, which forced him to retire. He died ten years later on his eighty-ninth birthday, September 6, 1974.

My God, who wrote this shit? Ah, yes, now I remember . . . The title was written by Helen Gurley Brown; the screenplay was written by Joseph Heller. No wonder it sucks.

‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’: The Greatest British Motion Picture

Criterion Collection Blu-ray cover.

Criterion Collection Blu-ray cover.

I’ve admired “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” (Rank Organisation, 1943) for decades, but until Criterion released it on Blu-ray, my enjoyment has always been impaired somewhat by the quality of the Technicolor. Criterion’s DVD release from about a decade ago was a vast improvement over what I’d seen before, but I still disliked the Easter-egg pastels. British Technicolor, as I understand it, uses different chemicals from American Technicolor, which creates an entirely different palate. Most of the aficionados I’ve heard talk about color (Martin Scorsese, for instance) prefer the British Technicolor process; I do not. I like the vividness of American Technicolor — “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “An American in Paris” and “Magnificent Obsession” are three great examples of the kind of color I like best. Perhaps I’ll go into this in more detail in another post, but for now the point I want to make is this: with the new Blu-ray transfer of “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” one of the only two real objections I had with the picture has been removed: it looks fabulous. (There is, however, one challenging aspect that comes as a result of the new, super-sharp image: the age makeup that is used throughout the picture is unmistakable. Whether or not this is distracting, however, will surely depend on the individual. I rather like the additional layer of artifice it adds to the story, which is decidedly artificial and artistic, rather than realistic and documentarian.  Many of the outdoor locations (especially the battlefields) are obviously shot on sound stages (I like this, too).  But I can quite understand how a lot of people will find greasepaint wrinkles and white shoe-polish in the hair difficult to accept as indications of the depredations of age. C’est la guerre.)

Let me get my remaining objection out of the way at once: it’s the crummy score by Allan Gray. Mind you, it’s crummy, but hardly appalling in the way that so many modern scores are appalling: it isn’t used as aural wallpaper; it’s used with discretion and it’s nearly always clear what purpose it serves. The only problem I have with it is that I don’t like the way it sounds: the romantic theme is the most satisfactory thing in the score, but to my ear, it’s not as gorgeous as it should be (I can’t help wishing Korngold could have scored this picture!) — it’s not as fine as the writing and the acting. The comic underscoring is too broad and corny — it doesn’t tickle my funnybone; it digs its elbow into my ribs in a most disagreeable fashion.  Of course, it could be a whole lot worse: Allan Gray’s wretched score for “The African Queen” is far more bumptious and irritating — he’s at his worst when he thinks “it meet/To put an antic disposition on,” which he does throughout that picture.  In “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” which is less comic than “The African Queen,” he’s less overtly antic . . . but, alas, it appears that I am not merely anti-antic, but also anti-semi-antic.

The history of “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” is a long and tortuous one, beginning with Winston Churchill’s failed attempts to stop the picture from being made, to its being hacked to bits and restructured for American audiences in its first run, then to its almost total disappearance, and finally to its complete restoration in the 1990s. What must have audiences thought of it when it was slashed from 163 minutes to 90? On the commentary track, Martin Scorsese, who first saw it on a black and white television back in the 1950s, says it was impossible to follow what was going on. In its pristine restoration, it is a masterpiece: the single greatest British picture of them all. As far as I know, there’s not even a close second. It’s one of only a handful of works of genius ever put on film. Unlike many great pictures, it’s also a huge amount of fun. It is alternately hilarious, serious, charming, poignant and heartbreaking. It is lovely to look at and even more delightful to know. The more often I see it, the deeper my love for it grows. But do yourself a favor and watch it on Blu-ray, which will give you the truest experience. The DVD will do in a pinch, but the Blu-ray offers a much better picture and soundtrack. (The clips I have included are not, alas, from the Blu-ray — but they’re good enough to get the idea across.)

The acting from everyone in the cast is superlative. Deborah Kerr was only 21 when she made the picture; according to director Michael Powell, he was constantly astonished by her intelligence and talent. After one romantic scene halfway through the picture, Powell says on the commentary track, “Isn’t she fine? She always hit the right note. Most actors — even actresses — are not particularly intelligent; Deborah was particularly intelligent.” During another scene Powell says, almost in a state of bewilderment, “And she never put a foot wrong. She knew things in the part that she couldn’t have possibly known as a girl.” And indeed, her performance is almost unimaginably superb. She plays three separate roles that add up to what I think may reasonably be considered The Eternal Feminine: three young women who come into the life of our hero over the course of his career. Take for instance, this scene, in which she handles the dialogue with the finesse of an actress (I mean a great actress, of course) twice her age and with the sort of moral authority that comes only from extraordinary intelligence. Though I’ve admired Deborah Kerr for as long as I can remember, her performance in “Colonel Blimp” fills me with something more exalted and exhilarating than mere admiration.

Commonsense and Bad Manners

Her intelligence and diction remind me always of that line from “The Agamemnon,” which Taplow construes for Mr Crocker-Harris in “The Browning Version“:  θαυμάζομέν σου γλῶσσαν — “We marvel at thy tongue.” That’s the wonderful Roger Livesey who gets cold tongue for his supper. Michael Powell hoped to cast Laurence Olivier in the lead role, but the military refused to grant him temporary leave from active duty. Olivier was a much bigger star at the time, but I don’t think he had nearly the soulfulness and conspicuous honesty of Livesey — and none of the pathos. Once you’ve seen Roger Livesey in the part, no other actor seems possible: he’s just about the most charming and lovable actor who ever performed in front of a camera.

“Colonel Blimp” tells of the forty year military career of General Clive Wynne-Candy, running from the Boer War until the middle of the Second World War. In the course of those four decades, we see how manners, morals, styles and warfare change — we see whole ways of life come to an end and old duffers who try to figure out how they fit in in a world they don’t understand — a new world that is being created by young men who know nothing about who and what came before them. Clive Candy meets his greatest friend by accident. After a chance altercation over a point of honor in a Berlin café, Candy finds himself challenged to a duel (with sabers) against an opponent he has never met. Both he and his Prussian officer opponent give each other a good pasting — Candy takes eight stitches to the upper lip; his Prussian opponent, twelve stitches to the forehead. While they are recuperating in the same hospital, they meet over a rubber of bridge and become lifelong friends. This is the scene where they meet in hospital.

Very Much

The charming German lady, Frau von Kalteneck, is a wonderful actress by the name of Ursula Jeans. She was the wife of Roger Livesey and also the sister of the sublime comedienne, Isabel Jeans, who was the first Mrs Claude Rains. Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff is the great Viennese ham, Anton Walbrook. Walbrook is awfully wonderful as Lermontov, the demented ballet master in “The Red Shoes,” but I don’t think he was ever better than he is in this one.

Several weeks go by in a hurry and we arrive at this, the next scene in the picture. Clive (Livesey) has fallen in love with Edith (Kerr), but doesn’t know it. Theo (Walbrook) has also fallen in love with Edith, and does know it. Edith has fallen in love with both Theo and Clive and doesn’t know what, if anything, will become of her.

I Came to Berlin to Find a Rat, and I Found Two of the Grandest People I’ve Ever Met

While it is certainly tempting at this point to go into some detail about at least a few of the major themes in the picture, I think I will forswear that temptation for the time being. Instead, I’ll show you two of my favorite scenes, both of which present thematic material forcefully, beautifully and, I think, poetically. (They are both certainly beautifully spoken and acted — “Colonel Blimp” has more interesting, beautiful voices than any other picture I know.) Both scenes are in the way of being quite unabashed propaganda; both present the most enchanting propaganda I’ve ever come across.

The first comes at the end of The Great War, a war we’re to accept as a fable with a moral, which, in as few words as possible is:

Right Is Might

I can’t tell if the scene, out of context, seems a bit thick. But in the context of the picture, Clive Candy’s world has been so thoroughly created in the two hours that precede it, the moralizing is entirely earned and very moving indeed. I don’t know of another picture that makes decency so exciting and satisfying. It’s propaganda of the very highest order. I particularly admire the set, which took a month to set up and two weeks to clear away after shooting wrapped.

In the last third of the picture, Theo, having lost his wife Edith, and wanting to get out of Germany before it’s too late, arrives in England, seeking asylum. When the official gives him a hard time about not leaving Germany in 1933, as so many others did, Theo delivers a thrilling monologue. When Michael Powell handed him the pages and told him that it would be shot in one long take, Herr Walbrook almost passed out. While you watch this scene, notice how Powell removes, little by little, the ambient sound as the monologue progresses till there are no street noises, typewriters, bells, footsteps . . . nothing but the human voice. I find the effect magical. I won’t do this often, but I’ve included two versions of the scene. One is the full scene, nine minutes long; the second is the great monologue with a little set up dialogue preceding it. If you don’t have nine minutes to spare, by all means, check out the second one first. Then you can always come back and see the scene in its entirety some other time. As I say, I won’t do this often, but this seems to me a special case. (N.B.: The short version is much louder.)

The Full Scene

http://youtu.be/HbyDwfOWS6c
Few of the actors in the smaller parts are familiar to modern audiences, but many of them were lions of the London stage — some of them shared the stage with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. The President of the Tribunal in the scene above is played by a popular West End actor, A.E. Matthews. In his youth, Matthews worked at a London bookseller; when he learnt that Sir Henry Irving had worked not only in the same bookshop, but at the very same desk as he, he decided to devote his life to the theatre. During his long and distinguished career, he worked with everybody from Ellen Terry to Elaine Stritch.

The Great Monologue Only