Tag Archives: Magnificent Obsession

Sirk the Berserk

Not too long ago, a friend from London wrote to tell me that a new musical is in the works based on Todd Haynes’ “Far from Heaven.”  I can hardly imagine a musical I’d less want to see than “Far from Heaven,” which is my idea of “The Nearest Thing to Hell.”  I walk out of pictures all the time, but rarely as early as I walked out of that one — even though, now that I remember it, it meant walking home in a blizzard.  The whole point of that picture was to recreate the steamed up bathos and luscious silliness of the Douglas Sirk super-saturated Technicolor extravaganzas of the 1950s (“Magnificent Obsession,” “All That Heaven Allows,” “Written on the Wind,” “Imitation of Life”),  and to my mind, Todd Haynes’ picture failed on all counts.  (He also bungled HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” badly — totally faithful to the book, and equally inert.  I do wish some kind friend would tell Kate Winslet to wipe her nose and stop snivelling.)

What 'Far From Heaven' hoped to be; aim low & you still can miss.

What ‘Far from Heaven’ hoped to be:  aim low and you still can miss.

For one thing, “Far from Heaven” wasn’t shot in Technicolor, so the colors didn’t come close to the look of those Sirk pictures, which, along with the demented framing and lunatic lighting, gave those inane stories their special zest. For another, the acting was far too realistic and competent to capture that special Sirkian balderdash:  good acting is the ruination of Sirk’s style (aesthetic is too elevated a word for his kitsch). Think of the actresses in his pictures:  Jane Wyman, Dorothy Malone, Lana Turner — the best of them was extremely limited; the worst was hopeless. On her worst day, Julianne Moore can’t be as lousy as Jane Wyman was on her best — she’s too intelligent and sensitive.  The same goes for Dennis Quaid, who is by no means a great actor, but he’s not hewn from the same timber as that cigar store Indian named Rock Hudson. (I’ve always found it ironic that so wooden an actor should have been given the name Rock.  It would have been more accurate to name him Oak(land), Ash(ley) or Elm(er). It was doubly ironic that he should have played a tree surgeon in “All That Heaven Allows.”) Patricia Clarkson, likewise, can no more do camp than Agnes Moorehead could avoid it.

I confess to having a great relish for those mad Sirk pictures (especially “Magnificent Obsession,” whose Tinseltown piety — a sloppy sentimental version of Christianity — has often left me helpless with laughter), but I don’t kid myself that they’re good. If Sirk’s pictures were any better than they are, they’d lose their bizarre pizzazz. To take them seriously is to miss the point — if, indeed, they have a point. They’re all about cinematic style, and I can’t see how that sort of thing can be translated to the stage. Charles Busch would be the ideal guy to do a send up of Sirk’s pictures, but the pictures themselves are send ups, so it would be carrying coals to Newcastle.

Magnificent Obsession

You, Rock; Me, Jane: 'Heck, Helen, I'll write . . .'

Me, Rock; You, Jane: ‘Heck, Helen, I’ll write . . .’

My favorite Sirk picture is “Magnificent Obsession.” It’s rife with a specific type of bogus Hollywood piety that I find irresistible. Most of the Christian message is spoken by Edward Randolph (Otto Kruger). Because Kruger made such a suavely effective Hitchcock villain, I scream with laughter to hear him speak his platitudinous Beatitudes.  “Now wait, Merrick . . . Don’t try to use this unless you’re ready for it! You can’t just try this out for a week like a new car, y’know! And if you think you can feather your own nest with it, just forget it.  Besides, this is dangerous stuff. One of the first men who used it went to the Cross at the age of thirty-three . . .” [cue chorale from Beethoven’s Ninth] Every time Edward Randolph delivers one of his many homilies, he ends by sucking on his pipe. There’s something almost pornographic about the close association of Christian doctrine and tobacco addiction.

Kruger: 'You don't talk much about this belief . . .'

Kruger: ‘You don’t talk much about this belief . . .’

Edward Randolph is my favorite character in the picture; every moment he’s on screen is hilarious — the sunnyside-up eggs he serves Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) look like the rubber eggs you buy in a joke shop (he serves ’em, salts ’em, but doesn’t touch ’em:  he’s too busy telling Merrick how to “establish contact with a source of Infinite power”); the cardigan sweater he wears, the way he purses his lips indulgently when listening to Merrick’s atheist poppycock, his hollow laughter, the supercilious melodiousness of his voice, and especially his truly ROTTEN paintings — they all make me laugh. If all these weren’t enough, there’s also Agnes Moorehead, cast against type as an all-wise, loving nurse/companion (and she does it up brown); there are the two incredibly terrible performances by Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson; there are huge, gleaming gas-guzzling automobiles and mansions a-plenty; there’s the hilarious backlot half-timbered, gingerbread Tyrol with its well-scrubbed, affable peasantry in their spanking clean dirndls and Lederhosen; and there’s a subplot that features what may be the single worst performance by a child actress ever captured on film. Her dialogue is impossible, of course, but the wretched little girl can’t even say “Hi, Helen!” without sounding as if she’d learnt it phonetically. And when her dialogue lapses, as it often does, into knowing, “adult” slang (e.g., “I’d say there’s about a ten knot blow . . . and a real gone daddy zooming around with his inboard.”), hilarity ensues. I also LOVE the staging of the big accident that sets the plot in motion, in which poor little Jane Wyman is blinded in a freak process shot. That slays me. Damn, I think I must go watch it again right this very minute.

All That  Heaven Allows

Rock, Jane & Lyme Disease

Rock, Jane and Lyme Disease on four hooves.

I particularly like the sylvan doe in the last shot, who peers in the window as the Widow Wyman nurses Rock Hudson, who lies happy and in love . . . and with his back broke. I quite like the whole picture, especially the Thomas Kincade landscapes and architecture. I love the insufferable kids (college boy Ned’s a prig, co-ed Kay’s a hypocrite psych major in cat-eye glasses) who never stop finding fault with their timid mother, whenever she so much as moves an ashtray or puts an old trophy into a less conspicuous place or doesn’t feel up to taking care of a big empty house by herself. (Ned:  “Father had that cup for I don’t know how long!” “We’ve lived in this house for I don’t know how long!”) I also love the elderly, eunuch-like Conrad Nagel with his aches and pains and nervous stomach: he’s a walking erectile dysfunction who hopes to marry the recently widowed Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) — and her kids approve. (His timorous courtship of the Widow Scott brings to mind Jimmy Fallon’s joke about Carol Channing’s second marriage, when she was eighty: “The ceremony was simple and tasteful, and the wedding night was disgusting.”) The way Nagel sips the martini gingerly and says, “Excellent, my boy, excellent!” also amuses me.

Nagel: 'Excellent, my boy, excellent!'

Nagel (back to camera): ‘Excellent, my boy, excellent!’

Then there’s the masher at the country club, Howard Hoffer (Donald Curtis), who ought to be locked up.  And the garrulous television salesman, Mr Weeks (Forrest Lewis), who acts like a raving lunatic. There is a staggering lack of decent people living in that little bedroom community. Everyone we meet is either a snob, a busybody, a hypocrite, a drunk, a fink, a golddigging tramp, a bearer of false witness, a sex fiend or all of the above. Worst of the lot is Mona Plash, one in whom all evil fancies cling like serpent’s eggs together. Jacqueline deWit’s exaggerated performance is outrageous, misogynistic and coarse beyond imagining: a drag queen’s Queen Bee.

Jacqueline deWit: Snob, busybody, hypocrite, drunk, all of the above.

Jacqueline deWit: Snob, busybody, hypocrite, drunk, all of the above.

Except for Dr. Hennessy (Hayden Rorke — Dr Bellows from “I Dream of Jeannie”), every person in that burg is a swine.  I suppose the town motto must be “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”  I also love la vie de bohème sequence.  What it’s missing, however, is the silly piety of “Magnificent Obsession.”  Still, it’s great fun.

Imitation of Life

Lana Turner and Dan Herlihy. Imitation is a polite word for fake.

Lana Turner and Dan Herlihy. Imitation:  a polite word for fake.

Annie:  How’d it go today?

Lora:  Oh, Annie, it didn’t.  I’m exhausted.  Walked my feet off today trying to see every agent on Broadway . . . I even tried some . . . Off-Broadway . . . Way Off . . .

I’ve been laughing about that line ever since I first heard it.  The self-pity in that “Off-Broadway” is great . . . and the way Lana mutters “Way Off” makes it sound not only like “Off-Off” and “Off-Off-Off-Broadway,” but also like it’s a criticism of her own performance.  It’s the only time in her entire career that Lana Turner managed to get a hint of subtext into a line of dialogue — and it’s at her own expense.

For “Imitation of Life” (Universal International, 1959), Douglas Sirk apparently took considerable pains to make Lana Turner look ridiculous.  What he does to her is quite bizarre and modern:  it’s a motion picture equivalent of deconstruction.  Sirk is like a double agent:  he gives her the full star treatment with a huge collection of expensive clothes and ropes of jewels, flattering lighting, plenty of close-ups — but at the same time, he turns these emoluments against her:  they’re used as devices to attack her empty blandness.  Far from mitigating his star’s awesome lack of talent, Sirk conspires to expose her limitations in every way he can.  In the picture, Lana, who hasn’t a scrap of wit in her, plays Lora Meredith, who (after five minutes of terrific struggle and setbacks) becomes the finest light comedienne in America, which is a cynical joke in itself — and Sirk caps his derision by preventing us from seeing a minute of her stagework:  “Take it from me, folks — you don’t VANT to see ziss broad act!”  Instead, Sirk gives us a montage of her curtain calls, which are more than enough to display her amateurish lack of poise.

Juanita Moore as Annie: A room for one night turns into a lifetime of unpaid labor. We're supposed to be happy for her.

Juanita Moore as Annie: A room for one night turns into a lifetime of unpaid labor. We’re supposed to be happy for her.

Conversely, Sirk adored Juanita Moore, who plays the long-suffering black mother, Annie Johnson (years later, he said she was his favorite American actress).  Moore has to speak a lot of terrible dialogue and some of the paces she’s put through are awfully sticky, but she has immense dignity and gravitas.  Until recently, I had never grasped how fine her performance really is.  In some ways, the picture was ahead of its time in its look at mid-century American racism, but unfortunately, there’s no escaping the condescending tone of its liberalism — mostly, I believe, because the studio was simply too timid to go all the way.  Nevertheless, it’s notable that Moore (who had never played a major role before this one) was given the opportunity to steal the big, expensive picture completely — not just because she’s a fine and subtle actress, but because Sirk saw to it that her role was made the most important:  she is the heart of the picture.  But then, in stark contrast to Moore’s superb and subtle performance, there’s the stolid, unimaginative, stale Hollywood construct known as Lana Turner, who manages to be completely sincere and totally artificial  — simultaneously!  She suffers, she simpers, she arches one eyebrow; she pouts, she strikes poses and pantomimes like mad in an endless array of expensive gowns and glittering jewels.  She’s not lazy; she takes no short-cuts; she commits herself whole-heartedly to every moment — no passing emotion is too small or brief for her to pantomime . . . and you never believe a word she says.  She’s The Compleat Mangler — the single worst major movie star of all time — a black hole surmounted by a helmet of peroxide blond hair.  To be fair, she does, however, possess one talent that borders on genius:  it’s her uncanny ability to stress the wrong word in nearly every line she speaks.  That ought to count for something . . .  According to www.imdb.com, Lana suffered three still-births, due to her having the Rh factor.  This number fails to take into account the 59 roles she played.

Sandra Dee, Lana Turner, John Gavin: Banality cubed.

Sandra Dee, Lana Turner, John Gavin: Banality cubed.

Lana Turner was a product of the Hollywood star system:  her bad acting was not really her fault.  She was taught by studio “experts” — acting coaches — to give all those lousy performances.  No good actor ever was a product of studio coaching:  the good actors in Hollywood pictures either already knew how to act (from stage experience), or they survived the bad coaching by following the example of the good actors they worked with.  But Lana was the studio coaches’ cat’s paw.  Besides, what launched her career and charted its course had nothing whatever to do with acting or talent.  Her very first role, in Warner’s “They Won’t Forget,” made her famous overnight.  Everything about the role was small, including the sweater she wore.  Only her tits were big.  That was enough.  Within a year, she was signed at Metro, where she co-starred as Cynthia Potter (a coy nympho) in “Love Finds Andy Hardy.”  Louis B. Mayer treated her like royalty, while at the same time, he referred to her phenomenally talented co-star, Judy Garland, as “the little hunchback.”  (So much for L.B.)

So Lana never really had a chance.  She was a star before she learnt how to act, and once she was a star, she believed all the lousy stuff the studio acting coaches taught her to do must be the key to her success.  Uh, no . . . it was those tits.  The closest she ever came to acting was what is known among professional actors as “indicating.”  Indicating is a form of exaggerated pantomime used by an actor to show the audience what he wants to convey, and usually involves a physical activity that nobody ever does in real life.  To take an obvious example, when the script calls for Lana to think, she will “indicate” the act of thought by squinting (very slightly — mustn’t develop wrinkles) and scratching her temple with her forefinger.  (If you want a Master Class in the crude art of Indicating, check out any episode of “The Honeymooners” and watch Joyce Randolph as Trixie.  She indicates so outrageously, she’s in a class all by herself.)  Indicating is the semaphore of bad actors:  you get the communication, but lose the poetry.

Take a look at the two pictures below.  You’ll see the difference between indicating and acting.  If you don’t, then never mind.

Lana 'indicates' full attention.

Lana indicates her full attention. 

Juanita Moore gives her full attention.

Juanita Moore gives her full attention.

There’s also a nice irony in the title song.  You’d swear it was Nat “King” Cole singing, but it’s not.  It’s Earl Grant . . . doing an imitation.

Notable Bette Davis Pictures

In This Our Life

The Family Circle:  George Brent, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Craven, Billie Burke and Bette Davis

The Family Circle: George Brent, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Craven, Billie Burke and Bette Davis

It’s the only time John Huston worked with Davis. It’s an absurd melodrama, with Davis as a mean, mean, mean mantrap. Quite hilarious. That big piece of solid timber from Ireland known as George Brent is also in it.

Brent, de Havilland:  On the bum.

Brent, de Havilland: On the bum.

Halfway through the picture, when Brent’s life is on the skids, he wears the most amusing greasepaint whiskers . . . I love that sort of stuff. And not in a cynical, sneering way: I genuinely like a certain amount of blatant artifice — it’s in keeping with the steamed-up nature of melodrama. Huston doesn’t hold back or go for realism — a whole lot of fur flies in this one. The last fifteen to twenty minutes are wonderfully over-the-top . . . and include one of the silliest car chase sequences I know — day for night shooting, which always looks phony; process shots, which look even phonier; and the speed of the cars has been increased by omitting every third or fourth frame, a technique that always makes me laugh.

About George Brent: except for his performance in “Jezebel,” when he played a charming bounder of the Old South, he was almost always stolid to the point of catatonia. Yet he came to America as a refugee from Ireland. He lammed it out of the Old Sod with a price on his head: he was a courier/hit man for the Sinn Fein when it was led by Michael Collins. A guy with that sort of past should have been a livelier actor, it seems to me.

There are a lot of good performances in this one. Frank Craven, who was the original Stage Manager in “Our Town” on Broadway, plays Davis and de Havilland’s put upon father. Charles Coburn plays a rapacious businessman who lusts after his febrile niece (Davis). Billie Burke, in a rare dramatic role, plays Lavinia, sister of Coburn and invalid mother to evil Bette and goody-two-shoes de Havilland. Burke gives a remarkable performance as a silly, selfish, sentimental neurasthenic. It’s essentially the same thing she always did, but this time, she’s pathetic and a little bit terrifying. Ernest Anderson makes an impressive debut as an ambitious, intelligent young black man, accused of a crime he didn’t commit. He conveys a beautiful combination of decency and shrewdness; when he finds himself in trouble, and understands that his innocence is meaningless in a Whites Only world, his despair is devastating. A wonderful performance — and no sentimentality in it. There’s a musical lilt to his speech that makes him a pleasure to listen to. He’s a very warm presence and he gives a seriousness to the melodrama that it would entirely lack without him. Hattie McDaniel plays his mother; she, too, is beyond reproach. Quite apart from the great moral authority and skill McDaniel brings to the role, it is a relief to see her play a role that gives her more to do than jumble her syntax and mispronounce big words to make white folks roar with laughter.

The commentary on the DVD is by Jeanine Basinger, who’s knowledgeable and straight-forward. She wrote a biography of Davis a few years ago. She reminds me of a younger, stouter Leonard Maltin, minus the beard — she gets her facts straight and she knows a lot, but her analysis rarely is very impressive. Still, she’s well-informed about the studio system, and appears to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the various sound stages on the Warner lot. That counts for a lot.

Davis didn’t want to play the bad girl; she wanted to play the sweet one, and argued that she was too old for the part. Then she hated the hair and the costumes (she took charge of both, and had her costumes redesigned by Orry-Kelly, her favorite designer, who did nearly all of her costumes while she was at Warners). She also thought the script was terrible, and an insult to the novel, which she said was “brilliant.” The author of the novel was equally appalled by the “phony” script. Moreover, during filming, Davis’ husband at the time was hospitalized in Minneapolis with pneumonia. Davis held up shooting by going to visit him (her friend, Howard Hughes, provided her with a private plane to take her there); shortly after she arrived, she received a cable from Jack Warner, ordering her to get her ass back to the lot. Between her concern for her husband and her fury at Warner, her own health suffered; her doctor ordered her to return by train (rather than air) and to get plenty of rest before returning to work. It was Davis who discovered Ernest Anderson. Huston couldn’t find a young black actor to play the role to his satisfaction, so Davis recommended Anderson. She had seen him waiting tables at the commissary and thought he had the right look for the part. That was about the only thing Davis liked about the whole picture. A few weeks before production wrapped, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Huston went off to war. Raoul Walsh finished the picture, but received no credit. He and Davis clashed immediately; she developed laryngitis from screaming at him, and in no time, refused to take any of his direction. The preview was a disaster. Audiences were in no mood for this sort of picture at the beginning of the war; the subplot that dealt with racial discrimination offended many people, and the picture was almost universally panned in the press.

Davis had a similarly low opinion of “Deception,” which is far from her best performance, but is one of my favorite pictures. She was a superb actress, but I find her opinions of her own work totally unreliable. She was hardly more reliable about other actors’ performances. She always insisted that Errol Flynn was no actor, and was furious when he was cast as her co-star in “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.” (That clumsy title was jury-rigged. Originally, it was to be called “Elizabeth the Queen,” after Maxwell Anderson’s play, but when Flynn was cast in it, his box-office power made him demand that the title be changed to include his character’s name.) If you ask me, Flynn not only holds his own against her in that picture, but he gives the better performance. He was also great in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” No actor since has come close to matching his ease and grace in that part. He was terrific in many of the other swashbucklers (e.g., “Captain Blood,” “The Sea Hawk”). He makes it look so easy, but the artificial, bombastic dialogue takes a lot of skill to put across. Flynn spoke that sort of claptrap better than anyone else. He also turned in a nice performance in “Gentleman Jim.” His range was not terribly broad, but he was a fine leading man — a hell of a lot better than many with higher reputations. The drinking and hard living made him unreliable and wrecked his looks by the mid- to late-forties, but he was a much better actor than Davis (and many others) ever gave him credit for.

Bette Davis as high maintenance mantrap:  Whooping it up all by herself.  Walter Huston tends bar.

Bette Davis as high maintenance mantrap: Whooping it up all by herself. Walter Huston tends bar.

You shouldn’t read the rest of this if you haven’t already seen the picture and are planning to do so.

“In This Our Life” verges on camp — maybe even crosses the border in a few places, as, for example, Davis’ stolen interview with Charles Coburn before her final flight from justice: “You’re not even listening! You don’t care what happens to me any more than the others! You’d let me go to prison! All you’re thinking of is your own miserable life! Well, you can DIE for all I care! DIE!” It has all the makings of camp: both characters are irredeemably wicked and both are in extremis: he, under sentence of death from his doctor; she, trying to escape justice after killing a child in a hit and run accident (which she has, for good measure, pinned on their maid’s (Hattie McDaniel) virtuous son (Ernest Anderson)). The physical setting is extreme, as well: the room is a nightmarish clutter of late Victorian kitsch: hideous, elaborately carved furniture and massive display cabinets; heavy, excessive window treatments; busy wallpaper. And Huston stages the scene in front of a roaring hearth, which lends a ghost-story-by-campfire atmosphere to the scene, and an adumbration of the fires of Hell that await these two monsters. Yet it’s not camp. Both actors are totally committed to the material; Coburn is almost touching in his snivelling terror: his panic is completely believable; Davis gives a huge performance, with all cylinders firing, but what she does is not camp: for one thing, her choices are too specific — she plays each beat of the scene, each change of tactic, with great clarity and finesse, and she keeps building the emotional intensity so that she doesn’t peak until that final “DIE!” She gives a showy, out-sized performance, yet I wouldn’t call it hamming: the emotionalism is certainly extreme, but it’s too grounded in reality to be considered fake, and her absolute control over how much to give and when is so ideally suited to the dramatic structure (in this scene and throughout the rest of the picture) to be dismissed as ham acting.

Jezebel

Fay Bainter and Bette Davis "Julie, but you cain't fight marriage!"

Fay Bainter and Bette Davis “Julie, but you cain’t fight marriage!”

“Jezebel” was Bette Davis’ second Oscar win, but the only one (as far as she was concerned) that she earned fair and square. She won her first in 1936 for “Dangerous,” a dim-bulb soap in which she gives a rather silly histrionic performance (histrionics are what she did, but it wasn’t until a year or two later that she learnt how much is enough and how much is too much). At the time, it was widely thought that her Oscar win for “Dangerous” was a consolation prize for not having won the year before for another histrionic (but truer) performance as the slattern in “Of Human Bondage.” For that one, she wasn’t even nominated, yet she received so many write-in votes from Academy members that she very nearly won.

Fay Bainter, who plays her Aunt Belle in “Jezebel,” won the Best Supporting Actress for the role, and she gives one of her typically fine, subtle and nuanced performances. Nobody much remembers her today, but I hold her in almost as high esteem as I hold Claude Rains.

There are many things in “Jezebel” that are particularly fine: the staging of the fatal waltz is brilliant — the way all those white dresses sweep away from the encroachment of the red dress — like drops of oil flying away from the center when a drop of vinegar is dropped into their midst (I also love Steiner’s melody for the waltz). Also the staging of the scene with Fay Bainter, when she comes to the full realization of her niece’s wickedness . . . “I’m thinkin’ of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God.” How many actresses could resist the temptation to overplay that moment? Bainter is perfection itself in that scene, as she is when she is introduced to Amy Bradford (“Pres, your wife . . . My dear, Pres’ wife would naturally be welcome here . . . but you are for your own sake.”) But the greatest of the great is Davis’ apology followed by her own introduction to “Bradford . . . Amy Bradford . . . from New York . . . ” Never were those goggle eyes put to better use. And the way that Fay Bainter watches her receive the news as if she’s waiting for the dynamite to go off . . . ! Quite incredible. The whole sequence is so invisibly edited, for years, I imagined it was all done in a single take, but of course it’s not. There are lots of edits — more edits than Wyler usually allowed into a single sequence — but they’re all so ideally placed and the continuity is so seamless, you don’t notice them unless you’re looking for them — and even then, I find myself so caught up in the action that I forget to count how many there are. Henry Fonda’s not as good in his part as many of the others, but he’s perfect in that scene, because his natural diffidence and awkwardness are exactly what the scene demands.

Davis apologizes.  "Pres, I'm kneelin' to ya."

Davis apologizes. “Pres, I’m kneelin’ to ya.”

Fay Bainter and Claude Rains starred together in one stupendously stupid picture, “White Banners” (1938, same year as “Jezebel”) — spiritually uplifting “pass-it-forward” treacle by Lloyd C. Douglas (who also wrote “Magnificent Obsession” — same theme as “White Banners” and for my money, the funniest camp picture ever). She and Rains are so fine in that otherwise execrable picture, I’m happy to endure (though not accept) Douglas’ creepy proto-Christian folderol. She was nominated for Best Actress in that one, making her the first actress to be nominated in both acting categories in the same year. Fay Bainter gave many excellent performances, and never a bad one. The trouble is, with the exception of “Jezebel,” she was nearly always in lousy pictures. Her last picture was “The Children’s Hour” (1961, directed by Wyler). Stupid picture, great performance — I may even say, quite awesome. When the vicious little schoolgirl whispers the libelous gossip into Bainter’s ear in the backseat of a taxicab, Bainter’s wordless reaction is stunning — you can see a lifetime of experience and know-how in that moment. Here was an actress who knew her job! In every bad picture Bainter was in, she was always worth watching. On Broadway, Bainter played Walter Huston’s straying wife, Fran, in “Dodsworth.” What a shame she didn’t play it in the picture! I’ve resigned myself to Ruth Chatterton’s fussy performance, which works in its way, but I can’t really admire it. Wyler tried to force Chatterton, over her strong objections, to play Fran as something more than a hateful bitch, but Chatterton outlasted him. (Even Bette Davis never got her way when Wyler objected!) Chatterton does Hateful Bitch to perfection, But is it Art? How I should have liked to see Fay Bainter in that part! (Incidentally, both Davis and Bainter were under contract to Warners at the time. Davis’ weekly salary was $650 when she starred in “Jezebel”; Bainter’s was $2,000.) Bainter’s last major stage role was as Mary Tyrone in the first national tour of “Long Day’s Journey.” What a performance that must have been. Throughout her career, she appears to have followed Huston’s sage advice to a young actor: “Son, give ’em a good show and always travel first class.”

Another unjustly forgotten character actress, Spring Byington, gives a witty performance in the small role of Mrs Kendrick in “Jezebel.” Mrs Kendrick is a foolish old busybody whose polite conversation consists entirely of platitudes and old saws, which she speaks as if she had freshly minted them (“Well, I always say, ‘Better late than never’ “; “I always say, ‘Spare the rod and you spoil the child!’ “; “I always say, ‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings!’ “; ” ‘Business before pleasure,’ I always say . . . “; “I always say, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.’ “), while everything she says to her daughter is a reproof (“Stephanie, your manners!”; “Well, we still do [curtsy] in New Orleans: no call to take up with Yankee manners.”). Mrs Kendrick is a one-joke character, but Byington brings her fully to life. A sweet little gem of a performance. Byington is also in “Dodsworth,” by the way, and gives a beautiful performance. She and Bainter represent a type of supporting actress — solid, reliable, but totally individual — that barely exists anymore. Before the Method came along and shook all the refinement and grace out of American acting, such supporting actors and actresses were thick on the ground. They spoke well, looked well, moved well, and gave wonderfully detailed performances that supported the stars’ performances without calling attention to themselves. How I admire that old technique!