Tag Archives: Melvyn Douglas

In Praise of Melvyn Douglas

Greta Garbo and Melyvn Douglas in 'Ninotcha.'

Greta Garbo and Melyvn Douglas in ‘Ninotcha.’


Melvyn Douglas was the man who made Garbo laugh. What most people remember about “Ninotchka” is that it was Greta Garbo’s first comedy; they probably also remember that she plays a humorless Commie who comes to Paris on official business and a little while later begins to laugh for the first time in her life. Many people remember that she ends up wearing a hat that looks as if the milliner had taken a large, soggy Frito and wound it round a dented traffic cone on an upward diagonal. (Adrian designed it, presumably as an homage to Dr Seuss.) Garbo got the publicity, the headlines and the legend; but it took Melvyn Douglas — ebullient, feckless, persistent Melvyn Douglas — to knock her seriousness into a cocked hat and make her roar with laughter.

Garbo Laughs! Melvyn Douglas hands Comrade Garbo a laugh in 'Ninotchka.'

Garbo Laughs! Melvyn Douglas hands Comrade Garbo a laugh in ‘Ninotchka.’


His performance in “Ninotchka” has always been cast deep in the shadow of Garbo’s million-watt glamour, but in this picture, he’s a far more interesting screen presence than she is. Garbo was rarely as good as she is in “Ninotchka,” but that is largely because so much of the comedy demands only that she be immobile, unapproachable, humorless — the Frosty Deity was a role she knew something about. The picture lampoons her Ice Queen persona; by doing nothing, Garbo becomes witty by default. Douglas does nearly all of the heavy lifting in their scenes together: after each failed attempt to warm her up, he must try a new tack; at the same time, he must not lose our sympathy, exhaust our patience, or do anything to make us turn against him. He must never seem less than charming and appealing. And to make things more difficult, if you judge Count Leon D’Algou by his actions, he is worse than a cad: he is a conniving gigolo without honor; he’s a titled parasite. And yet, we’re supposed to root for him. With Melvyn Douglas in the part, we do.

An irresistible force meets an immovable object. Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas meet cute in 'Ninotchka.'

An irresistible force meets an immovable object. Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas meet cute in ‘Ninotchka.’

Two years earlier, in “Captains Courageous,” Douglas played a relatively small role for a star of his magnitude, but he didn’t pull any cheesy tricks to draw attention to himself during the brief minutes he’s onscreen. As Mr Cheyne, the wealthy industrialist father of Freddie Bartholomew, Douglas acts the part with conviction and immediacy — in his performance, we see Mr Cheyne’s very carefully concealed inner life thrown into a riot of doubts and confusion when he recognizes how his own well-intended miscalculations have brought his life to grief — and he does it without stealing focus from the real star of the picture, the thirteen year-old Freddie Bartholomew. Douglas gives an extraordinary performance, but it’s done with such finesse and understatement that very few ever realize the amount of skill, discretion and exquisite taste that went into its creation.

With Freddie Bartholomew in the final scene of 'Captains Courageous.'

With Freddie Bartholomew in the final scene of ‘Captains Courageous.’

In “A Woman’s Face,” he miraculously spoke lines of unspeakable badness without betraying contempt or embarrassment for having to breathe life into such excruciating nonsense. In that one, he played a plastic surgeon who repaired, with spectacular results, Joan Crawford’s face, hideously ravaged in childhood by a bottle of acid her father shied at her (perhaps the gentleman was a connoisseur of good acting?). The woman’s disfigurement has led her to shun good companions and to travel down the crookedest paths, to haunt the meanest resorts, keep company with the lowest scum, pursue the worst vices. (The seamy underworld gets the standard Metro treatment: it is depicted as a weird fairyland of Germanic kitsch. The lowest criminal haunt is a hunting lodge/clip joint set in a sylvan glade deep in the heart of Metro’s Hansel and Gretel soundstage forest; the backdrops appear to be from “The Wizard of Oz.”) When Douglas first encounters Crawford, she’s a dangerous criminal (she manages a clip joint where they water the drinks and overcharge the drunks): as a surgeon, he feels ethically obliged to help her; as a citizen, he is decidedly ambivalent about curing such an evil ham.

Conrad Veidt, Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas: Crawfor's torn between Satan and the sawbones.

Conrad Veidt, Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas: Crawford’s torn between Satan and the sawbones.

In “Hud,” he played an aged Texas rancher whose cattle have contracted hoof and mouth disease and must be destroyed. The old man insists on killing his prize longhorns himself, an almost unbearable sorrow for him. Before he raises his rifle, he says, “Lord, but I have chased them longhorns many a mile. I don’t even know if I can kill ’em . . . But . . . I guess I can.” Douglas’ reading of the line doesn’t ignore or avoid its belles-lettres-in-chaps quality, nor does he stress its poetry; he speaks the words simply and sadly, and makes the phrasing sound utterly natural but richer in meaning; it’s plain, but more eloquent, more resonant than everyday speech. Characteristically, he does not allow a single drop of sentimentality to bedew the line’s bitter pragmatism. You hear the echoes of the man’s entire life when Melvyn Douglas speaks those words.

In 'Hud' with Paul Newman.

In ‘Hud’ with Paul Newman. His first Oscar win.

In another beautiful sequence, he attends the picture show with his grandson, played by Brandon De Wilde. When they enter the little auditorium, the old man is sick at heart. He’s burdened with the knowledge that the only world he ever gave a damn about, and the only way of life he knows and trusts, have already vanished; the lab results haven’t come back yet, but he has a sinking feeling that his cattle will have to be destroyed. He complains that he’s “wore out,” but it’s more serious than that: he’s ill and won’t get better; what he’s got is going to kill him. When they sit down, the old man looks at all the young people around him and wonders aloud how young folks can be so foolish as to waste sixty-five cents to come here to “get their knees pinched,” when a hayloft is free. When the first featurette begins, it’s a follow-the-bouncing-ball sing-along of “Clementine.” It turns out that the leathery old cattleman loves to sing. He sings loudly, lustily and with a lofty indifference to accurate intonation. On each repeat of the chorus, he sings louder and more enthusiastically — he keeps getting ahead of the beat, and drowning out all the other people in attendance. You’d expect his sensitive, painfully shy grandson to be in agonies of embarrassment at his grandfather’s stupendous lack of inhibition; but Douglas’ raucous enjoyment is unstoppable, irresistible, triumphant; it seems to fill the boy with admiration: the old-timer puts a higher value on the pleasure he gets from singing than on making a favorable impression on a pack of foolish youngsters who don’t have his magnificent zest for life or his lung power. De Wilde throws in with the old man, and sings for all he’s worth. He’s young and has his whole life ahead of him, but it’s the dying old man who knows how to have a good time. Douglas permits no sentimentality in this sequence, either; if it were sentimental, it would be unbearable. It’s a very brief sequence, but Douglas fills it with radiant life. In its own small way, the scene is thrilling. Whenever I look at this scene, I think — Yes: this is an actor who really knew his business. He won his first Oscar for this performance.

Many years later, when he was 79 years old, he was nominated for his great performance in “Being There.” That same year, Justin Henry, who played the little boy in “Kramer vs Kramer” was nominated in the same category. Douglas remarked, “The whole thing is absurd, my competing with an eight year old child.” Happily, Douglas won his second Oscar for his performance, and the absurdity was relegated to a footnote in Oscar history.

The grand old man in 'Being There.' Douglas' second Oscar win.

The grand old man in ‘Being There.’ Douglas’ second Oscar win.

Nowadays, Melvyn Douglas seems to be considerably less familiar to audiences than Bogart, Cagney, Cooper, Gable, Grant, Tracy and some others. In my view, if he’s less familiar to modern audiences, it’s because he exists in a different category from all the other famous leading men. He was unquestionably an A-List Leading Man for many years — he costarred with the likes of Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Deanna Durbin, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Peter Sellers and virtually every other name-above-the-title star in Hollywood. As he aged, he became a superb character actor, and often those character parts were also leading roles. He continued to work in prestige pictures until the end of his long life. His career lasted fifty years, and for most of them, he was a major star. His career endured and carried on through all the post-Studio Era upheavals better than any of his contemporaries (including the supremely gifted Bette Davis, who made very few worthwhile pictures after 1950: not her fault, but there it is), partly because he aged well, like an excellent Burgundy, but mostly because (like Davis) he was always an actor first and a movie star second. And yet, for all his longevity and famous roles, he’s not always remembered by the sort of people who draw up numbered lists of the most popular/influential/important/famous Hollywood stars. Even at the peak of his popularity, I have the sense that his skill was such that audiences had come to expect him to give a fine performance, so that his excellence eventually became something of a foregone conclusion: only a bad performance would have attracted critical attention, and that’s the one kind of performance Melvyn Douglas didn’t give.

Critics are constantly saying that Cary Grant’s special gift was his ability to make everything look so easy, as if he weren’t acting at all. I think Cary Grant acts far too much — at his best, he pleases and amuses me, but I just about never believe a word he says: he’s too busy pulling faces and doing bits. But then there’s Melvyn Douglas, who nearly always makes you forget he’s acting. He was a very big star and had a commanding presence, but he wasn’t a show-off. All of his best qualities are the opposite of showy histrionics: he doesn’t stammer like Jimmy Stewart, arch his eyebrows like Joan Crawford, gulp like Gary Cooper, squinch up the sides of his mouth like Clark Gable, pull faces like Cary Grant, insert “naturalistic” pauses like Spencer Tracy, or rely on any other mannerisms to remind us that we’re watching Melvyn Douglas give a Great Acting Performance: his only trick is to beguile us into believing he is the character he’s playing. There’s the effortless ease of his delivery, which is almost too smoothly eloquent and well-spoken to be credible, yet is nevertheless completely natural; there’s his technical skill, which is so masterful that it’s nearly always invisible. Perhaps most amazing is his ability to play every style, genre, historical period with equal success (one wouldn’t question his presence at the trial of Socrates for a second, but imagine Gable, Cooper, Tracy or God forbid, Duke Wayne in that setting!). If he doesn’t get as much credit as he deserves, it’s because he’s too real, too perfectly believable, to call attention to his virtuosity. It is only when you look at the list of his credits that he becomes an astonishment. As an actor, I rank him in the same category as Claude Rains and Walter Huston, which is to say, I’m prepared to see him act in the worst rubbish just to watch how his superb aplomb gets him through the wretched stuff without mussing his hair or unsharpening the perfect crease in his trousers. You only have to see him come through a rotten picture like “A Woman’s Face” with his dignity intact to know what I’m talking about.

Melvyn Douglas in his leading man days.

Melvyn Douglas in his leading man days.

Of all the first-rate all-round leading men of the Studio Era, Melvyn Douglas gets my vote for finest and most versatile. He played debonair heroes, suave bounders, champagne-swilling boulevardiers, sober surgeons, likeable cads, tough-minded businessmen, amused husbands, aggrieved fathers, put-upon architects, resilient dupes, learned judges, grizzled seamen, sozzled swells, steely generals, shifty plutocrats, noble ranchers, incorruptible authoritarians, and even average fellows (his average fellows were always, by virtue of the man himself, well above average, though he was a fine enough actor to make them seem believably “average”: he was the average man’s dream of himself). Every one of these parts he played with authority, distinction, style, grace, wit and above all finesse. Bravo, Melvyn Douglas!

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.