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Frightfulness II: Funny Halloween Fare, 2014 Edition

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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.

The Ghoul

Ghoul Poster

Boris Karloff is certainly the most famous actor in “The Ghoul” (Metro, 1933), but he is surrounded by several of Britain’s finest and most eccentric actors. A very young Ralph Richardson (he was not yet a knight) makes his screen debut in a small, amusing role; the sublimely witty oddball, Ernest Thesiger, plays Karloff’s sepulchral Scottish butler; Kathleen Harrison (perhaps best known for her performance as Alastair Sim’s housekeeper, Mrs Dilber, in “A Christmas Carol”) is in it and up to her old tricks; and there’s a very droll performance by Cedric Hardwicke, who plays a cantankerous, shifty-eyed solicitor. He was not a knight yet, either. His investiture took place the following year, and was performed by King George V. The cares of state had made the monarch old before his time; by 1934, he was almost deaf and a little bit dotty, but he performed the ceremony perfectly until the last moment. The knight-elect knelt upon the knighting-stool before The King, who duly laid the sword blade on Hardwicke’s right and then left shoulder. Then followed several seconds of uneasy silence; the new knight remained motionless, waiting for the royal command to rise. But His Majesty, as an unperfect actor on the stage, had gone up on his lines. At length, a courtier prompted the befuddled sovereign. Then spake King George in a loud, clear voice: “Rise, Sir Cedric Pickwick.”

There are many fun sequences in “The Ghoul,” and a lot of good acting, but the flat-footed direction is so lethargic that it feels much longer than its 77 minutes.

Richardson Calls, Thesiger Answers

Karloff is upstairs on his deathbed. Ralph Richardson, a burglar posing as a clergyman, comes to the door to offer comfort or, if need be, last rites to the unfortunate sinner. Ernest Thesiger is having none of it. To be honest, there’s not a lot going on in this scene, but the very idea of Ernest Thesiger and Ralph Richardson acting together in a horror picture makes me happy.

Thesiger Takes Karloff’s Last Orders

Here we have dear old Ernest being given instructions by Karloff.

Thesiger Takes Command

Karloff has died. Ernest has much to do. Sir Cedric Hardwicke comes looking for something he doesn’t find and promises to make trouble. Ernest and Sir Cedric make a very funny pair. I wish they had done “Waiting for Godot” together.

The Black Cat

Poster for Swedish release.

Poster for Swedish release.

It was a dark and stormy night. In a gloomy old mansion, the elderly millionairess, Henrietta Winslow, lies abed, at the very brink of death. Her poor relations are gathered downstairs, waiting impatiently for the wretched old invalid to die. Old Mrs Winslow keeps refusing to heed the fatal summons; she is therefore murdered; more will follow her to the grave. An old dark house, terrible weather and a murderer on the loose: that’s the set up for “The Black Cat” (Universal, 1941). It should have been great, yet it is a terrible picture — needlessly terrible. It’s not a total loss, however: there are plenty of pleasures mixed in with the dreadfulness. Every second that Basil Rathbone, Gladys Cooper, Cecilia Loftus and Gale Sondergaard are onscreen, the picture’s a lot of fun. Rathbone, alas, has not nearly enough to do, but he does everything to perfection. This may be the tawdriest picture Gladys Cooper ever appeared in, but it’s very probably the juiciest part she ever played on screen. She made her Hollywood debut only a year before, playing Laurence Olivier’s sister in Hitchcock’s “Rebecca.” Later that year, she played Dennis Morgan’s regal, Philadelphia snob mother in “Kitty Foyle.” It was only her second Hollywood picture, and for the rest of her career she was typecast as imperious widows and seriously displeased doyennes, usually with at least one child who was likely to be the death of her (Charlotte Vale’s mother in “Now, Voyager,” Mrs Railton-Bell in “Separate Tables,” Henry Higgins’ mother in “Pygmalion” and again in “My Fair Lady”). The Scottish character actress, Cecilia Loftus, plays the batty old millionairess who, after not-quite-dropping dead once too often, is murdered. This is the first picture Gale Sondergaard made after she played the spooky Eurasian widow who murders Bette Davis in the last moments of “The Letter”; in this one, she plays the spooky housekeeper.

Unfortunately, the desperately unfunny Hugh Herbert and Broderick Crawford are thrown in (up?) as comic relief. Crawford plays a big, loudmouth jerk — it’s a stretch. About halfway through the picture, he becomes a semi-love interest. (What were they thinking?) Crawford is obnoxious and repulsive, but then there’s Hugh Herbert, who gets my vote as the most insufferable, wearisome low clown in pictures. His popularity in the thirties and forties has always mystified me. I never laugh at the Three Stooges, but I understand why others do. I’m rarely amused by gross-out humor, but I recognize it as humor. But Hugh Herbert? He pats his palms together, flutters his fingers and emits little falsetto hoots — that’s his act. In “The Black Cat,” he bumbles into a scene, brings the action to a halt, inadvertently knocks something over, stammers something incoherent, does his little falsetto woo-woo, then bumbles off. That’s his shtick. Half a minute later he bumbles into another scene and does the same thing. And so on for the rest of the picture. A Star Is Born. André Previn, in his memoir about his years at MGM, “No Minor Chords,” wrote that his idea of Hell is being forced to watch the last half hour of Norma Shearer in “Marie Antoinette” for all eternity. I’d take that form of damnation over ten minutes in the presence of horrible, exasperating, unfunny Hugh Herbert.

The Vultures in the Parlor

This is the first scene in the picture. Alan Ladd plays the son of Basil Rathbone and Gladys Cooper — not, I may say, entirely believably.

What I like best about this picture is its musical score, which is a compendium of spooky movie clichés played with great brio and flair. “The Black Cat” is unquestionably a low budget B picture, but the score is far more exciting and entertaining that what pass for musical scores in today’s A budget pictures. Shamefully, the three composers who scored the picture are not listed in the onscreen credits. They are: Hans J. Salter, who composed more than a dozen horror picture scores in the forties. His first horror score was “The Invisible Man Returns” (1940), his last was “Attack of the Slime People” (2008). Frank Skinner, who scored all the big, plush Douglas Sirk pictures in the fifties also contributed. Stock music written by Charles Previn is also used.

Sondergaard Laughs!

In this scene, we come upon Mrs Winslow, down in the family crypt, where she is busy incinerating one of her beloved cats. Poor little friend! Oh, it’s all very queer, and that’s a fact: there was nothing at all the matter with the poor little fellow. How could it have happened? One moment he’s lapping milk intended for Mrs Winslow and the next moment he’s as cold as any stone.

Gale Sondergaard made her Hollywood debut in 1936 in “Anthony Adverse,” for which she became the first winner of the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, which category was introduced in 1937. She tied with Mme Maria Ouspenskaya for being the first actress to be nominated for her debut performance (Ouspenskaya was nominated for her amazing turn in “Dodsworth”). Sondergaard usually played villainesses; she was one of the inspirations for the Evil Queen/Witch in Disney’s 1937 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” In “The Black Cat,” which was released the year after “Rebecca,” she’s pretty obviously doing a parody of Judith Anderson’s Mrs Danvers, but Sondergaard’s fearsome dolor makes Dame Judith Anderson seem like Little Miss Muffett by comparison.

That laugh! The first time I saw her do that take, I couldn’t stop laughing for the next ten minutes. The more Gale Sondergaard pictures you’ve seen, the funnier it is likely to seem. She was not a merry presence.

Miss Cooper Misbehaves

From the mid-Nineteen-teens through the Nineteen-twenties, Gladys Cooper was the unrivalled queen of the West End stage. She was never a truly inspired actress; it doesn’t appear that she possessed the sacred fire that greatness requires. For the first several years of her career, critics complained that her stately, almost immobile acting style had plenty of tableau about it, but skimped on the vivant. Of her performance in W. Somerset Maugham’s “Home and Beauty” (1919), Aldous Huxley wrote: “Miss Gladys Cooper hardly does justice to the part of Victoria. She is too impassive, too statuesque, playing all the time as if she were Galatea, newly unpetrified and still unused to the ways of the living world.” None of this seemed to matter to audiences, who loved her long before she began to impress the critics favorably. Whatever she may have lacked in fire and music, she made up for in diligence and commonsense. The improvement she made in her technique impressed Maugham so deeply that, in an essay he wrote some thirty years later (in 1953), he praised her for “turning herself from an indifferent actress to an extremely competent one.”

She played Peter Pan for the 1923 and 1924 Christmas shows at the Adelphi Theatre. Much as I love Gladys Cooper, I can’t imagine her in that role; had I been a child in the audience when she came swooshing in through the nursery window (she was the first Peter Pan to enter on a wire), I believe I’d have been distill’d almost to jelly with the act of fear. Her glacial austerity is impressive, majestic, worthy of veneration, but it’s not a quality that causes children to frisk about. (She would have been well cast as Frosty the Snowman’s trophy wife.)

It’s not every day you see Miss Cooper murder Bela Lugosi in cold blood. She had, of course, famously shot a man before: she was the original Leslie Crosbie in the stage version of Maugham’s “The Letter.” Just as Bette Davis did in the excellent movie adaptation, Miss Cooper started the evening by shooting her lover in the back, then followed him as he staggered on to the veranda, where she shot him five more times, twice while he staggered and fell, thrice when he was down. People who saw her in that part said no other actress ever came close to matching her performance. But that was in 1927, when she was still considered the most beautiful and glamorous woman in England and the toast of the West End, with a theatre named after her.

L to R: Gladys Cooper in the 1910s; Hugh Cecil's 1926 portrait; Cooper on stage, circa mid-1920s.

L to R: Gladys Cooper in the 1910s; Hugh Cecil’s 1926 portrait; Cooper on stage, circa mid-1920s.

Miss Cooper, the Human Torch

Having been a great beauty for many years, Miss Cooper had little patience for unattractive actors. She especially admired actors who began as models, as she had, who had struggled and fought to be taken seriously as real actors. In 1916, while starring in “The Misleading Lady,” she was quite taken by the twenty-five year old Ronald Colman, who played a tiny part. One night he overheard a remark she made about him while she stood in the wings waiting to make her entrance: “Such a handsome young man, but why does he have to be such a terrible actor? So very clumsy — and those feet!” I invite you to keep this in mind while you watch Miss Cooper share the screen with that study in dishevelment, Broderick Crawford. How she must have loathed him! But can you blame her?

I think it’s safe to say that “The Black Cat” is the only time you’ll ever see Miss Gladys Cooper run from a room, shrieking and flailing her arms and engulfed in flames. But even without the fire, she probably would have made the same exit to remove herself from Broderick Crawford’s odious presence.

You can see last year’s edition by clicking here: “Frightfulness: Funny Halloween Fare.”

‘Captains Courageous’ — Updated with an Encomium to Melvyn Douglas

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Captains Courageous: Original Poster

Captains Courageous: Original Poster.

It’s amazing that “Captains Courageous” (MGM, 1937) should be such a brilliantly effective picture when you consider how bad Spencer Tracy’s performance is. As Manuel, the simple, good-hearted Portuguese fisherman, Tracy seems to be impersonating Chico Marx, though with his hair in corkscrew curls, he looks like Harpo. (If he’d worn a greasepaint moustache, he could have been all three Marx Brothers simultaneously.) He won an Oscar for his performance. It’s hard to account for this win, except that It wasn’t a strong year for leading men. Of the nominees, Charles Boyer (as Napoleon in “Conquest”) would have been my choice, but the picture was an expensive dud. Fredric March wasn’t terribly good in “A Star Is Born”; Robert Montgomery was bad in “Night Must Fall.” And Paul Muni was at his poisonous worst in “The Life of Emile Zola.” Muni may be the only actor who was even more overrated in his day than Tracy, but at least nobody appears to remember him or take his ham performances seriously anymore. Only Tracy continues to be considered a great actor, despite everything. I just shake my head and shrug. Anyhow, Tracy won, and he’s the worst thing in the otherwise estimable picture.

Happily, there are many wonderful performances in “Captains Courageous” — enough of them to mitigate the crumminess of Tracy’s I-no-speaka-da-Eenglees vaudeville turn — more than enough to make the picture well worth seeing. At the top of the list (and most surprisingly) is Freddie Bartholomew, who is superb. In every other picture I’ve seen him in, his goody-goody act gives me the pip. But in this one, he’s beyond reproach. I expect the director, Victor Fleming, had a lot to do with this. Before Harvey Cheyne (Bartholomew), falls overboard from an ocean liner and is subsequently reformed by three-months’ hard labor aboard the small fishing boat that rescued him, Fleming allows no whiff of the charming scapegrace about Harvey: instead, he is a dishonorable, thorough-going swine — and remains so even after his rescue. Then, just shy of thirty-five minutes into the picture, Captain Disko (Lionel Barrymore) decides he’s heard enough and slaps the little bastard so hard, it knocks him down — decks him, in fact. “You hit me!” Harvey says, suddenly pathetic and vulnerable. “Now you just set and think about that for a while,” replies the captain. Harvey’s formal education officially begins at that moment. It’s the best argument I’ve ever seen for corporal punishment. Audiences in 1937 must have cheered when they saw it; I bet they’d still cheer today.

Tracy, Bartholomew, Barrymore: The Good, the Bad and the Snuggly (not necessarily in that order).

Tracy, Bartholomew, Barrymore: The Good, the Bad and the Snuggly (not necessarily in that order).

In the scenes that follow, what a pleasure to see Harvey begin to admire, then to love, then to hero-worship Manuel . . . ! It’s done in such carefully plotted, tentative stages, and the evolution of Harvey’s relationship with this sea-faring father figure is so beautifully acted (by Bartholomew, if not by Tracy) that, even though you know you’re being had — the boy already has a father and will not be allowed to have two, so something extremely unpleasant will have to happen — you don’t feel manipulated by any of it. Bartholomew is so persuasive as Harvey that he makes Spencer Tracy’s dreadful performance appear to have its own weird logic . . . after all, if this shrewd little kid buys the mush-mouthed organ grinder act, who am I to gainsay it? By the end, as you will see, the picture is remarkably touching. “Captains Courageous” doesn’t jerk the tears; it conjures them.

Freddie Bartholomew as Harvey Cheyne. His one good performance, or were there others?

Freddie Bartholomew as Harvey Cheyne. His one good performance, or were there others?

The crew aboard the little fishing boat (named the We’re Here) is played by a group of seasoned pros, all of whom bring a lot of eccentric personality and energy to their roles. Barrymore is better than usual — he’s a ham, all right, but so is Captain Disko — and he underplays the emotional scenes (in one scene near the end, he gives the best performance of his movie career). John Carradine is tremendous as the dour pessimist, Long Jack, who believes Harvey to be a Jonah and wants him thrown off the boat. Carradine doesn’t sweeten him up: even after he eases up a bit, he’s still believably a hard fisherman, full of suspicions and superstitions and always expecting the worst of everybody and everything. A coming-of-age story like this is bound to be larded with sentimentality — Carradine and the rest of the cast (with the exception of Spencer Tracy) play against the sentiment; Fleming keeps the action moving along smartly: many life lessons are learned aboard the We’re Here, but Fleming never lingers over them. Mickey Rooney is good and admirably restrained in a small role. For once, he doesn’t chew the scenery. God only knows how Victor Fleming managed to keep him under control. As Harvey’s lonely business tycoon father, Melvyn Douglas is also excellent: but then, he always is.

Replica of the Fishermen's Memorial in Gloucester, Mass.

Replica of the Fishermen’s Memorial in Gloucester, Mass.

In Praise of Melvyn Douglas

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.’


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.

In “Captains Courageous,” he plays a relatively small role for a star of his magnitude; moreover, there are more hams in the picture than one could hope to find in a Smithfield slaughterhouse. Douglas doesn’t pull any cheesy tricks to draw attention to himself during the brief minutes he’s onscreen: instead, he 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; we see him come to understand that all the certainties on which he based his conduct and set his priorities were not certainties at all, but rather, miscalculations that have brought his life to grief. But Douglas doesn’t appear to act any of this: he doesn’t present them to us with a series of carefully arranged hesitations, sighs, arched eyebrows, sweetly rueful smiles or any of the thousands of other sentimental acting tricks a lesser actor would put to use. He doesn’t even delude himself that Mr Cheyne’s crisis of the soul, as painful as it is, is the point of the story. He knows he’s of secondary — even tertiary — importance to the story: he knows he’s not the star of this coming-of-age picture: Freddie Bartholomew is. Yet Mr Cheyne’s agonies are acute; they’re also terribly interesting and are an essential element to the story, so just hitting his marks, finding his light and being a good feed for the child star are not an option. It’s quite an acting challenge: Mr Cheyne must go through his terrible ordeal, yet he must do so without taking the focus of the picture off the kid. How does Douglas solve it? As I mentioned, he doesn’t act the crisis; he doesn’t show us what the man is going through: instead, he does precisely what Mr Cheyne would do: he approaches his problem systematically. Without losing any of his dignity, he quietly seeks advice and information from the captain who has turned his son into a man. He puts aside all questions of class and education — Mr Cheyne is not a snob — and as he talks to the old captain, Douglas lets us understand something of Mr Cheyne’s awakening, which we learn by reading the sorrows of his changing face. It’s 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.’

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!