Tag Archives: Mrs Danvers

Gladys Cooper Cuts Loose in ‘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.

Scene Stealers in ‘Rebecca’

Rebecca:  Original Poster.

Rebecca: Original Poster.

What I like most about Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” (Selznick International, 1940) are the performances by the half dozen character actors in the smaller roles. Pauline Kael complained that it was one of Laurence Olivier’s rare bad performances; I think he’s actually better than he was in a lot of his other pictures (he’s best in “Henry V” and “Richard III”). He doesn’t have much to work with as Maxim de Winter, but he looks good and sounds right — he’s just not terribly interesting. Joan Fontaine plays awkwardness quite well, but she can’t resist the urge to telegraph emotions as a sort of semaphore (e.g., Quizzical Look 6(a): raise left eyebrow, cast eyes downward, count one, then cock head) — once you crack her simple code, she’s rather touching. Later on in her career, she hardened up and was no fun to watch, except as an object of ridicule: her by-the-numbers acting made the Method seem a breath of fresh air, when it came along about a decade later.

Fontaine, Laurence Olivier

Joan Fontaine, Laurence Olivier:  Mr and Mrs Maxim de Winter of Cornwall.

Judith Anderson’s sepulchral housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, is the character most people remember, and with good reason. I doubt Miss Anderson ever was better suited to a role, but I find that the character practically plays itself: it’s to Anderson’s credit that she stays out of the way, neither over-emphasizing Mrs Danvers’ creepiness nor commenting on her apparent lesbianism and necrophilia. She plays her as a blank, with her cards close to her chest, as it were. In those scenes where she tips her hand and we see her malevolence, her words betray her cruelty, not Anderson’s performance.

Joan Fontaine, Judith Anderson:  'You've nothing to stay for. You've nothing to live for really, have you?'

Joan Fontaine (sporting Quizzical Look 6(a)), Judith Anderson: ‘You’ve nothing to stay for. You’ve nothing to live for really, have you?’

Florence Bates, in the small, but important role of Edythe Van Hopper, gives a truly great performance. The dreadful Mrs Van Hopper is a cartoon of the selfish, overfed society matron who treats her servants badly and fawns on her social betters. It takes great skill to play this sort of character. Mrs Van Hopper is hateful in every conceivable way: she’s suspicious, venomous, gluttonous, dishonest, vain, bad-tempered, and perhaps worst of all, a cracking bore. Yet her nastiness must do more than merely appall us: it must also make us laugh. She must horrify us, but we shouldn’t be anxious to be rid of her before she has served her purpose in the story’s clockwork. We must enjoy hating her. Florence Bates has no equal when it comes to this sort of battleaxe. Her trick is always to be as imaginative as possible. She’s never a generalized harridan: she’s always specific. Look at her in this scene:

It helps that the scene is so cleverly written, but a lesser actress would miss the hints of humanity in the old gorgon’s reactions to the coldness of Maxim de Winter’s replies to her maddening chatter and especially to his abrupt retreat. At the end of the scene, when she scolds Fontaine (“By the way, my dear, don’t think that I mean to be unkind, but you were just a teeny-weenie bit forward with Mr de Winter: Your effort to enter the conversation quite embarrassed me, as I’m sure it did him”), it is obvious that Mrs Van Hopper is in the process of shifting the blame from herself to her innocent, pretty, young paid companion.  It’s a nasty thing to do, but Mrs Van Hopper is wretched and lonely and though she is wealthy, she knows the world has passed her by. I’m particularly taken with the way Bates phrases the line: she begins in her lower register and rattles off the first several words — the preface — as quickly as possible. Then she draws a breath, fixes Fontaine with a “sneer of cold command” and draws out “teeny-weenie” while shaking her wattles imperiously. This is no accident:  Bates knows exactly what she’s doing. Those wattles remind us of the dragon’s beefiness and age, and by lingering over “teeny-weenie,” she makes her rebuke more intolerable, because it suggests that she feels she must use baby-talk vocabulary to ensure her companion will understand the criticism. Moreover, her mid-sentence change of tempo adds variety and renews our interest in what the old bitch has to say. This is the sort of attention to detail that makes Florence Bates so funny and infuriating in battleaxe roles.

Here are two other shorter examples of Florence Bates in full sail. Notice in both clips how clever she is about changing tempo and vocal register. When she goes into her head voice — like an elderly opera singer — she’s particularly peremptory and exasperating. All Bates lets you know in advance is that Edythe Van Hopper is going to be extremely unpleasant, but she keeps you guessing about how she’ll do it. You can never predict what new angle she’ll swoop in from.

Again, the writing gives her a lot to work with, but the point is she brings the good material fully to life. Also, as hateful as the old bitch is, she doesn’t know she’s hateful. It’s clear that she believes she’s a charming woman of the world: she describes the de Winters as old friends, but in the earlier clip, we know he endures the garrulous old parlor snake only to be close to her young companion — and even then, he lasts only a minute before the barrage of her loquacity drives him off. The self-delusion that runs through her performance grounds the character in reality; it doesn’t make her any less abominable, but it does arouse a little pity.

Her putting out her cigarette in the cold cream is in the book. It’s one of the few details about the novel that stayed with me. It’s wonderfully vivid. You can practically extrapolate the rest of Mrs Van Hopper’s character from that one piece of damning evidence.

Also in a small role is the legendary former beauty, Gladys Cooper, who would go on to play a succession of imperious old cats herself. In “Rebecca,” she plays the no-nonsense, but kindly sister of Maxim de Winter, Beatrice Lacy. She had nothing like the imagination and resourcefulness of Florence Bates, but she had style and authority. This was her first Hollywood picture. Miss Cooper knew when Hitchcock cast her in the part that she was no longer a young woman, but she was horrified by her appearance on film, completely unprepared for how she looked. It must be said that neither Hitch nor his director of photography, the great George Barnes, did anything to light her in a flattering way. She was, after all, in a small role and served an almost entirely expository function. Yet she does well with the little bit of humor that she is given to do. She has a nice exchange with Robert, the footman, who serves luncheon, while helping herself and never once looking in his direction.

Gladys Cooper, Philip Winter, Olivier:  'How are you, Robert?'

Gladys Cooper, Philip Winter, Olivier: ‘How are you, Robert?’

Beatrice:  How are you, Robert?

Robert:  Quite well, thank you, madam.

Beatrice:  Still having trouble with your teeth?

Robert:  Unfortunately yes, madam.

Beatrice:  You should have them out.  All of them.  Wretched nuisances, teeth.

Robert:  Yes, madam.  (She finishes helping herself and he moves off.)

Beatrice:  Ooh, what a plateful.

Cooper, Olivier:  'Ooh, what a plateful.'

Cooper, Olivier: ‘Ooh, what a plateful.’

Nigel Bruce is also along (as Cooper’s husband, Major Giles Lacy), harrumphing and doing his bumptious, befuddled country squire bit. Hitchcock allows him to be a bit broader than is really necessary or advisable, but it’s hard to dislike him. Like Cooper, he’s there mostly for purposes of exposition, which generally come in the form of his putting his foot in his mouth, usually after he has just stepped into another cow-pie.  He gets the job done, though not with much wit or imagination.

And then there is the incomparable professional cad, George Sanders, who gives the most George Sandersesque performance of them all. If the word insouciant had not existed before Sanders grew to manhood, it would have to have been invented to describe his droll presence and deft handling of a witty line. His range was extremely limited; he’s ill-served in serious roles, but he plays suave bounders with as much authority and imagination as Florence Bates plays bejeweled scolds. Everything Sanders does, including the way he eats a chicken leg, is hilarious. He has one of the most mellifluous bass baritone voices in pictures. (At one point, he was invited to play the Ezio Pinza role in the National Tour of “South Pacific,” but he backed out at the last minute. What a shame.  He played the romantic foil to Ethel Merman in the movie version of “Call Me Madam,” and sang beautifully. A friend asked me to describe his sound. After some thought, I answered, “Ezio Pinza without the garlic.”)

In “Rebecca,” Sanders is not only a cad, but a blackmailer as well, and he’s unbelievably funny every second he’s onscreen.

George Sanders:  'You know old boy, I have the strong feeling that before the day is out, someone is going to make use of that expressive, but rather old-fashioned term, "foul play" . . . '

George Sanders: ‘You know old boy, I have the strong feeling that before the day is out, someone is going to make use of that expressive, but rather old-fashioned term, “foul play” . . . ‘