Tag Archives: Paul Henreid

Katharine Hepburn in a Pair of Stinkers

I don’t think time is being kind to Katharine Hepburn’s reputation:  it’s incredible how many terrible pictures she made, how often she was bad in them, and how seldom she was in a good picture.  She’s terrific as Rose Sayer in “The African Queen,” and as Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” She’s pretty good in “Summertime.”  She may be okay in “The Philadelphia Story,” but it’s a rotten, woman-hating picture, as is “Woman of the Year.”  I hate every one of those bum comedies she made with Spencer Tracy — the most overrated actor in pictures.

'I'll be a son of a bitch.'  You said it, buster.

‘I’ll be a son of a bitch.’ You said it, buster.

The last picture they made together — “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” — is so stupendously terrible that I sometimes find it hard to dial away from it when it’s on TCM — its dreadfulness creates something like a magnetic force field or an electrical charge, rather like the shock you can expect if you take a shortcut while monkeying with an electrical circuit.  It hurts like hell while it’s got you, and you know the ominous current will kill you, but it’s hard to pull free.  Hepburn’s especially terrible in the performances for which she won her four Academy Awards.  “On Golden Pond,” for example, is unwatchable.  I can’t think of it without shuddering.  Jane Fonda told a funny story about it.  Both she and Hepburn were nominated for Best Actress that year.  Hepburn already had three Oscars; Fonda had two.  And one of Hepburn’s was a tie (with Barbra Streisand).  So when Hepburn got the Oscar for “On Golden Pond,” she rang Fonda the next day and crowed, “You’ll nevah catch up to me now!”

Dragon Seed

Turhan Bey, Katharine Hepburn:  Me no rikee.

Robert Bice, Katharine Hepburn: Me no rikee.

A friend lent me his DVD of the expensive MGM 1944 epic “Dragon Seed,” based on the best selling novel by that Great Lady of China, Pearl S. Buck, and for my sins, I watched it.  It’s as bad as, perhaps even worse than, “The Good Earth,” the other lavish Chinese epic with no Chinese actors in major roles.  James Agee’s original assessment of “Dragon Seed” was  a b s o l u t e l y  correct.  He wrote that it was an “unimaginably bad movie,”  full of “such distinguished Chinese as Katharine Hepburn, Akim Tamiroff, etc.” all performing in Chinaman drag against “unearthly, sepia-tinted landscapes, speaking their inhuman language.”  (The prosthetic epicanthus folds over Hepburn’s eyes make her look like the Cowardly Lioness.)  Agee continued with a litany of complaint about how every last detail was wrong, including the shape of Miss Hepburn’s eyelids, and finished by observing, “Indeed, I’ve never seen another picture so full of wrong slants.”  He was a very funny writer, but not as funny as the authors of “Dragon Seed.”  Two screenwriters are credited:  Marguerite Roberts, who later wrote the screenplay for 1968’s “True Grit,” and Jane Murfin, who, after a long, prolific career (“Lilac Time,” “Smilin’ Through,” “Roberta,” “The Women,” to name but four of her 66 titles), never wrote another screenplay after this one, though she lived another eleven years.

Walter Huston, Frances Rafferty, Robert Bice:  Huston said, 'I'm paid to make to make the bad lines sound good.'  Not this time . . .

Walter Huston, Frances Rafferty, Robert Bice: Huston said, ‘I’m paid to make to make the bad lines sound good.’ Not this time . . .

Agee is right about the “inhuman language” spoken in “Dragon Seed.”  The dialogue in this wretched picture is terrible beyond belief . . . every minute there’s a new outrage.  For instance, in one scene Turhan Bey (a/k/a “the Turkish Delight”) looks upon a long parade of refugees and says, “We are an island in a river of fleeing people!”  And a minute later, comes the following bit of turgidity, with nary a syllable of overlapping dialogue (for these were the good old days when everyone politely waited his turn to speak, no matter how overwrought):  Henry (Clarence Oddbody, AS2) Travers, as Wise Old Chinaman No. Two (Wise Old Chinaman No. One is Walter Huston),  watches an endless line of coolies hauling heavy machinery on shoulder-borne litters across a rugged terrain, and asks Turhan Bey:  “Cousin, what are these?  They carry different burdens!”  Bey says noisily to the passing parade, “Only a fool would carry iron on his back when sacks of rice are so much lighter!”  An anonymous coolie on the line responds with considerable spirit, “This is not iron, but a factory, that we carry on our backs!  Behind us follows a whole city!”  Bey and Travers shake their heads in bewilderment.  Only Katharine Hepburn, with an inverted basket on her head, fully understands the social change that is taking place.  Out of the corner of her mouth, like a gangster, Miss Hepburn observes, sotto voce, “These are not as the others were . . . They seem to have a plan!”  Viva Hollywood!  Those big studios really knew how to make a stinker.  I laughed and laughed.

When the picture was made (1944), there were more than a half billion Chinese on the planet, yet to look at the credits, no more than a half dozen were in Hollywood.  There are four Wongs in uncredited roles (as Japanese soldiers),  Four Wongs don’t make it right.

 Song of Love

Several years ago, Renee Fleming was TCM’s guest programmer on Monday night and for the second movie of the night, she chose the 1947 MGM biopic of Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann called “Song of Love.” Katharine Hepburn plays Clara and Paul Henreid plays poor doomed Prof. Schumann.  I’d seen about ten minutes of it two or three years earlier and was appalled by what I saw, but when it was on again I happened to be in the mood for it — probably because of the bludgeoning my senses took from watching “The Great Waltz,” which was Miss Fleming’s first pick for the night.  Miss Fleming has a beautiful voice, but it appears that all her taste is in her mouth.

Song of Love:  Awful Wieck

Song of Love: Awful Wieck stuff.

“Song of Love” is every bit as bad as I had remembered, but I couldn’t stop watching it.  Brahms is played by Robert Walker, who gulps and stammers so much, you’d think he was playing Bashful the Dwarf.

Kitten on the keys.

Kitten on the keys.

The script was written by the doyenne of the Classical Music Cinema, Irmgard von Cube, who also wrote “They Shall Have Music,” which was one of the few times Heifetz ever appeared in a Hollywood picture.  Apparently, Miss von Cube was besotted with music, but her imagination was so trivial and vulgar that she turned the story of these great artists into one of suffocating, sit-com domesticity.  The story of Herr and Frau Schumann and their complicated friendship with Johannes Brahms unfolds as a series of silly little housekeeping turmoils, hardly worthy of “The Brady Bunch”:  how will the Schumanns get their important dinner party on after their maid walks out two hours before the guests arrive?  Clara is too featherbrained to have mastered any of the domestic arts, so Johannes and Robert agree to cook the meal themselves . . . if they can work up the nerve to kill the clucking chicken.  “Comedy” ensues.  Honestly, it was a scene straight out of “Ich Liebe Lucy,” minus the laugh track.

That ubiquitous Nellie from the forties, Henry Daniell, in an unbecoming Prince Valiant wig, is on hand as Franz Liszt, glowering over the keys and banging with all his might.  In one scene, he bangs away so hard that the strings snap as he plays, whereupon he moves to a second piano, stage left, and proceeds to bang even harder on that one.  (As a matter of fact, this is quite accurate:  before their plates were made of cast iron, pianos literally used to fall apart under Liszt’s hands in the middle of his concerts, as in a Warner Bros. cartoon.)

Henry Daniell as Franz Liszt:

Henry Daniell as Franz Liszt:  Flame on.

We can be grateful that Miss von Cube rarely allows any of her characters to say a word about music, other than things like Clara’s, “Your latest work is lovely, darling,” or the startled observation made by one of the Schumann children upon hearing his mother in concert:  “Her hands move so FAST, Mr Bwahms!”  There is one scene, however, in which Clara so abominates Lizst’s inventions on a piece of her husband’s that she complains about it during the performance and then noisily chastises him afterwards for ruining it with what she calls “glittering pyrotechnics.”  Daniell swallows the opprobrium like a good sport; when one of his friends leans into him and says, “She insulted you!,” Daniell replies in his nasal hiss, “She did worse than that:  she dessssscribed me!”

As Robert Schumann, Paul Henreid does what he always does:  nothing at all.  As he descends into madness, dark greasepaint is smeared on the bags under his eyes and when he attempts to conduct his own work, the orchestra is obscured by buzzing . . . ah, the poor loonie!  With all that buzzing, his music sounds like Varèse.  His final madness takes the form of benign reasonableness:  he goes about with a distracted, lopsided half smile and seems utterly resigned to failure.  Henreid’s Schumann is so meek and gentle, I couldn’t understand why anyone fretted over his mental health:  he didn’t need an alienist — he needed water and plenty of sunlight.  But I screamed with laughter when I saw that Clinton Sundberg of Appleton, Minnesota — an MGM contract player who always looked and sounded as if he’d just fallen off the turnip truck — was Schumann’s alienist and eventual coroner.

Henried, Hepburn:  'Come, darling, let's get you to the nuthouse.'

Henreid, Hepburn: ‘Come, Liebchen, let’s get you to the nuthouse.’

There was one lovely little exchange near the end of the movie, however:  after Schumann is in the cold, cold ground, Clara attends a gathering at which a violinist, hitherto unknown to her, plays the wedding music that Robert had specifically written for her.  Tears come into her eyes.  “That’s the first time I’ve had it played for me by someone else,” she tells the violinist.  “How did you happen to know it?”  The violinist replies, “I am a musician, madame.”

Notable Claude Rains Pictures

The Adventures of Robin Hood

Rains as Prince John:  "Whoever would have thought my dear brother would be so considerate as to get him self captured & leave all England to my . . . tender . . . care?"

Claude Rains as Prince John: “Whoever would have thought my dear brother would be so considerate as to get himself captured and leave all England to my . . . tender . . . care?”

In “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” Claude Rains is not as subtle as he would soon become, but he’s awfully funny and adds mad frivolity to the stock villain he plays. Rains plays Prince John as a nattering swish. It would be interesting to know if he came up with the idea on his own, or if the strawberry blond whiskers and Prince Valiant wig made the choice for him. (Look at the picture below: Melville Cooper, Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains: as many silly looking wigs as on the 2013 Oscars.)

Claude Rains as Prince John: "By my faith, but you're a bold rascal . . . "

Love at first sight. Rains to Errol Flynn: “By my faith, but you’re a bold rascal . . . “

Rains camps it up to a fare-thee-well: he speaks his lines in the highest reaches of his tessitura, titters in a tinkling falsetto, and waves his scepter about with a limp wrist. If he weren’t so funny and incorrigible, the stereotypes he employs would be an insult to every pansy in America. And of course, he’s lecherous as a monkey, too. With his eyebrows aloft and his lids at half-mast, Rains rakes Errol Flynn up and down with his glittering eyes — boldly, outrageously — and leaves no doubt what this goatish little tyrant wants to do with his lissome nemesis. Every time I see Prince John mentally undress Robin, I half expect the score to go boiiinnnng! Rebuffed, he affects delight at “this saucy fellow”: “Ho, varlets, bring Sir Robin food! Such insolence must support a healthy appetite!”

[More to come]

Deception

Rains as Hollenius: "They call me a great man . . . that's the loneliest animal in the world . . . !"

Rains as Hollenius: “They call me a great man . . . that’s the loneliest animal in the world . . . !”

Bette Davis had little use for “Deception” (Warner Bros. 1946). She did allow, however, that Claude Rains was great in it. The picture is so stylish and witty that, until a friend straightened me out recently, I never understood why it’s not more celebrated than it is. I never even heard of it until the late 90s, and I had been watching old movies since the mid-sixties. The trouble, my friend assured me, was that there’s no character with whom we can wholly sympathize. He’s probably right about this. I failed to recognize the problem because I cannot see the picture as a whole, but rather as a series of acting lessons by the great Claude Rains, who gives one of his most accomplished performances. He dominates every scene he’s in and, for once, he’s speaking first-rate dialogue, rather than elevating lesser fare. In pictures like “Casablanca,” Rains made mediocre stuff sound first-rate, but in “Deception,” the dialogue he speaks (by John Collier) is worthy of his great talent.

Taken as a story, with beginning, middle and satisfying conclusion, “Deception” is not, technically speaking, a good picture: the machinery of the plot is creaky; the characters are cartoonish; aside from Rains, the acting ranges from not very good to quite terrible: the problems with it are many. But none of them matter to me: the vast operatic silliness of everything, including the two fabulous apartments — Christine’s (Bette Davis), in all its angles and shadows and rain falling on the slanted skylights (there’s a legend that it is based on one of Leonard Bernstein’s apartments); and Alexander Hollenius’ (Rains), with his throne and all the Gothic clutter — and all the over-ripe rococo dialogue and the mad conductor/composer temperament and classical music . . . It all conspires to act on me like an hallucinatory drug. I don’t even pay attention to the plot or take a word of it for true . . . it’s all style, technique, panache, wit and connoisseurship. It’s as if all the silliness were tailor-made ten years before I was born specifically to appeal my peculiar set of tastes and interests. It appeals to me in so many curious, obscure ways . . . even the cat and the parrot (who doesn’t turn a feather when a shot is fired) seem calculated to please me. My favorite cat looked exactly like Hollenius’ feline . . . and I spent several of the happiest months of my life living down on East 9th Street back in the eighties, with a great (now late) friend from college, who had a parrot that looked exactly like Hollenius’ bird. And then the Korngold Cello Concerto . . . I love it — it’s gorgeous; the slow movement wrings tears from my eyes. And what other picture ever featured a full radio commercial, complete with close-harmony jingle for a fictional product called “Draw-r-Off,” a kitchen pipe cleaner? “. . . Nothing WIPES/Or cleans your PIPES/Like double-action Draw-r-Off!” “Remember, folks, when you spell ‘Draw-roff’ backwards, it spells ‘forward’.” Hunh? How am I NOT gonna love that? But who else in the world cares about such nonsense? It’s really as if John Collier knew ten years before I was born what would make me — and perhaps no one else on earth — laugh.

Hollenius orders dinner: "Mmm-hmm, I think so, don't you?"

Hollenius orders dinner: “Mmm-hmm, I think so, don’t you?”

“You might think about getting three of these little fellows ready. And you know what I think would go well with them? A trout. A nice brook trout. Not too large . . . ! . . . from a good stream.” My God! I’ve seen that picture maybe 200 times, and I hardly know how it ends. I watch Claude go at it hot and heavy, then skip over the scenes between Henreid and Davis, then I listen to the Cello Cone-see-ayr-toe (as Henreid pronounces it), and don’t bother with the rest of it. It’s like a form of Trekkie-style geekdom, my affection for that picture. I just never realized it before now. Rains’ entrance is unforgettable: “A party indeed!” My God!


“Champagne, caviar . . . all very fitting . . . I infer a husband . . . Make me acquainted with him. My dear sir: I wish you all the joy we less fortunate men must be content to imagine.” “You know, I require only one thing of a meal: that it be excellent.” The list is not endless, but every time Alexander Hollenius opens his mouth, another quotable line is added to it.

Rains: "Extraordinary, isn’t it, that music can exist in the same world as the basest treachery and ingratitude?"

Rains: Extraordinary, isn’t it, that music can exist in the same world as the basest treachery and ingratitude?

Now that my friend has explained what prevented him from enjoying the picture as much as I do, it occurs to me that the people I know who love “Deception” — most of them musicians — understand that it’s not intended to be an accurate portrayal of the world of classical music: we accept it as something akin to an inside joke, a curiosity, a collection of hilarious bits . . . just as “Citizen Kane” is a collection of preposterous bits. It has all the ostentation of “Citizen Kane,” but none of its pretension. No, “Deception” is not really a very good picture, taken as a picture. Taken as a repository of hilarious lines and hamming at the very highest level, well, it’s in a class of its own . . . And that’s all I care about when the subject matter, temperament, atmosphere and sense of humor are so weirdly and perfectly tailored to my tastes.

And there’s another thing, too. My affection for the picture was strongly influenced by how I first saw it. I came in late that first time, and had no idea what I was watching. This was in the early days of TCM — in the mid- to late-nineties. I came home from work on a Friday evening, turned on TCM and it was smack in the middle of Claude’s maddening ordering of dinner at the very point where he pulls out a cigarette and suddenly there’s a forest fire of matches, all waiting to light him up. It was love at first sight . . . and I had absolutely no idea what I was seeing. Though I was already a big fan of his, I had never heard of this picture. It was all so demented and hilarious and stylized I was fascinated by it. And I had a wild suspicion that the script was the work of mad, wonderful John Collier. More than a year passed before TCM showed it again, and it did not disappoint. It had been at least ten years since I’d read anything by John Collier (“His Monkey Wife,” “Defy the Foul Fiend,” “Fancies and Goodnights”) — and I had no idea he’d ever written a screenplay — but to my ear, his ornate style is as unmistakable as, say, Odets’ ornate ghetto lingo is. John Collier is definitely not for all markets, but he suits me right down to the ground. His brand of humor slays me. There’s not another Hollywood picture I can think of — including the few others by Collier himself — that sound anything like “Deception.” It’s the weirdest form of wit I ever saw in a major motion picture . . . or for that matter in any picture. Hollenius wears his leather gloves at dinner and takes them off ONLY to handle the poultry carcasses that are brought for his inspection, then pulls them back on again . . . ! That kills me. “From now on, you’re MY cellist!” says an infatuated college reporter from “The Bugler” in an early scene . . . Who else would write such a line? Or take Hollenius’ first exit line: “Like all women: white as a sheet at the sight of a couple of scratches. . . But calm and smiling like a hospital nurse . . . in the presence of a mortal wound . . . Good night!” Who else could write such a line?

Collier wrote a lot of very strange fiction, full of weird, unsettling paranormal incidents, usually set in dark, decaying, overheated mansions where gigantic exotic plants swallow up visitors and where unhappily married couples (the only kind that exist in his fiction) go to fantastic lengths to bump each other off. His style was extravagant and ornate, full of lurid metaphors and rococo similes. I doubt he’s an acquired taste: you either love his stuff at once or not at all. “Deception” is one of his few screenplays, and the dialogue he wrote for Alexander Hollenius (Rains) is echt Collier: droll, menacing, contemptuous, politely hostile, freighted with more innuendo than actual substance. Not many actors can handle such ornamental, filigreed language; Bette Davis is not at home in such turbid waters, while Paul Henreid (who completes the love triangle) is utterly hopeless as a genius cellist with war-shattered nerves. Rains disliked Henreid intensely, and had no respect for his talent. He referred to him as “Paul Hemorrhoid.” John Abbott fares rather better — he’s the hilarious, cringing Bertram Gribble, a thin-skinned cellist. Abbott is an actor who pops up in all sorts of unusual places and he always puts on a good show. He plays Chevalier’s valet in “Gigi.” A very witty performance, so perfect that it, like a great movie score, is almost invisible in its perfect appropriateness.

When Bette Davis appeared on the Dick Cavett Show back in 1971, she was particularly complimentary of Rains’ handling of one scene from “Deception,” in which he drives her and Paul Henreid out of their minds while ordering dinner at a French restaurant. You can see what she means.

The Unsuspected

Claude Rains: Your genial host.

Claude Rains: Your genial host.

Claude Rains gives a fabulous performance as a suave and slippery radio personality, whom his announcer introduces as “Your genial host: renowed writer, art collector and teller of strange tales, Victor Grandison.” (That should give you an idea of the ludicrous over-ripeness of the picture — written by Ranald MacDougall (“Mildred Pierce”).) That queen of the noirs, Audrey Totter,* is in it and very funny indeed. As is another actress I like a lot: Constance Bennett. There’s also a peculiar leading man, who gets a credit that reads “Introducing Michael North,” even though it was hardly his first picture — he’d been in several pictures before this one, including “The Ox-Bow Incident,” billed as Ted North. A very handsome fellow with a nice manner, but stiff as a board and he has trouble with the letter R. So does Rains, which makes for some amusing dialogue (Rains masked his R problems quite well, but not always). North is one of those rare actors who can convey thought: you can actually see him think — and you can see that he’s an idiot. I often watch his scenes just to see the thoughts come into his head one at a time, slow and hard. “Introducing” was an ironic title card for North: “The Unsuspected” was his last picture. Nothing after 1947, and I can find nothing about what happened to him, other than he was divorced that same year. Whether he died or simply got out of pictures is a mystery to me. Hurd Hatfield, who plays Totter’s dipso husband, once again looks as if he’s just come from a chemical peel. The imperiled heroine is played by an actress named Joan Caulfield; whether she’s good or bad in the part is beside the point: she makes no impression at all . . . she’s amnesia on a pair of legs. What other pictures she appeared in, I couldn’t say. I can never remember to look up her credits. Michael Curtiz directed the picture with a lot of style, and there’s at least one shot early in this one — a panning shot from a moving train to a hotel window that’s quite remarkable. I don’t mind saying the picture is poppycock, but it’s a lot of fun and is told in a way that keeps you guessing for a long time. The first time I saw it, I didn’t know WHERE it was heading. Unfortunately, when you learn what in fact is going on, it doesn’t add up to much: “The Unsuspected” has more dead herrings than red ones, but Rains’ performance elevates the material to just above sub-par. Franz Waxman did the intrusive, amusingly creepy score.

*About Audrey Totter: It was while watching this picture for the first time that I came up with the following: If Audrey Totter gave birth to a girl who grew up to be a slut, she’d be Audrey Totter’s tawdry daughter.

Audrey Totter, Michael North: "You see, Matilda & I were mawwied."

Audrey Totter, Michael North: “You see, Matilda and I were mawwied.”