Tag Archives: Woman’s Picture

Starting out from Scratch: Barbara Stanwyck in ‘My Reputation’

Original poster.

Original poster, and totally misleading: Barbara Stanwyck has been posed and painted to look like Jane Russell in ‘The Outlaw.’

Curtis Bernhardt’s “My Reputation” (Warner Bros., 1946) is one of the best Woman’s Pictures I know. (Bernhardt directed another great one, “Payment on Demand,” which I examined a few weeks ago.) Like “Payment on Demand,” it is unusually adult. Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica “Jess” Drummond, a youngish widow with two teenage sons; she’s neither ready nor willing to be a widow for the rest of her life, but doesn’t know what she’s to do with her husband gone after a long illness and her two boys off at prep school. To complicate matters, she has a pushy, old-fashioned mother who bullies her, and she’s surrounded by a crowd of catty, gossipy friends: they’re despicable, but hardly unusual. No, they’re standard-issue Woman’s Picture upper middle class women. I’ve been looking at a lot of Woman’s Pictures lately, and with very few exceptions, they positively pullulate with idle female chatterbox parasites in hats and jewels and furs, who get tight at lunch, slander their absent friends, cheat on their husbands and ostracize any member of their set who wants to make herself useful or pursue an intellectual or artistic interest. These pampered ladies are snobs and hypocrites and busybodies — when there’s a war on, they do much of their shopping on the black market and speak scornfully of the patriotic simps who live on ration tickets and abide by the government’s austerity measures; half of them are tramps and the other half are frigid. Here’s an early scene in which we meet some of these poisonous dames at the market. There’s another type of stock villain at the scene’s end, but I’ll have something to say about him a little later on.

There have been Woman’s Pictures since the beginning, but they became a readily identifiable genre during the War Years, when Hollywood studios did what they could to cater to their idea of what women on the Home Front would want to see. The stories in this genre tend to be overwrought romances in which an attractive, sympathetic leading lady is put through tumultuous psychological wringers by antagonists who come in all shapes and sizes. Yet, with much of the adult male population fighting overseas, most of the villains in these dramas necessarily had to be other women; Woman’s Pictures, as a rule, present the vast majority of the adult female population in a harshly negative light: they’re nitwits at best and venomous reptiles at worst. Even when the screenplays were written by women (as this one was: Catherine Turney) or were based on novels written by women (as this one was: “Instruct My Heart” by Clare Jaynes — terrible title!), the pictures were produced and directed by men who worked for studios that were run by men. And of course with the Production Code in full vigor, the conclusions drawn in even the best of these pictures tend to be conservative, to say the least. The Women’s Liberation movement was still decades away.

A Message from Beyond the Grave

In this clip, which comes in the first reel of the picture, Jess reads the letter her late husband wrote for her a few days before he died.

I have great admiration for Stanwyck’s combination of intense emotion and restraint. She doesn’t hide her feelings, but she doesn’t parade them either. She sheds tears, but she doesn’t glory in them. Although “My Reputation” seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle (why isn’t it better known?), it’s one of Stanwyck’s best performances: you can start watching the picture at just about any point and within a few seconds, you’re bound to see her doing something wonderful. But I’ll give you a hint: as good as she is in the first half of the picture, she only gets better as it goes along.

The (slightly misquoted) quotation comes from a sonnet by Christina Rossetti. Jess’s husband Paul remembered the last line only slightly incorrectly, but his paraphrase throws off its rhythm. I like to think Paul got the quote wrong because he was, well, dying and didn’t have time to look it up. Besides, he closes with “your loving but unpoetic husband,” which claim his error confirms.

Remember

by Christina Rossetti
Remember me when I am gone away,
       Gone far away into the silent land;
       When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
       You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
       Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
       And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
       For if the darkness and corruption leave
       A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
       Than that you should remember and be sad.

I rather like the poem, and it’s well suited to the picture, which, like Rossetti’s work, is wet without being soppy. But I can’t help comparing it to a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the same subject — for instance, Sonnet 71, which begins “No longer mourn for me when I am dead/Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell/Give warning to the world that I am fled/From this vile world, with vildest* worms to dwell.” Not very comforting, I know, but more bracing and less sentimental. In my book, the dying husband who left that passage for his widow to chew on would be a much more interesting fellow and a greater loss. But this is a Woman’s Picture, and sentimentality is part of the deal. What makes “My Reputation” exceptional in many scenes is Stanwyck’s ability to play the emotions without becoming vague and sentimental. Jessica Drummond is a native of a wealthy suburb of Chicago, but Stanwyck puts a lot of Brooklyn in the woman’s backbone.
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* Most modern editors amend “vildest” to “vilest,” but I disapprove of this liberty: vildest has more bite.

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

There are several partings in the picture, two of which are at train stations, and all of them are handled extremely well. Max Steiner’s score knocks me out: the way the main theme swells as the train pulls away strikes me as musical scoring at its best. This scene shows Jess as she puts her boys on the train to their private school back East. This is another example of how brilliantly Barbara Stanwyck expresses a complicated, deeply-felt inner life, but without telegraphing it: Stanwyck doesn’t present her emotions to you: she allows you to catch them as they fleet. It’s not only her face that registers what’s going on inside her, but look at her body language: she’s incredibly expressive. But she’s not the only one. I think the two kids in this scene are worth paying close attention to.


Bobby Cooper is the older brother, Keith; Scotty Beckett plays Kim. Bobby Cooper got out of pictures early. Of the two boys, Keith (Bobby) is the somber, soulful one; Kim’s the firecracker. And why not? Scotty Beckett was discovered at the age of three, when a casting agent overheard him singing for his ailing father, in The Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles. Scotty’s natural gaiety charmed the nurses: soon he was singing for all the patients on the ward. His father died the following year. Scotty appeared as Spanky McFarland’s co-conspirator in an early season of the Our Gang shorts, and went on to play opposite the biggest stars (including Garbo) at various studios all through his childhood, often portraying the leading character as a child. The kid was talented, extremely cute and a natural show-off, as Kim is. But I consider Bobby Cooper’s Keith to be the more interesting performance: Keith’s a nice looking boy, with more than a passing resemblance to his mother (they have the same eyes and the same jawline), but a melancholic, adult shadow partially eclipses his boyishness. You can see that Keith is at least dimly conscious, as his younger brother is not, of his mother’s loneliness and anxiety. And he sees that Kim is cuter and livelier than he, and knows that he lives in his younger brother’s shadow. I think little, if any, of this is in the script, but the acting is specific enough to make these details evident, without underlining them. (These details are more noticeably on display in other scenes, but they’re also in this scene if you look for them, and I wanted to show one of the nice train station sequences.) Look at the way Stanwyck interacts with her two boys: there’s nothing vague or general about her relationship to them as distinct, uniquely loveable individuals. She’s cheerful and light with Kim; she treats Keith almost as if he were her confidant . . . and the man of the family. The scene is deeply poignant, yet the dialogue is second rate at best. It’s the acting that is first rate. There’s real emotional truth in this parting that lifts the humdrum to something quite a lot better — perhaps better than it deserves. But I’m thankful for great scenes like this, however they happen and wherever I can find them.

You can also see in this clip that Scotty Beckett is already playing all the angles. His life was soon to spiral out of control; by the mid-fifties, he had become a one man “Hollywood Babylon.” Drunken driving, drug addiction, hotel robbery, passing bad checks, attempted suicide, pistol-whipping, wife-beating, a stretch in the stoney lonesome, parole violation . . . you name it, Scotty did it. An overdose killed him at 38 years old, a washed-up has-been. Poor little bastard.

The querulous old bitch of a granny with the chalk-on-a-slate voice is that bus-and-truck Gladys Cooper known as Lucile Watson. She gave the same goddamn performance in every picture she was ever in: the Sweet Old Darling rounded by an acidic brown perimeter; she’s an inferior dessert wine turned to vinegar: simultaneously cloying and tart — sickening. I can’t bear her.

The Masher

The most common stock male villain in Woman’s Pictures is The Masher. Occasionally, he’s a moderately attractive bachelor with bad manners (e.g., Jack Carson in “Mildred Pierce”), but far more often he’s an unattractive, hard-drinking, unhappily married middle-aged man who is under the misapprehension that his boorish double entendres and fulsome compliments are catnip to the ladies, especially when he’s got a half dozen Old Overholt highballs sloshing round in his belly. He usually gets a well-deserved slap in the face, which he interprets as just another step in the timeless dance of seduction. In the War Years (“My Reputation” was shot in 1943, but not released till ’46), The Masher was a more than usually objectionable and obnoxious pest: his being stateside implied he was a coward or unfit for service or unpatriotic — and probably all three. In “My Reputation,” The Masher is played by Jerome Cowan, a reliable, but wholly unsympathetic contract player at Warners.

I confess I find the scene in the car difficult to watch: what this bastard does to our heroine amounts to attempted rape — when she repulses his advances, his reassurance that nobody “would ever suspect you, anyway” is particularly loathsome. This scene takes place just days after her husband has been buried in the cold, cold ground. Who is this son of a bitch? “No hard feelings, Jess!” Hard feelings?! I’d like to see her go all Phyllis Dietrichson (“Double Indemnity”) on his ass, but that would be a different picture. Moreover, his confidence and persistence suggest that his brutishness has actually worked in the past. In the scene, Jess says, “Women on the loose can be such a mess,” but it’s hard to imagine any woman being quite that messy. I look at this scene and my wits begin to turn: during the Production Code era, a husband and wife couldn’t be shown lying fully clothed in a bed together, unless one of them had at least one foot touching the floor, but Jerry Cowan could be shown manhandling Barbara Stanwyck and smothering her with unwanted kisses, without a murmur of protest from Joe Breen’s office. Nobody gets laid or has any fun, so it’s all right for us to see it. Anyhow, having met his odious wife at the market in an earlier scene, we know that he’ll go home to her and they’ll both make each other miserable. So it all works out.

Eve Arden to the Rescue

Here’s what happens immediately afterwards. I cannot think of a more perfect example of what Woman’s Pictures are all about: serious psychological turmoils addressed with as much seriousness as Hollywood timidity and censorship would allow. Frankly, I much prefer this sort of tame psychoanalysis to what began to show up in Woman’s Pictures of the seventies, such as “An Unmarried Woman.” I love the gorgeous cinematography, the artificial (i.e., non-improvised) dialogue and the polished (i.e., not perfectly realistic) acting. And I especially savor the total absence of underscoring during the scene (the voices are melodious enough to carry it), followed by the plush ripeness of the travel music — it’s all close enough to reality to be believable, but it’s better than mere realism. Noël Coward once said, “When I go to the theatre, I want to see extraordinary people, not a series of ordinary ones.” Amen.

In this picture, Eve Arden is, for once, more wise than wise-cracking. Her analysis of Jessica’s problem isn’t what I’d call penetrating, but she’s certainly on the right track, and I like her combination of earnestness, empathy and toughness. Arden’s diction is precise almost to a fault; her way with a line is mannered and artificial, yet she unfailingly conveys canniness and above all, a warm personality. She lets you know she’s acting, but she also clearly means what she recites. She’s unreal without being phony. I’ve always found her a sympathetic actress, but never as witty as she apparently intends to be. But this is usually because her zingers aren’t good enough.

The Worm Turns

Another standard feature of the Woman’s Picture genre (and the one I like the best) is the obligatory scene in which the beset heroine finally finds the moxie to turn on her antagonist(s) and speak her mind: I call it “The Worm Turns.” “Now, Voyager” has a few spectacular examples of this, when Bette Davis faces down her formidable old tyrant of a mother (Gladys Cooper). Joan Crawford was always camp in such scenes, because she was always itching for a fight and took too much pleasure in browbeating her co-stars. Like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck plays this sort of scene excellently: she hates conflict, she doesn’t want to lose her temper, she’s ashamed of herself for losing control, but she’s got to set things straight. I love the way she lets loose in this scene: seeing it out of context, it won’t mean as much, of course, but I believe you can still get a fair idea of how emotionally satisfying the moment is in the context of the story. Steiner’s underscoring punctuates Stanwyck’s arguments beautifully. Stanny has an even better outburst later in the picture, but I don’t want to give too much away.

Lucile Watson wears that same jeweled brooch in other scenes. It reminds me of the solitary eyeball that the Grææ, the three blind hags who guarded the Medusa’s cave, passed among themselves. I’m captivated by this idea, because it reinforces the idea of Watson as a Gorgon, which she undeniably is.

The Complicated/Doomed Love Affair

Our heroine has to fall in love, of course, and the affair needs must be complicated — perhaps even impossibly so. In “My Reputation,” Jessica is a woman who married in her late teens and has no experience of romantic love outside of her marriage. She’s in her mid-thirties, but has less sexual experience than most girls in their freshman year of college; she appears to be a woman of the world, but she’s terrified of her unexplored sexuality and is afraid of being engulfed by passions that could lead her to her ruin. She’s emotionally stifled, even crippled, by the gossipy females of her social set and by her interfering termagant mother. And she has two boys who are still too young to understand her desire for romance. All the Rules say that she is supposed to immure herself in widowhood, but she falls — against her will — desperately in love with Major Scott Landis (George Brent), who introduces her to a new world of adult sexuality, which had never even occurred to her before. It’s all very complicated and confusing to her. She’s drawn to him, but he is, in his own way, just as bullying as her social set, her adolescent (and therefore selfish) boys, and her horrible old mother. The difference is, Major Landis is trying to liberate her, while they’re all trying to hold her back. The emotional conflicts become extremely intense before the picture comes to a satisfactory end.

Mind you, I don’t mean to overpraise “My Reputation”: it’s far from great. But once again, it’s a flawed picture that I admire, in large part, for its ambition. Some of the scenes with Brent are, by today’s standards, exasperating: much of what we’re to accept as his perspicacity strikes me as merely presumptuous and insulting. This first scene of him alone with Stanwyck after nightfall offers many examples of what I mean.

“I’ve seen hundreds of people like you . . .” Oh, the dirty swine: how dare he? In a later scene, she comes to his apartment, where he pours gin down her throat while he crowds her on the sofa . . . this is love? Who wants it? (And his gin is warm.) In many of Brent’s scenes, his chauvinism and smug superiority are really infuriating. And yet . . . if you can accept these things (as I do) as a product of their time and a form of getting-it-past-the-censors shorthand for a more complicated and protracted seduction and sexual awakening, at least it makes it possible for a wartime Woman’s Picture to tell a story about an inexperienced woman who learns what sex is, what all the fuss is about, and realizes that she likes it so much that she’s willing to take great risks on its behalf and to make considerable sacrifices to keep it coming. That’s no small matter, especially in a picture from the mid-1940s.

James Wong Howe photographed it beautifully. Max Steiner’s score is lush and, in the main, perfect. I dislike the flutes and the Laurel and Hardy-style mutes on the trumpets in the courtship scenes and the way the orchestrations go all puerile and kittenish in the clinches, but I expect this is intended to downplay Jessica’s sexual excitement and terror, and to emphasize instead the comical varieties of nervousness that are a natural consequence of falling in love. Taken as a whole, “My Reputation” is not nearly as good a picture as “Casablanca,” but I find its conclusion to be as emotionally exhilarating as the last moments between Ilsa and Rick. The last shot in the picture is unforgettable.

Young Ambition’s Ladder: ‘Payment on Demand’

Original Poster. It's not wrong, exactly, but makes the picture seem tawdry in a way that it is not.

Original Poster. It’s not wrong, exactly, but makes the picture seem tawdry in a way that it is not.

“Payment on Demand” (RKO, 1951) is one of the best Woman’s Pictures that I’ve yet encountered. There are several strong performances in it, beginning with the one given by Bette Davis. She plays Joyce Ramsay, an ambitious, social-climbing wife, jilted in middle-age by her ungrateful husband, David (Barry Sullivan). The many stages of a one-sided marital dissolution present Davis with a field day for outrageous hamming; instead she gives a performance of restraint and dignity: it’s a big performance, all right, but is in no way outlandish. This is the first picture she made after her contract with Warner Bros. ended. The last one she made for them (under protest) was the appalling “Beyond the Forest,” which contains the line made famous by Edward Albee: “What a dump.” It was an undignified end to an illustrious association between a great actress and a fine studio; in “Beyond the Forest,” she was camp all the way, but that’s what the material demanded — and she gave the picture what it needed . . .  good and hard. In this one, she is not camp. It’s not her best performance, but she’s damned good in it.

It’s almost gruesome to think of Joan Crawford in the same role. Come to think of it, you can see her in a similar part: have a look what she does in “Queen Bee” and you’ll see what happens when an actress goes for the hysteria and bathos rather than the wounded pride of an ambitious and intelligent woman. Both pictures are about ruthless social climbers, but as Davis climbs, she becomes grander, more sophisticated and genteel; Crawford’s idea of breeding is all about being affected and humorless. It’s easy to accept Bette Davis as a social register matron; Joan Crawford wouldn’t know gentility if it vomited on her Adrian gown. “Payment on Demand” has a better script than “Queen Bee” (though it’s hard to separate the badness of “Queen Bee” from the badness of Joan Crawford), and it has a much better leading actress.

The Peculiar Device

After David tells Joyce he wants a divorce, she revisits her past in a series of flashbacks. The director, Curtis Bernhardt, employs a strangely theatrical device throughout the first half of the picture, which was shot in 1950, the year after “Death of a Salesman” had created a sensation on Broadway. Over the years, Jo Mielziner’s extraordinarily atmospheric set for “Salesman” has become almost as famous as the play itself. In his design, some walls were non-existent, and others could be transparent, translucent or opaque, according to how they were lighted. During the present-day scenes, all of them, whether transparent or not, represented actual walls, and audiences accepted them as such. But during Willy’s flashbacks, the transparent walls lost their literal meaning: characters walked through them as if they weren’t there, and by violating the convention established for the present-day scenes, they established a new and different semi-reality, a form of ambiguity that is peculiar to the theatre. Onstage, the device was used to great effect: it created a clear sense of what was “real” (a relative term in live theatre) and what was memory or fantasy; more importantly, it underscored the slackening of Willy’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality and past from present.

Jo Mieziner's rendering for his set design for 'Death of a Salesman.'

Jo Mielziner’s rendering of his scenic design for ‘Death of a Salesman.’

Original production of 'Salesman.' Lee Cobb and Mildred Natwick in the foreground.

Original production of ‘Salesman.’ Lee Cobb and Mildred Natwick in the foreground.

“Payment on Demand” borrows this device, but only half-heartedly: all of Joyce’s flashbacks are announced by the appearance of frames of empty walls, but nobody ever walks through them. These transitory scenes begin in shadow, as if on a stage set before the lights have come up, with shadowy figures in the foreground, and frames of walls silhouetted against a half-lit background — sometimes ominous Wagnerian clouds scud across the empty surfaces. When the lights come up to full and we can recognize the characters in the scene, the clouds disappear and the walls become opaque. It’s an interesting, even surrealistic, effect. But there’s a problem: having once established that the opaque walls are really nothing more than theatrical “flats” (i.e., lightweight muslin stretched over frames), it becomes hard to accept them as being real walls, no matter how opaque they appear to be.

This device works exceptionally well in the theatre, where the mutually agreed upon “fourth wall” (i.e., the invisible barrier between the audience and the live actors, who pretend they’re not being looked at, even as they pause while they wait for laughter and applause to subside) and the plainly visible lighting grids and equipment automatically establish an artifice that calls for the suspension of disbelief, which is a fundamental element in the enjoyment of live theatre. Nobody really believes what they see on stage is actually occurring to real people. Besides, unlike Willy Loman, Joyce Ramsay is not losing her mind, but is simply remembering events from the past; moreover, she remembers her own past accurately and unsparingly. Anyhow, reality in a motion picture is different from that in the theatre: when you establish that the walls are not real in a movie, then where is the action supposed to be taking place? On a stage? If so, why isn’t there an audience on the screen? If the action is not happening on a stage, then where is it? A similar device was used for the recent screen adaption of “Anna Karenina,” but the theatrical stage settings were the most significant thematic element in Tom Stoppard’s screenplay. For better or worse, he employed the device as a metaphor for the rigidity of the social structure of Imperial Russia, in which everyone was expected to play within the confines of his scripted part, as actors must do in a well-made play. But in “Payment on Demand,” the device is little more than an oddity; it serves no function that I can detect, other than as a means of separating present-day scenes from remembered ones. But who the hell remembers his past as scenes from a stage play? The device might be less peculiar if the characters were show folk, but they’re not: they’re businessmen, lawyers and café society parlor snakes.

Bette Davis, Barry Sullivan: Out for a spin in a transparent car.

Bette Davis, Barry Sullivan: Out for a spin in a semi-transparent car.

Let me say plainly that I’m only ambivalent about this device; I’m not entirely against it. On the one hand, it tends to exaggerate the artificiality of the acceptable writing and better-than-acceptable acting; on the other hand — well — it’s interesting and often creates a strange and beautiful atmosphere. Visually speaking, the effect is most startling in a scene where Sullivan and Davis go out for a drive: we see the night sky and all the stars above them, and reflections, in the rear side windows, of the trees they pass. I find the image quite beautiful, but it’s so distracting that I forget to pay attention to the dialogue . . . so I’m ambivalent about the whole idea. I wish it worked better than it does. And I fear it doesn’t really work at all, except as a curiosity that separates “Payment on Demand” from a host of other Woman’s Pictures and as an excuse to stage some nice tableaux. The three pictures below show one of the most dramatic uses of the device, when Joyce and David attend their first lavish party for the swells. Jane Cowl is in the center of the bottom picture; she’s holding a cigarette in one hand and shaking Bette Davis’ hand with the other.

Payment Transparent Cowl 01
Payment Transparent Cowl 02
Payment Transparent Cowl 04

Jane Cowl

A few words about Jane Cowl, who plays society doyenne, Mrs Emily Hedges. She was a famous, even legendary, actress in her day. But as with so many theatrical celebrities, her fame evaporated almost before her corpse was stiff, and long before her bones were rotten. Like her contemporary, Edith Evans, she was not a great beauty, but her intelligence and charm were such that she made audiences believe she was. She set a record by playing over a thousand consecutive performances of Juliet on Broadway. About her performance, George Jean Nathan wrote, “hers is not . . . the best Juliet that I have seen, but she is by all odds the most charming.” She was known for playing “lachrymose” roles and was often described as having a “voice with a tear.” Jane Russell was named after her. (Figure that one out.) Here’s our introduction to her.


Leaving aside the ostentatiously theatrical oddity of the flashback device, “Payment on Demand” contains a fair amount of other nonsense. (Nonsense is as common in Woman’s Pictures as are infidelity, tears and death.) For example, there’s a flashback in which Joyce and David are supposed to be in their early twenties (or even their late teens); both of them impersonate youth by pitching their voices in a key about a fifth higher than their usual ones; both sound ludicrous: she sounds like Holly Hunter after five hot rum flips and he sounds like one of those kids who go to school, as Chris Rock once put it, “a half hour late, in a little-ass bus.” But I’m prepared to be lenient in the matter: it is a very short episode and reminds me pleasantly of an idiotic Saroyan one-act I was once in, when I was young and very much in love; it comes early and is best forgiven and forgotten. The flashback is necessary, and double-casting younger actors would have only made it worse: what other actress could play Bette Davis?

The Ladies Who Lunch

The day after David moves out of the house (and into the athletic club, which is what men did in those days), Joyce goes to lunch with her catty girlfriends. What follows is a staple of the Woman’s Picture genre: a hen party for well-to-do idle females who drink too much in the middle of the day. This one, I think, is particularly satisfying. The best-known actress in the coven is Natalie (“Gilligan’s Island”) Schafer. She plays Joyce’s cattiest and most voluble friend, Mrs Edna Blanton. Schafer was the fourth of Louis Calhern’s five wives. She survived nine turbulent years before they called it quits. (Ilka Chase, Calhern’s first wife, lasted a spare nine months.) Bear this in mind when you have a look at the clip; it adds depth to Schafer’s performance, which, out of context (and perhaps in context, too), may well seem camp. It’s unfair, but it’s hard to take seriously any line spoken by Lovey Howell.

After Joyce hears gossip about The Other Woman (another staple of the Woman’s Picture genre), she springs into action. First, she seeks professional help from a divorce attorney named Ted Prescott (the redoubtable Otto Kruger) and his operative, a no-nonsense bedroom dick, Mr Pinkins (Mack Williams). As always, Kruger has a cigarette going.


When Prescott lights a second cigarette for himself and offers one to Joyce, his first is still burning. Eternally smirking and surrounded by smoke, Kruger once again could easily be mistaken for Lucifer himself. He offers sagely conservative advice to his client, but this is Otto Kruger, man! He knows she won’t listen, so he makes sure that she gets “complete” coverage. In other words, the sky’s the limit.

Poster for French release. A much better title, which unfortunately doesn't translate into English well.

Poster for French release. A much better title, which unfortunately doesn’t translate well into English . . . ‘Madame Ambition,’ maybe . . . ?

The scenes dealing with the divorce settlement are remarkably frank for the time, and are among the best in the picture. Joyce’s demands are extreme and she is implacable. She broke a lot of rules and betrayed a lot of friends to make her husband a success: he wouldn’t have gone nearly so far without her ruthless ambition, and now she intends to get what she feels is owed to her. The scenes Sullivan plays with Davis in the middle of the picture are the best work he ever did. To complicate matters for Joyce, she’s still in love with David, who is not merely tired of her, but also sickened by her lack of ethics and her insatiable ambition; he repudiates the dirty tricks she played behind his back to move them up in the world and make them welcome in the salons and gaming rooms of high society. He knows he’s indebted to her, but when he learns of the means by which she climbed ambition’s ladder, he is disgusted by her callousness and dishonesty. Joyce is as devious as Regina Giddens, the villainess Davis played in “The Little Foxes” nine years earlier, but she’s a much more complicated woman.

‘First I Had a Dog, and Then an Old Widower, Then a Lady Companion’

Worn out by the legal wrangling, Joyce goes on a cruise while she waits for the divorce to become final. One port of call is in Haiti, where she visits the now-divorced Mrs Hedges. This is the last scene that Jane Cowl ever played. I think she’s remarkable. So remarkable, in fact, that I had seen the picture several times before I realized that her dialogue is not first-rate — it’s not even top-shelf second-rate stuff, like Maugham or Hellman. But Jane Cowl makes it sound brilliant and profound; as Claude Rains so often did in second-rate parts, she brings to it great sensitivity, sadness, wit and intelligence. Every second of her performance is full of life and rich with biographical information about the woman she’s playing. In her few minutes in this forgotten and neglected picture, I get a sense of what great stage acting looked like a hundred years ago — for Cowl’s career began in the ‘teens, and she represented a technique that went back another thirty years at least. She is a natural heir of Sir Henry Irving’s leading lady, Dame Ellen Terry, who was the great-aunt of Sir John Gielgud. They all have in common wit and sadness and easy tears, along with a virtue all too rare these days: a beautifully expressive voice that is a pleasure to listen to, for its own sake. I have great admiration for Jane Cowl, and in this, her final scene, she quietly but firmly tears it up. Wait till you hear what she does with the line, “First I had a dog, and then an old widower, then a lady companion.” Quite stunning.

Wow, isn’t she wonderful! I just never get used to her in this scene. Where are you gonna find an actress like this today? The closest I can imagine is Olympia Dukakis if she’d gone to finishing school. Well, never mind — that kind of part isn’t being written anymore. But this character type is one I’ve recognized in pictures since my earliest childhood — I’ve always been drawn to the batty old broads in pictures. When an old actress grows soft and sentimental and plays this sort of woman as a Sweet Old Darling (Helen Hayes and Gloria Stewart spring to mind), I can’t bear it. But when an actress of Jane Cowl’s shrewdness, experience and talent gets hold of such a part, it’s magic. The willowy and unattractive gigolo, Arthur, is played by James Griffith, who made a career playing low-lives and shit-heels, including Judas Iscariot (“Day of Triumph,” 1954). Poor Mrs Hedges! It’s terrible to imagine how she must feel waking up each morning next to that.

Jane Cowl played Kit Marlowe in the original Broadway production of “Old Acquaintance,” which Davis played with great distinction in the movie version. In “Mother Goddam,” Davis wrote, “I was unbelieving that I was playing scenes with her. I was nervous.” The two old pros have wonderful chemistry together, though I do wish the director had contrived to get both of them in the same shot more often — real chemistry happens only when two actors are seen together; back-and-forth close-ups don’t do full justice to great acting.

Cowl also wrote several hit plays with Jane Murfin; the most famous was “Smilin’ Through.” “Payment on Demand” was her last role in pictures; she is better than the material, but both she and Davis elevate it and make the picture well worth seeing.

The score by Victor Young is exquisitely beautiful. In my opinion, he was possibly the most gifted melodist of all the major Hollywood composers.