Requiescat in Pace - Olivia de Havilland

The incomparable Olivia de Havilland has exited this world after celebrating her 104th birthday, leaving us breathless, as usual, with the sum total of her talent, her elegance, her grace, and an unusual quality of self-knowing. Among her films we've discussed here are The Heiress (1949), for which she won one of her two Oscars and was made in the period where she did her strongest work; The Strawberry Blonde (1941), one of her last pretty young ingenue roles before her court fight with Warner Bros. resulting in her win and "the de Havilland decision"; and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935), a lovely example of her early work, so mature, which brought her to Hollywood as a teenager.

Of all the greats we've lost this year, her career stretches farthest back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. Sometimes interviewers ask stars if they watch their old movies, but I wonder if someone like Olivia de Havilland, who had retired happily to France many years ago, only dabbling in TV in the final years of her career, watched any classic films at all -- and especially, did she enjoy recalling former colleagues in the industry.  For someone who has lived more than a century, one outlives almost all relationships.  Someone in the entertainment business has many more people passing through their lives than most of us do in our occupations.  We may number our working acquaintances in the tens; someone like Olivia must have known hundreds.  Did she ever watch a film and smile at being reminded of someone she knew?

For all her class and elegance, I like to think of her humor and this clip from Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943) doing a jitterbug parody with Ida Lupino, and George Tobias, who despite being a character player (usually of simpletons), gets the starring role of squiring the two hepcats. 

Ida Lupino Wants to Laugh

Ida Lupino in living color, another example of gorgeous photography from Screen Guide magazine.  This March 1943 issue also includes a brief article, see below, on Ida's desire to step back from all the heavy drama and try a little comedy -- "I Want to Laugh!"

Teresa Wright on TV

Teresa Wright is decency personified for many fans.  Her portrayals of young women at a crossroads—as Bette Davis’ independent daughter in The Little Foxes (1941); the intelligent young bride in Mrs.Miniver (1942); the spirited protector of her family against a maniacal, and former favorite, uncle in Shadow of a Doubt (1942); the gallant wife of Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees (1943); and most especially, the young woman who came of age during World War II and who now faces its aftermath in the form of a hopeless love for a distraught, and married, veteran in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)—are all characters that carry her particular stamp of forthrightness and humble courage. 

This post is part of the 2015 TCM Summer Under the Stars Blogathon hosted this year by Kristen at Journeys in Classic Film.  Have a look at her blog for other terrific entries.  Today TCM’s Summer Under the Stars is dedicated to the films of Teresa Wright, and most of those mentioned above will be featured in today’s programming.  But, as you can see by the links on those movies (as well as California Conquest and Casanova Brown), we’ve discussed them before, so today I’d like to turn our attention to Miss Wright’s television work, which was filled with opportunities to perform exciting roles at a point in her career when Hollywood was no longer granting her that option. 

Most of her later film roles in the 1950s treaded into the hysterical female area, which, being fairly one-dimensional, are unfulfilling for the fan and, I would guess, the actress.  An artist of subtle depth and delicate underplaying, Wright had earned Academy Award nominations in two different categories for her first three roles, and won Best Supporting for Mrs. Miniver, the same year she was up for Best Actress for Shadow of a Doubt. She is the only actress to have been nominated for Oscars® for her first three films in a row. It was a prodigious beginning for an actress who took her work seriously and cared very little for stardom (we’ve also referred in this post toher famous contract clause excusing her from any publicity nonsense).

None of those early roles are typical ingénues, certainly not damsels in distress waiting to be rescued; at least, she does not play them as such. There is something of iron in her will, despite the softness of her voice and the sweetness of her expression.  There is a knowing sadness that creeps into her young women that tells us that though she is genteel, she is not fragile, and is capable of standing up to the obstacles, or threats, against her.  Charley is shocked by the evil uncle, but she recognizes evil when she sees it and won’t back down.  Peggy Stephenson is deeply touched by the deeply troubled ex-Army Air Corps officer, but she has been exposed to damaged warriors through her wartime hospital work and she knows something of what he is suffering.  She’s a nice girl, but not sheltered.

In this vein, the two TV roles I’d like to discuss today are her work in “No. 5 Checked Out” from Screen Directors Playhouse from 1956, and “Lonely Place” from The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1964.  These are two women in peril, but she plays these women as possessing a frank capability far beyond the template laid down by the script. 

Some of her work on TV was pioneering, most especially that she originated the role of Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker when it debuted on Playhouse 90 in 1957, long before the film or Broadway play.  I enjoyed watching this some years ago at the Paley Center for Media in New York City.  Unfortunately, it is not available on DVD.

She also played the intrepid Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White on Sunday Showcase in 1960, Mary Todd Lincoln on General Electric Theater in 1955, among many other TV roles.  In her TV career, she was nominated for three Emmys®. However, most of her work from the 1950s onward took place in theatre, where she began her career and which provided intelligent and challenging roles.

The roles in Screen Directors Playhouse and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour are both women in danger and the stories are offbeat and quirky.  Both feature surprise endings, but the plot is secondary to characterization.  We go on a psychological journey with these women. It is this journey that defines them, not the danger.  Both, incidentally, are also three-person plays creating tension within that triangle.

“No. 5 Checked Out” on Screen Directors Playhouse was directed by Ida Lupino, and co-stars Peter Lorre and William Talman.  Teresa Wright is a deaf woman, who is capable of reading lips and speaking without impediment.  We are told that an operation may help her, but the story is not about curing her; it’s about her acceptance of herself.  She is a teacher in a school for the deaf, but is currently helping her father run a tourist cottage camp.  He must leave to care for a sick relative, and she is left alone to prepare the cottages for the opening of the season. 

William Talman and Peter Lorre are bad guys on the lam.  Mr. Lorre is the badder of the bad guys, with his creepy leer and sociopathic enjoyment of making others squirm.  He makes Talman squirm.  Talman was the getaway driver in a bank heist that went wrong, and he feels betrayed because a man died and there was supposed to be no violence.  Lorre likes violence, and he has Talman under this thumb.

Mr. Talman has a nice role here and he plays it beautifully, a sadder-but-wiser schmuck who can easily be seen as a romantic hero paired with Teresa Wright.  He is not aware at first that she is deaf, as she is able to hide it well, and chooses to hide it to after being jilted by a boyfriend who found her deafness inconvenient.  Eventually, Talman discovers it, and encourages Wright to believe in her chances for a full and happy life, including romance.  

He sadly acknowledges to himself and her that she could do better than him, gallantly not attempting to be more than her friend. 

Lorre, who does not know she is deaf, thinks she has been eavesdropping on their plans for escape and intends to kill her.  Talman tries to stand up to him to protect Wright.  The ending is as cynical and fatalistic as any noir. 

In “Lonely Place” for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Teresa Wright is the careworn farmer’s wife of  Pat Buttram.  Bruce Dern is their new hired hand.  It is a tale of deception, betrayal, and terror. 

First, one is struck by Wright’s beauty in this episode.  In middle age, she has passed beyond the delicate prettiness of her youth and has developed—with fine lines around her eyes, her jaw set in determination, and a wide, clean smile—into a beauty that is natural and mature.  Her face registers many moods in this piece as she takes us on a journey that is as introspective as it is distressing.

For those used to seeing Pat Buttram in slow-witted, clownish sidekick roles, this performance is a revelation.  He is splendid as Wright’s penny-pinching husband, too engrossed in making a buck that he walks a doomed path from taking her for granted, to neglecting her, to putting her in danger, to saving himself at her expense.  He is so meek a man that we fail to see until it is too late, as does Wright, that his self-centered personality is as deadly a threat to his wife as Bruce Dern.

Dern has the flashy role of a knife-wielding maniac, who shows up looking for work, and will work so cheap that Pat Buttram won’t send him away, even when Dern begins behaving rudely to his wife.

The performances are top-notch, and are complemented by intriguing camera work.  They are framed carefully in the context of the moment.  The trio at dinner, with Dern in the center of the shot literally between them as he is coming between them in their marriage.  A shot of Dern’s razor-sharp hunting knife in the foreground in his grip as he talks to Wright.

At the beginning, Teresa Wright is shown feeding a favorite pet squirrel, laughing over his antics. Later, Bruce Dern will kick sand in the little squirrel’s face, and then kill it.  When she suspects his is attacking her pet, Wright runs out of the farmhouse and we switch seamlessly to a hand-held camera.  

When she finds the animal dead, she screams in horror, a wail of heartbroken despair that breaks into a silent, breath-catching sob.  It’s a stunning scene.

Her journey of discovery is played out in her sensitive face: her expression of hatred for Dern, her expression of disbelief at her husband’s seeming unconcern for this event, at his apparent ignorance of Dern’s manipulation as the episode progresses, her expression of disgust when her husband belittles her and allows Dern to tease her.  Dern frightens her, but it is her new perspective on her husband that causes her the most discomfort.  When he playfully suggests he was jealous of her attention for the squirrel anyway, and complains that she fed the animal too well, she asks him if that is why they never had any children.  It is implied that he did not want additional mouths to feed, or to have her attention centered on anyone but him.  Her throwing a handful of corn to a wild, but friendly, squirrel who has grown to trust her, giving him water in an old baking pan, was too much time spent away from the kitchen, in her husband’s eyes.  Buttram is not bullying, but employs as passive-aggressive tactic to make her feel guilty for not being more sensitive to his feelings.

She does feel badly, but Dern is too scary.  Finally, she can take no more and attempts to sneak out of the house at night—and Dern catches her.  There is the ultimate terror of being physically attacked, prolonged by Dern’s enjoyment of terrorizing her.  He tries to make her scream again, as she did over the squirrel, because he wants her husband to come out to save her so he can kill him.  She knows this, and she will not scream.  She will save her husband if she cannot save herself.

As a thunderstorm moves in, they scuffle and she gets his knife.  She has the upper hand now, and he runs away. 

The ultimate shock when she returns to the house is discovering, slowly in their conversation, that her husband, whom she thought was asleep during her alteration with Dern, was actually awake.  He heard everything.  He refused to help her because he was afraid of Dern.  Also, he hoped that Dern would just settle down and continue working for him the next day, because he worked dirt cheap.

The ending is a great surprise, but the finely crafted scenes building up to it are really the driving engine of the story.  The image of Teresa Wright, with all her decency, her intelligence, and her gentle humanity being a caged woman in her own simple home, at the mercy not only of crazed Bruce Dern, but of her greedy, stupid pig of a husband are what is most shocking about the episode and this is what stays with us long after.

Perhaps the image is indelible because it is not just a helpless woman being threatened, it is that decency and humanity of the young bride from Mrs. Miniver, the loyal daughter of Shadow of a Doubt, the noble wife of Pride of the Yankees, and the beloved Peggy Stephenson who gently comforted Dana Andrews during his nightmare in The Best Years of Our Lives.  Teresa Wright not only owned those early roles, she took them with her all the rest of her life.

Have a look at the other great posts in the TCM Summer Under the Stars blogathon this month at Journeys in Classic Film.

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Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 
by Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.

The eBook and paperback are available from Amazon and CreateSpace, which is the printer.  You can also order it from my Etsy shop. It is also available at the Broadside Bookshop, 247 Main Street, Northampton, Massachusetts.

If you wish a signed copy, then email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com and I'll get back to you with the details.

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My new syndicated column on classic film is up at http://www.go60.us/govoice/advice-and-more/item/2025-ccc-movie-fan, or check with your local paper.

Deep Valley - 1947

Deep Valley (1947) is a movie where the telling of the story is probably more important than the story itself; indeed, what is likely to be most memorable to the audience is the poetic cinematography by cameraman Ted McCord.  In post-World War II Hollywood, film noir was sometimes deliciously softened and morphed into romance by introspective sensitivity.

This is our entry in The 1947 Blogathon hosted by Shadows and Satin, and Speakeasy blogs.  Have a look here at the other great bloggers participating.

Directed by Jean Negulseco, we get the feeling Deep Valley was a warm-up for his Johnny Belinda the following year.  The plot is familiar—a troubled young woman suffering from some handicap and shut off from the outside world is visited by an equally troubled stranger who will change her life.  Ida Lupino plays the young woman with a natural, glowing gentleness.  She is isolated on her parents’ remote property on the California coast, and traumatized by her parents’ estrangement.  They live on separate floors of the house and do not communicate. 

Veteran actress Fay Bainter is her self-pitying mother who playacts an invalid to punish her rough husband.  Henry Hull is Ida’s scruffy, resentful father, who perhaps—though this is never really explored—feels guilty for the final argument which tore him and his wife apart when he struck her.

Ida Lupino is their whipping boy, the daughter caught between them, dismissed, used as a servant to clean and cook, but the worst torment for her is her parents’ hatred of each other and their failure to express any affection for her.  The poor girl is starved for a kind word, let alone affection.  Her tearful pleading for a sign of any love in the house once she can finally find the words is heartbreaking. Only her dog shows her any devotion.  She escapes the house when she can and roams the woods with him, finding freedom in the outdoors.  She stutters at home, but in the woods can converse quietly with the squirrel she feeds, and he scrambles onto her back. 

The stranger is played by Dane Clark.  He is a convict on a chain gang who escapes.  He and Ida find each other in the woods, and fall in love.  He is a well-meaning guy, whose quick temper and lack of judgment has gotten him afoul with the law, but he is always repentant afterwards and baffled, frustrated that he almost always does the wrong thing.  He is disillusioned by the world, as isolated from it in his chains as she is a prisoner of her home—but his love for her has a gentling influence.  He finds peace; she finds love and acceptance.

It’s a kind of role in which I think Dane Clark was best used.  Repeatedly referred to, ad nauseum, as the poor man’s John Garfield, Dane Clark did not have Garfield’s strengths, his particular way of playing the cussed and outcast.  However, he had something Garfield did not: a manner of vulnerability that is eloquent and heart-wrenching.  I find I like Clark less in hard villain roles because he does not play them as well as somebody like John Garfield.  There is a mask, like he’s trying too hard.  But give him a role like this, where he can be on a knife-edge of anger and anguish, where he can show his softer side as a tortured soul, and he’s wonderful.

A few particularly great scenes:  when Garfield and Lupino lie along the brook and attempt to catch a fish, their exuberance at their success, and physical closeness leading to their first kiss, so much that we want to cheer the fish too.

The scene where, Dane Clark hiding in the hay loft of the dilapidated old barn, protected from the sheriff by Lupino, and she sneaks up the ladder to check on him.  He thinks it’s the sheriff after him, and to defend himself, he grabs an old scythe.  The long sharp blade glints in the dimness of the barn as Ida’s head pops up into the loft.  We see Clark’s horrified, manic expression as he comes frighteningly close to decapitating her, but for perhaps the first time in his life, he pauses before he acts rashly.  They stare at each other a moment, she is acutely aware of the inner strength it took for him to stop himself.  His tortured, sweaty face bears the look of a man clinging to the edge of sanity.

Wayne Morris plays a construction engineer.  A highway is being carved out of the hillside where Lupino’s parents live, the work being done by the convicts.  Morris, always a dependable actor, here is a nice, boring guy who has taken a fancy to Ida.  She has no feelings for him, but we may wonder if there had been no Dane Clark in the picture, would she eventually fall for the kind but dull Morris?

An interesting subplot is the change in the relationship between Ida’s parents.  When Ida runs off, her mother can no longer wallow in her self-absorbed and utterly phony invalidism.  Fay Bainter gets dressed, goes downstairs for the first time in seven years, and orders her husband to stand away from the stove while she gets breakfast, as if she’d been doing it for years, as if she just left the room for five minutes.  He takes her gruff and grudging take-charge attitude as a sign she has forgiven him, and he becomes gentle in her presence.  They make small talk at the table over breakfast.  This is a simple scene their daughter would have loved—mother and father together, but it only happens when Ida’s absence forces them to, for want of a better word, reconcile.  It’s an intriguing, weird sort of development, but it happens too fast and too automatically to be believed.  There is an absurdity to it that does not match the tone of the rest of the movie.

The biggest problem with the plot, however, is that we know from the start that the romance between Dane Clark and Ida Lupino is doomed.  There is no hope for an escaped convict, no happy ending, and the only relish from the brief relationship for either is the epiphany that they have come to a greater understanding of themselves and have found the ecstasy of love for a few hours.

At the end, we see Miss Lupino and Mr. Morris standing atop a bluff, and he putting his jacket over her shoulders to fend off the chilly breeze.  She walks away, he follows.  It is as if he will be the new man in her life by default, but the emptiness in her eyes that she displayed at the beginning of the film has returned.

What lingers to the viewer are the sometimes stunning shots: The a construction worker silhouetted against bright sunlight; the deep woods; the fine, shabby detail of the house, and the intensity of the quiet close-ups on Dane Clark and Ida Lupino.  It is a dismal story, made beautiful through the eye of cameraman Ted McCord and director Jean Negulesco.

Have a look at the other great entries in The 1947 Blogathon.

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There is one day left to enter the Goodreads Giveaway to win a copy of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 

The eBook and paperback are available from Amazon and CreateSpace, which is the printer.  You can also order it from my Etsy shop. It is also available at the Broadside Bookshop, 247 Main Street, Northampton, Massachusetts.

If you wish a signed copy, then email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com and I'll get back to you with the details.

Errol Flynn's Lady Friend

“Women make better friends than men: good, really honest friends.” -- Errol Flynn in his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Cooper Square Press, 2003 p. 398).

In her first of four films with Errol Flynn, “Dive Bomber” (1941), discussed in this previous post, Alexis Smith refused to kiss him -- for artistic reasons, she said. Even before that, contention occurred in her first important movie close-up in a major film -- when he stole the scene.

“Alexis was distraught. She ran to her dressing room, tears welling in her eyes and convinced her opportunity had been lost forever…When she returned the next morning…she walked into her dressing room and saw a note in front of her make-up mirror…on his own personal stationery, Errol had written a note of apology so sincere in appearance that if she wanted to be angry she could be so no longer. ‘It was that Errol Flynn charm,” she explained. (The Two Lives of Errol Flynn by Michael Freedland, article syndicated in The Lakeland (Florida) Ledger, August 14, 1979, p. C1)

“…there is no true friendship like that between a man and a woman, especially if platonic.” -- Errol Flynn, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (p. 359.)

“Errol was a movie idol of my teens,” Miss Smith says, “And when I was playing opposite him I was intimidated. I came to like him genuinely.” Films in Review article by Lennard DeCarl, (June-July 1970, pp. 360-361.)

It is often repeated on Internet sites that Errol Flynn was the best man at Alexis Smith’s wedding to Craig Stevens in 1944. This is an error. Stevens's best man was Major John E. Horton, Stevens’s friend. Flynn was only one of some 300 guests at the Church of the Recessional, Forest Lawn. (St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, June 1944, p. 2.)

He did, however, take it upon himself to perform a special duty. After the ceremony, he “…took Craig aside, as though he were my father, and told Craig that if he didn’t treat me right he’d have to answer to him.” Alexis Smith, DeCarl article, (p. 361).

“On “San Antonio”…he cared for Alexis’s welfare. If he thought director David Butler was demanding too much of her, he made it very plain he was on her side. ‘Steady, old sport,’ he would tell Butler, ‘the lady’s only human.’ She, for her part, did her best to cover up the excesses of his drinking, which was anything but easy.” Freedland, (p. 161).

On Flynn’s being diagnosed with a mild heart attack during “Gentleman Jim” (1942): “She pulled him aside and said kindly but firmly: ‘It’s so silly, working all day and then playing all night and dissipating yourself. Don’t you want to live a long life?’ Errol was his usual apparently unconcerned self: ‘I’m only interested in this half,’ he told her, ‘I don’t care for the future.’” Freedland, (p.108).

“…a woman friend is the best friend you can have. In my early days I was brought up to hear it said that you can never have a real woman friend, that male friendship is deeper, like Damien and Pythias. That is not true -- not in my book. I have had two great friends: I still have them. They are so far superior to male friends, so much more understanding, so much more generous in feelings.” Errol Flynn, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (p. 398.)

“Although Flynn was renowned for having affairs with many of his leading ladies, his relationship with Alexis was strictly platonic. ‘He had feelings for her, but he also had great respect for her,’ Stevens said, ‘He treated her with dignity, respect and humor. He never made a pass at her.’"  A few months before his death, Flynn finally confessed his true feelings to Alexis. ‘When he was making ‘Too Much, Too Soon’ he called one day,’ Stevens said. ‘I answered the phone and he said, ‘Hey Old Boy, is your lady there?’ When Alexis got on the phone he asked if she would meet him at Warners for lunch. She said, ‘Of course.’ The next day when she came home from that lunch there were tears in her eyes…He told her that he knew he didn’t have much longer to live…‘He wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed working with me and also that he loved me.’ She never forgot it.'” Interview with Craig Stevens, The Women of Warner Brothers by Daniel Bubbeo (McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina, 2002, p. 215).

Alexis Smith, Ida Lupino -- another very close platonic woman friend of Errol Flynn’s, and many Hollywood figures attended Flynn’s funeral in October 1959. The ceremony was conducted at the Church of the Recessional, Forest Lawn, where Alexis and Craig Stevens had been married.

“Errol Flynn was an extremely bright man,” she says reflectively, “He had a great zest for living, of course, and a great sense of humor about himself as well as the world. But he was very intelligent and sensitive, and as anyone who worked with him will tell you, a very good actor. I think he was underrated.” Interview with Alexis Smith, article by Jamie Portman, (The Montreal Gazette, September 21, 1981, p. 49)

Below, a rare opportunity for them both to sing -- their real voices -- in “Montana” (1950), the last film they made together.



“Women make better friends than men: good, really honest friends. When the going gets tough, give me a woman for a friend. If they happen to care for you they will go farther than any man.” Errol Flynn, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (p. 398)

Flynn never actually names those two great women friends in that amazingly gentle paragraph in his otherwise rolicking, hedonistic autobiography -- to protect them from the taint of a cad's reputation, perhaps?

Note: Both "Dive Bomber" and "Montana" will be shown on TCM tomorrow.

Special thanks to Laura of Laura's Miscellaneous Musings for the heads up several months ago on Daniel Bubbeo's book The Women of Warner Brothers.