For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and ‘The Champ’ Part 5

When King Vidor first stepped onto the set of The Champ, he was filled with a rare sense of freedom. Frances Marion’s script was unusually simple, focused squarely on a pair of immensely sympathetic protagonists and their relationship. All the key moments, plot twists and emotional climaxes were spelled out on the page, with no false conflicts or manufactured drama to complicate the works. Vidor realized that having such a tight screenplay “would relieve me as a director — now I didn’t have to worry about the story, worry about how I will wrap this up and keep it all together. I could concentrate on little details, touches and things.”

Touches and things. As we learned last week, Vidor equated silent films to ballet: operatic makeup, overwrought facial expressions, stylized movements, and the action punctuated by an enormous symphonic orchestra that — because the players and their instruments were live in the theater — sounded as amazing as today’s very best surround-sound systems. With the advent of synchronous dialogue, all of this vanished — people now wanted to hear actors talk, of all things! Now, rather than mounting a sort of grand operatic ballet, Vidor found himself helming something more akin to a stage play, and the change was jarring and disheartening. How could a director recapture the emotional magic of old, using mere dialogue?

The freedom accorded to Vidor by Marion’s script gave him time to think through these challenges, and ultimately work out an entirely new way of expressing himself on celluloid. For every silent-film technique he was forced to abandon, or that he preserved to his detriment (I’m thinking of his under-cranking the camera for The Champ’s final fight to artificially speed up the action, a trick that today looks horribly dated and silly), Vidor discovered another made possible because of sound. For instance, “When we were running the silent films,” Vidor explains, “faces were always in profile. We called these ‘fifty-fifty shots.’ In this film, you began to see people’s backs.” Such a tiny thing, filming the actors from behind — but think of the freedom this gave the director to attempt shots impossible in silent films:

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Then there was the rebirth of camera movement. In the silent era cameras were gloriously mobile, but now they were imprisoned in large, soundproofed housings. (Thankfully, sound also ended the reign of hand-cranked cameras, which so often resulted in herky-jerky action, and ushered in pilot-toned and ultimately crystal-synched cameras that captured movement at exactly 24 frames per second). By the time of The Champ, the old silent-era directors were itching to recapture the sense of motion that propelled their earlier films, so they started experimenting. “Sometimes you had to do a retake because of camera noise,” Vidor remembered. “However, we were able to put the camera tripod on a dolly, and then move the whole thing around the floor. This was what we called a perambulating shot. I liked to move the camera around, and I used a lot of this in The Champ.”

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Lighting, too, improved by leaps and bounds in the early silent era, for reasons that may not be immediately apparent to modern audiences. It wasn’t just technology that was advancing, but film grammar. “As we depended on dialogue more and more,” said Vidor, “we could have the faces more in shadows, and we could pay more attention to effect lighting. With sound, you were not completely dependent on facial expressions to tell the story. I realized that I could do a whole scene in the dark if I really wanted to. It freed lighting to help establish more of the mood.”

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Then there was the freedom of dialogue to consider. Unlike a stage play on Broadway, where every line has to be projected — almost shouted — to the whole audience, in film an actor could whisper a line, or hem and haw and stutter under his breath, and by so doing broaden the range and depth of a line of dialogue far beyond what was possible before. Acting became more subtle and intimate.

It was inevitable that actors exploring these boundaries would soon discover the joys of improvisation. One of the big complaints against Wallace Beery was his infuriating penchant for changing the script’s dialogue on-the-fly to better match his blue-collar vernacular. “I don’t think he’d ever speak a line exactly as it was written,” Vidor said, “unless it was right in line with his character. He wanted to be crude and mumbling a bit. He was not thinking in the exact words the character was supposed to be speaking with.” Imagine a director doing Shakespeare and having Beery changing lines pell-mell!

But King Vidor — ever on the lookout for new ways to improve his films — saw improv not as an annoyance but as a boon. He quickly recognized in Beery a budding expert in the skill, correctly divining that the hulking lug’s natural style fit perfectly with his character in The Champ. “As far as I was concerned,” Vidor said, “I didn’t care if he spoke the exact words, as long as he put across the feeling of the scene. I like an actor to adapt things to his own character and way of speaking.” Thus Vidor encouraged the habit that so many other directors despised. “Quite a few lines were all off-the-cuff. It seemed to work pretty well.”

It wasn’t only the actors that were improvising — Vidor found himself doing a lot of things “off-the-cuff” as well. “I don’t know whether you remember Jackie Cooper walking up on a roof of a house and singing a song and sticking cigarettes in his pocket — well, this was Marion Davies’ dressing room on the M-G-M lot, but it was ad-lib, off-the-cuff, because I was in the mood.”

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During these moments, Vidor began to appreciate his luck in having two naturalistic actors like Beery and Cooper to work with, instead of the more stolid and classically trained thespians that littered M-G-M’s roster. “When you put Wallace Beery in a film,” Vidor said, “you had something to work with. You had interest immediately, in every shot. And Jackie Cooper at the that time was the same type of small boy. So you had a live couple of actors in there, interesting actors.”

Interesting as they were, they were still actors, and Vidor sometimes had to use guile to evoke the performances he needed. The very end of The Champ was the key to the whole picture: we see Jackie Cooper’s character, so old beyond his years, regress back to a child. “When we got down to the end of the picture,” Vidor said, “he had to have this very hysterical sobbing scene. I wanted to achieve something a little beyond fake acting. I wanted to really feel it.” For Cooper’s role in the hit film Skippy his director/uncle had, among other things, threatened to shoot his dog to get him to cry. Vidor wasn’t that mean, but at one point he told Cooper he had fired assistant director Red Golden (who Cooper was apparently quite fond of, despite his later protestations in his autobiography), and even lied that Cooper’s mother had been brought to the hospital. “I’m sure he didn’t believe these stories,” Vidor said later, “but he was enough of an actor to understand what we were doing, and he went along with it. Pretty soon he swung into it and became hysterical, and started to throw a tantrum. The result was great. He was a very good actor, and a joy to work with.”

With Beery, getting a professional performance wasn’t the problem, but there were other issues. When first offered the role, Beery had told Vidor, “If I have to do any fighting, I can’t do it.” His reluctance wasn’t merely movie-star pique. A few years earlier, during a training flight for the Navy, Beery had suffered a mild stroke, forcing the trainee he was teaching to bring the plane down in an emergency landing. Now he was afraid of putting too much strain on himself, and the final fight in The Champ sounded like a bridge too far.

“All right,” Vidor assured him. “We’ll get doubles. I’d like to have you do the film.” But Vidor wasn’t about to let one of the picture’s important scenes suffer so easily:

One day at lunch when we were getting to do the prizefight scene, I noticed [Beery] with a couple of pretty girls, extra girls, having lunch, and I was having lunch with the assistant director and I said, “Go over and get the girls’ names — I have an idea.”

We took them off the set where they were working, put them in the front row of the prizefight audience, and then when I called for the doubles to do the fighting, Wally said, “What do you mean, doubles?” So he got up in the ring and did some tough fighting because those two pretty girls he’d had lunch with were sitting there.

He was a wonderful character.

All of these things — script, camera movement, lighting, improv  — helped make The Champ one of the monster hits of 1931-32. Audiences lined up for the chance to delight in the byplay between a washed-out father and his adoring son. Handkerchiefs were a necessity. Thinking about the film’s success fifty years later, Vidor would conclude that, “It was simply the fact that everybody could go and have a good cry that marked the success of The Champ.” People had wept at films before, of course, but a tender relationship between father and son had never been rendered so delicately and humorously on screen.

When first taking on the job, Vidor had considered it little more than hackwork, a studio gig endured so that he could get permission to make the less bankable, artistic films he liked best. But by the time the film premiered the nation was deep in the Depression, people were feeling downtrodden and vulnerable, and they reacted strongly to Vidor’s championing of lower-class American exceptionalism. A funny gossip item from The Hollywood Reporter for October 6, 1931 was titled “Two-Time Weeps,” and dutifully reported that M-G-M executives

“Louie” B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Eddie Mannix were among the weepers at the preview of The Champ. While in the theater they wept because of what the picture did to them — and later on the curb, for joy at what the picture would do for them.

Vidor in turn was touched by the reaction of his countrymen, and he found himself going out of his way to enjoy their emoting first-hand. “Those were the days when I was seeing a lot of [Charlie] Chaplin,” Vidor remembered. “We usually had dinner at Musso and Frank’s and then we would walk the length of Hollywood Boulevard. I always timed it so that we would be walking past the theater when The Champ was getting out. I would watch the people come out with their handkerchiefs in their hands, wiping their eyes. This was a great joy to me.”

When asked in the 1960s why movies had dropped so much in popularity, the now-retired Vidor acidly quipped, “The sight of a couple having sexual intercourse is not a good enough reason for people to spend money on babysitters.” He correctly perceived that the duty of the Hollywood entertainer wasn’t to mirror the state of the lowest elements of the culture or put filth on a pedestal in the name of realism and artistic authenticity. “The movie director has a voice, a powerful and articulate voice,” he said, “and he should use it well. People in India, China, South Africa, Uruguay have been affected by the fashions and customs set forth in American motion pictures. . . I had always felt the impulse to use the motion-picture screen as an expression of hope and faith — to make films presenting positive ideas and ideals rather than negative themes. When I have occasionally strayed from this early resolve, I have accomplished nothing but regret.”

Whether filming the trials of a soldier (The Big Parade), or a man and his family struggling in the big city (The Crowd), or an over-the-hill prize fighter and his boy (The Champ), or a little girl dreaming on a Depression-era farm (The Wizard of Oz), Vidor’s America possesses a God-graced moral center. The Champ’s Andy Purcell is a divorced drunk and a gambler, someone whose loss of fame has turned him into a sot and a loser. But he is never beyond hope. There’s a classically American optimism that courses through him and the story, and I credit that to the soul and sensibility of King Vidor. “I affirm that ours is a grave responsibility,” Vidor said about his profession as a Hollywood entertainer.

Man, whether he is conscious of it or not, knows deep inside that he has a definite upward mission to perform during the time of his life span. He knows that the purpose of his life cannot be stated in terms of ultimate oblivion. That is why the Bible has always been at the top of the bestseller list and why the assertion “In God We Trust” is a national motto, minted on our coins. So an explanation of this heroic struggle that we are living — a film story giving humanity reassurance that the good fight is not in vain, and showing the individual that he is not alone in his quest for the good life — would be received by receptive hearts everywhere. I think that multitudes would leave their warm firesides and doubtful television programs, call in babysitters and stand in line to see such a film.

After a long life as a film director, King Vidor died hopeful that Hollywood would one day redeem itself, just like The Champ’s flawed protagonist, and that through the efforts of good filmmakers it would once again man its post on the ramparts of American culture. “The only barrier between the public and the filmmaker lies in the mind of the latter,” he vowed. “When the makers of films are as unafraid of good films as the public, we shall really have a renaissance.”

This concludes our five-part look at Frances Marion’s and King Vidor’s The Champ. Come back next Saturday as For Conservative Movie Lovers turns to an all-new film from an all-new-year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

OK, time for you to hunt down a copy of The Champ. You can find a good-looking print on DVD for as low as $14.05 (the audio, being from the dawn of sound in 1931, hasn’t held up nearly as well, but played through a good sound system it’s plenty serviceable). Alas, no Blu-ray yet.

You can also pop The Champ into your Netflix queue, (avoid the 1979 remake, which features the Mighty John Voight but is a pale shadow of the original).

And if the Beery-Cooper combo delights you as much as I think it will, you can also use Netflix to watch their final team-up in the Robert Louis Stevenson classic Treasure Island (1934), directed by Victor Fleming (who would go on to make both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz).