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

Leo Grin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:41:00 +0000

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:

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.”

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.”

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.”

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

For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and ‘The Champ’ Part 4

Leo Grin — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:09:19 +0000

Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”? If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

And yet Vidor (you pronounce it “VEE-door,” not “VEYE-door”) was no foreigner at all. Texas born and bred, he was a champion of the little guy, the average Joe. His Christianity (he was raised a Christian Scientist), optimism, and Americanism infuse all his work. A craftsman, an innovator, an auteur, he had one of the longest careers of any director. If you have always treasured those sepia-toned Wizard of Oz sequences, and would like to find more stuff like it, do yourself a favor and hunt down Vidor’s The Champ (1931), a film that shares many of the same qualities with his later work on Oz.

Growing up as a middle-class kid in Galveston, Texas, King Vidor (1894-1982) didn’t fall in love with cinema right away. He was born just at the time that movies began being projected for audiences, and as a kid he would occasionally frequent the local Nickelodeons (so named because they cost a nickel to get in) and see the very first silent films. He was far from impressed. “When I was a young kid in Texas at the beginning of the century, I used to hate movies,” he explained decades later. “I hated their phoniness, their fakeness, the makeup which used to mask the actor’s expressions, their dreadful unreal acting with overdone pantomime gestures. People find them laughable today. I found them laughable then.”

All of that changed when, as a teenager, he became a ticket taker and backup projectionist at one of the theaters in Galveston. With nothing else to do, he found himself watching the films over and over. “I saw that two-reel Ben-Hur (1907), made in Italy [sic], twenty-one times each day or one hundred and forty-seven times in its week’s run. The men who made it never sat through it as often.” Studying the pantomime, the acting, the lighting, the camerawork, Vidor began to see the possibilities and power of this nascent art form. One thing he noticed right away: “The better the technique of the director, the fewer the subtitles.”

When a neighborhood kid hatched a plan to build a functional movie camera out of “an old projection machine and cigar boxes,” Vidor jumped at the chance to join in the experiment. They worked like kiddie mad scientists on their project, then bought a hundred feet of unexposed negative and used it to capture the spectacular destruction of a bathhouse near the Galveston seawall during a raging storm. With the help of some adults they sold the film as a newsreel to a distributor, and it got a lot of play around Southern Texas. “The day that hurricane struck,” Vidor said, “the course of my future was settled.”

He continued making newsreels throughout high school and selling them to distributors, ever trying to expand his prospects and break into a real job as a director of honest-to-God movies. It seemed that every day came further confirmation that cinema was growing into a great art form with a power to be reckoned with. Once, while watching a Western in a North Texas theater, Vidor watched in shock as a cowboy in the audience suddenly drew his pistol and began shooting at the screen! “He had come to town for a Saturday night’s spree,” Vidor recalled, “but when he saw the hero was about to be hung unjustly for cattle rustling, he couldn’t sit there with his six-shooter without doing something. The film did not stop, nor did they arrest the shooting cowboy. I suppose the three bullet holes were later patched, the manager having decided the less said about the incident the safer.” Movies, Vidor believed, were quickly becoming, “as vital to everyone’s life as milk and bread. You grew up with it. It affected your character, your dress, your lovemaking, your courage.” It was an industry of dreams and illusion and humanity that he wanted to be a part of.

Newly married, Vidor rode out to California at nineteen and ended up in San Francisco with twenty cents left in his pocket. They survived with typical Vidor-ian ingenuity, by taking empty, discarded boxes from grocery stores and scraping out the crumbs of oatmeal, Shredded wheat, and corn meal found within until they had enough for a meal. Eventually they scrounged together enough money to take a steamship to Los Angeles, where they did their best to weasel their way into the budding Hollywood film industry.

Vidor’s pretty wife became a $10 a week actress, while Vidor himself wrote dozens of scripts, photographed newsreels and travelogues, and worked any odd studio jobs that presented themselves. His breakthrough came with The Turn in the Road (1919), a film he financed from money begged from a consortium of dentists. Shot for $9,000, he found a distributor to take a chance on it, and it made $365,000 in its run. With that notch in his belt he could finally get studio jobs, and at twenty-three he was a young up-and-coming director. (his wife, Florence Vidor, became a famous silent screen actress, and they would eventually divorce for all of the usual Hollywood reasons).

Always pushing the envelope and remembering the unrealistic movies of his youth, Vidor experimented and innovated in his films. He used bright lights to smooth out the wrinkles on actresses faces, and got them laughing off-camera before a scene to capture a bit of that authentic glow of humor on film. He began timing shots to classical music, building up the editing of scenes into what felt like a musical crescendo, calling his technique “silent music.” He would sometimes even make his actors march or walk to the pace of a metronome, and the effect was almost subliminal, but haunting.

At a time when most films were suffused with fantasy and spectacle, Vidor grew to appreciate human stories that carried with them what might be called American realism. There were seldom villains in his movies — he relied instead on the trials and tribulations of real life for his drama. “War, wheat, and steel,” was his way of summarizing his interests, meaning life on the streets of middle-to-lower class America.

The Big Parade (1925), a World War I film presenting for the first time the perspective of mud-soaked grunts and GIs, became the most profitable silent film ever made (had there been any Academy Awards back then, it would have won a pile of them). Another Vidor film, The Crowd (1928), was an experimental masterpiece about ordinary people making their way through the small triumphs and tragedies of American big-city life, and garnered nominations for Best Picture and Best Director at the very first Academy Awards.

With the coming of sound, Vidor didn’t suffer the career setbacks that actors like Wallace Beery did, but he did discover that he needed to make some serious adjustments to his filmmaking style, not all of them welcome:

Silent pictures were treasured as an art form, and when talking pictures came in, most of the silent film directors regretted the change, the transition, because there was a certain technique that was very much akin to music. A silent film was never seen without music, without an orchestra. . . .We believed in the articulate powers of pantomime; we felt the things we were doing were bigger than words.

[In talking films] words reduced the actions, the emotions, the story we were trying to tell. It was like using words at the ballet. It made specific what we wanted to keep general. We could no longer appeal simultaneously to all audiences, the various levels of age and intelligence and sophistication. People were no longer free to fill in their own words. . .

It was a time of quiet despair to those of us brought up to love the lucidity of silence.

He also bemoaned the fact that all of the wonderful (and today still very modern-looking and influential) camera movements for silent pictures like The Big Parade and The Crowd were now all but impossible in the sound era, as the cameras now had to be housed in soundproofed rooms or covered with bulky soundproofed housings.

These were the problems facing him as an artist when, in 1931, he got the chance to direct The Champ.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at The Champ with some stories about how Vidor worked behind-the-scenes with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, along with a look at the movie’s appeal both in 1931 and in 2010.

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

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

TCM’s Shadows of Russia: The Lighter Side of Revolution

Robert J. Avrech — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:45:14 +0000

“I feel a little reactionary,” deadpans Hedy Lamarr in Comrade X, 1940.

On their improbable wedding night, anti-Communist reporter—remember them?—Clark Gable gives Bolshevik Hedy Lamarr a luscious, Adrian designed silk nightgown. Unlike Travis Banton, Adrian was concerned with silhouette and in this exquisitely bias-cut negligee—Gable just happens to have it in his suitcase—Hedy Lamarr’s figure is highlighted to a spectacular effect.

Long live the products of decadent American capitalism.

Capitalist Clark Gable puts Communist Hedy Lamarr in touch with her feminine side in Comrade X, 1940.

Hedy, playing a variation of Greta Garbo’s Ninotchka, is a humorless Soviet scold more concerned with industrial production than with her own femininity, which translates into her humanity.

TCM’s Shadows of Russia series, organized and programmed by my favorite film blogger Self-Styled Siren and The New York Posts’s fine film critic Lou Lumenick, kicks into a refreshing mode—after the shallow and dopey Reds—as we view the lighter side of the Russian revolution.

Comrade X, directed by King Vidor from a story by Walter Reisch and script by the great Ben Hecht is the story of an American reporter who is blackmailed into getting the beautiful but ideologically rigid streetcar—not named Desire—conductor out of Russia.

Interesting to note that Hedy Lamarr’s character is ideologically committed to Communism. But Clark Gable’s hard-nosed American reporter never really claims an ideology. In fact, as he and Lamarr are about to face a Soviet firing squad, Gable passionately states: “You’re a beautiful woman and nobody’s gonna turn a machine gun on you. That’s my politics.”

Clark Gable, more than any other American actor, exudes a deep and abiding love for women. In Comrade X he projects just the right degree of lust to melt Hedy Lamarr’s Marxist heart. The flawless landscape of Lamarr’s face allows this lovely but limited actress to project the heartless core of Soviet totalitarian rule.

Garbo surrenders to Paris fashions and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka, 1939.

Ninotchka, produced a year earlier, Garbo’s best role and her best film, was a huge hit. The story is a classic Hollywood fish-out-of-water tale. Garbo, a Soviet envoy who carries a portrait of Lenin in her suitcase, arrives in decadent Paris and is swept off her feet by the charming and corrupt Melvyn Douglas, and Paris fashions as interpreted by Adrian.

The script, credited to Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and Walter Reisch was, in fact, the work of at least ten Hollywood screenwriters. But it is a seamless screenplay and Ernst Lubitsch’s assured hand brings a consistent tone to this near-perfect Hollywood classic.

Casual but razor-sharp lines nail the murderous and corrupt Soviet regime.

Says Garbo: “The last mass trials were a success: there will be fewer, but better Russians.”

This one piece of dialogue is more honest than the entire three-hour plus Reds.

As in Comrade X, a hard-core Commie babe is taught by a decadent American to get in touch with her feminine side. Love vanquishes politics. Like Gable, Melvyn Douglas has no particular ideological bent except a fondness for champagne and beautiful women. This, I suppose, is a way of indicating the American love of freedom in contrast to dreary and regimented Communism. When Douglas views the lights of Paris he sees beauty and romance. Garbo’s Ninotchka sees a waste of electricity—she’s already an insufferable Greenie. Thus, Garbo’s transformation from Soviet drudge—wisely, Lubitsch keeps Garbo in medium shot emphasizing her chronically bad posture—to capitalist swan is deliriously romantic.

Comrade X and Ninotchka are like Soviet versions of What Not to Wear—and you thought I only watch classic Hollywood movies—with free market American males rescuing Bolshevik beauties from the unspeakable horrors of Communist shmattes. In both films the Commie females are decidedly, er, masculine until all American males effect fierce make-overs, thereby freeing up natural feminine impulses.

Flashback:

I’m sitting with my wife Karen watching What Not to Wear.

Karen: “You’d never nominate me for this show, would you?”

My wife is wearing a killer Prada dress and lethal Christian Louboutin heels. The rabbi’s daughter is just as beautiful as when we first met in third grade.

Me: (totally sincere) “Of course not.”

Karen: (totally sincere) “Because if you did, I’d dis-em-bowel you.”

End Flashback:

Satire is, perhaps, the most potent weapon in Hollywood’s arsenal, and these two films, more than any other I have ever seen, expose and ridicule the evils of Communism. Comrade X and Ninotchka are classic Hollywood movies, hugely entertaining, and deeply enlightening. Both films recognize that Communism is an assured platform for mass murder, but it is also a decidedly anti-romantic ideology. And that is intolerable.

Both movies take it for granted that Stalin’s regime was a monstrous killing machine liquidating vast swaths of its people. Hollywood is properly repelled by Soviet Communism. In contrast,Walter Duranty, Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for praising Stalin and defending the brutality of the Communist purges. The Soviet-manufactured mass starvation in the Ukraine never happened in the expert opinion of this Communist hack. Predictably, Duranty never recanted his noxious opinions—a true Stalinist—and the New York Times never returned the Pulitzer—true running dogs of elitism.

With two elegant and fluffy romances, Hollywood righteously skewers Soviet Communism.

For a shining moment tinsel town was on the side of the angels.

By the way, “Garbo Laughs,” was the line used by MGM to sell Ninotchka. But if you look carefully at the scene where Garbo laughs, it appears that her voice is out of synch—I ran the scene back on forth on my DVR like a complete lunatic. Almost certainly, Garbo’s laugh was dubbed, probably by some anonymous actress or sound editor.

© Robert J. Avrech

For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and ‘The Champ’ Part 1

Leo Grin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 14:53:18 +0000

Our newest film in this series, 1931’s The Champ, marks the first time we begin our study not with a director but with a writer. Not to say that the director didn’t have a great deal to do with the success of the film — he most certainly did, and (as the title of this post hints) we will review that contribution in good time. But in the case of The Champ, it was the writer who was primarily responsible for the rich familial tone and heart-rending melodrama for which this touching little film (only 86 minutes) is best known and remembered.

The Champ is that rare film that features a pair of strong male leads doing masculine things in a masculine universe, but with nuanced and delicate characterizations that delve far deeper than the usual sports movie, tearing at the raw edges of what it means to be a parent in an imperfect world, to live through the tragedy of a broken family, and to suffer the premature loss of childhood innocence. On the surface, these subjects would seem ill at home in one of the most famous boxing movies of all time. But The Champ is not based on a true story, or cribbed from a famous novel — it was wholly conceived in the mind of the screenwriter. And not just any screenwriter, but the most prolific (and arguably one of the greatest) in Hollywood history. Who was he, you ask?

Well, first of all, he was a she.

Born in 1888, Marion Benson Owens grew up in San Francisco as the middle child of a no-nonsense ad executive, but soon developed into a rebellious little Bohemian with a variety of artistic pretensions. She was above all precocious and full of imagination. Whenever her aunt would invite other ladies over for séances (a favorite pastime in those days), young Marion would play the part of a possessed girl channeling spirits, inventing all manner of accents, characters, and stories with which to delight her audience. Her uncle, an old seaman, often took her along to visit his buddies in seedy bars and taverns. Watching the gruff men smoking, drinking, and cursing in their salty element, she gained early first-hand experience in the sort of masculine banter and swagger that decades later would grant The Champ so much verisimilitude.

Looking for ways to express her imaginative longings, Marion began to draw and to write poetry, things that failed to impress her down-to-earth businessman father and socialite mother. Their divorce when she was a teen imbued her soul with another of the painful elements that would later figure so prominently in The Champ. Among her parents’ friends was the great Jack London, the first millionaire author in history. Although it is unknown whether she read any of his seminal tales about boxing (The Game, “A Piece of Steak”) it is known that he heartily encouraged her writing endeavors, spurring her to submit what would become her first fledgling short story and poetry sales.

Marion’s early marriage to a magazine illustrator failed, as did a second to a steel magnate. By 1915 a series of transient jobs (including time spent in Europe as a WWI combat correspondent!) had ended with her in Los Angeles, nibbling around the edges of the molten Hollywood film industry. Meeting the famous actress Mary Pickford was a turning point, as they quickly began a warm friendship that would last over fifty years. Soon she was acting in bit roles for silent movies under the stage name “Frances Marion” (one of her distant relatives was Francis Marion, the legendary “Swamp Fox” of the Revolutionary War). The name would stick, and the former Marion Owens would be Frances Marion for the rest of her life.

Ultimately, acting wasn’t her forte. Her first chance to write for a movie came about due to a funny circumstance. The movies of 1915 were silent, yes — but amazingly, studios were getting complaints from lip readers who claimed that the words mouthed on-screen by the actors didn’t at all match the displayed dialogue cards. (Because there was no sound, actors could say anything — including plenty of things no lip-reading Christian ought to “hear”!) Directors began requesting scene-appropriate mock dialogue for the actors to use. The newly christened Frances Marion obliged, and began what would become a lifelong career and passion.

Within a few years Marion the writer was a hot property, penning a continuous stream of “scenarios” and making an obscene amount of money doing it. She became the personal screenwriter for her friend Mary Pickford, as well as the ghost-writer for Pickford’s newspaper column. In 1917 alone Marion cleared $50,000 for her scriptwriting chores. She wrote lightning-fast, sometimes cranking out a feature-length script in as little as three weeks. No one knows exactly how many movies she wrote during the teens and twenties. The Internet Movie Database has records for 150, but copyright filings at the Library of Congress reveal that to be a low-ball figure. The estimated totals published in various sources are all over the map, ranging as high as 325.

What isn’t in dispute is that Frances Marion remains the most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history. During her tenure she was also the best-paid writer, man or woman. “She had more muscle than most women in Hollywood,” observed actress Gloria Swanson, “because she was a gold mine of ideas — ideas that could become stories that could become scripts that could become films that could save careers, lives, and corporations.” In 1926, Variety reported that Marion was to be given a staggering $100,000 to write exclusively for Sam Goldwyn. Still later, as M-G-M’s prize scenarist, she would be paid upwards of $30,000 per week. “I’ve been so glad to get the money,” she said, “that I never worried much about the credit.”

In 1919 Marion married for the third time, to an ex-Army Chaplin named Fred Thomson, who had been a military adviser on one of Mary Pickford’s pictures. Unlike her previous marriages, this one worked out exceedingly well — after a decade of trying, she had finally found true love. A few years later, when Marion called on her husband to fill in for a missing actor on one of the pictures she was directing (yes, she even directed a few films), he promptly became an overnight sensation. Thomson ended up starring in dozens of films, most of them written by his wife, and soon her husband was one of the most popular Western stars in America. The happy couple adopted one son, had another naturally, and built a sprawling twenty-four acre estate in Beverly Hills. Life was wonderful.

Then, in late 1928, tragedy struck in the form of a rusty nail on the floor of a horse stable. Thomson stepped on it, developed tetanus, and quickly sickened while his doctors flailed around trying to diagnose his illness. His death on Christmas Day (so emotionally similar to the one she was soon to write for The Champ) sent her into a tailspin. Forty years old and with two babies to raise, she was hospitalized several times for exhaustion and grief. A fourth marriage to director George W. Hill ended in divorce (soon after, Hill committed suicide), and with that Marion swore off marriage forever, dedicating herself to the raising of her sons while alleviating her loneliness with occasional flings and affairs.

It was in the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death that she wrote the movies for which she is best remembered. Sound had arrived, and dialogue suddenly had grown substantially in importance. Whereas before a screenwriter need only write small bits for subtitle cards, now they were required to invent whole monologues and long debates bristling with dramatic energy. A new set of rules regarding pace, length, and nuance were required. Techniques that worked wonderfully in the silent era now fell flat. Unlike many, Marion’s well-rounded and emotion-laden characters transferred well to talkies. With the support and encouragement of the brilliant young producer Irving Thalberg, she penned hit after hit for M-G-M, and in 1930 became the first woman to win an Academy Award for a non-actress category when she took home the statue for The Big House, a gritty prison film.

But it was in Mexico, on a research trip for an upcoming western, that she had the “Eureka!” moment that would result in a film even more memorable and close to her heart. She watched in fascination as a man got tossed out of a saloon along with his young son. The boy was angrily defending his drunken dad, calling him “the Champ!” This scene of familial loyalty and moxie from a little boy touched her, and when she got back she asked Thalberg if she could write a different story than the western they had been planning. As Thalberg was vacationing in Europe, he assigned Marion to Harry Rapf, one of M-G-M’s top producers. It was an inspired choice, for Rapf gave Marion additional ideas that ultimately nudged the story far closer to the one we now know and love.

Rapf’s friend, director Chuck Reisner, had told him some tales about the misadventures of his son Dinky with a horse at a Tijuana racetrack. Marion incorporated these into her plot, and added heaping portions of emotional resonance drawn from her own life — divorce, untimely death, the hole left by the absence of a parent. Her flair for melodrama was exquisitely developed by this point, honed to a razor’s edge by fifteen years of writing hundreds of silent films. The resulting screenplay featured a mix of powerful elements appealing to both males and females. Alcoholism especially was given a harrowing treatment (and this during Prohibition, which had not yet been repealed).

Many critics find weepy melodrama loathsome, but Marion prized the ability of movies to elicit strong emotions. Years later, in a book on screenwriting, she would say:

A character exists only in his emotions and sensations. Without the expression of feeling, he no more represents a living person than does a fleshless skeleton. If he does not realistically express some credible emotion himself, he will not be likely to arouse feeling in those who watch him. His own characteristics and the plot arrangement should set him in situations that plausibly arouse his own fear, hope, passion, desire, anger, love, jealousy or other emotion, and his own feeling should be expressed so realistically as to arouse emotion in the beholder.

After she finished the story proper, screenwriters Leonard Praskins and Wanda Tuchock were brought in to add dialogue and flesh out the scenes. According to Marion, surgically adding layers of witty banter and comedy to an outwardly dramatic movie is a tough business:

If anyone [believes] that we sit around holding our sides with laughter as one hilarious gag after another is suggested, they are gravely mistaken. We sit in a room and build our comedy scenes with concentration. It was grim work, and even when we thought we had hit upon what comedians call a “belly laugh,” nobody so much as cracked a smile.

The resulting script was strange, the first of what would eventually be seen as a new genre, the “male weepie.” It’s a delicate balance: take the masculinity from such a script, and it’s just another Little Women type estrogen-fest. But take away Marion’s feminine melodrama, and it’s just another fight picture with shallow, cardboard heroes. As things turned out, audiences suffering through the Depression heartily embraced Marion’s heartfelt tale, and the script for the movie won the veteran screenwriter her second Academy Award.

Marion would continue writing for M-G-M until 1946. By then, in her late fifties, she was thoroughly disenchanted with the business. Most of her silent-era friends were dead or retired, and it was near impossible to get anything personal made anymore. Whereas The Champ had been pitched and developed at light-speed, now everything was homogenized by a legion of script doctors and production-code enforcers, assembly-line style. Writing in that environment was, in her words, “like writing on sand with the wind blowing.” The personal, heartfelt projects of yesteryear had given way to

the era of messages, of art; the intellectuals have taken over and the films aren’t simple and direct any longer. . . The poor people who write for the films! Film writers are like Penelope — knitting their stories all day just to have somebody else unravel their work by night.

Thus, with her children almost fully grown, she abandoned Hollywood and moved East to write novels and plays. Her last brush with Tinseltown was to adopt her Champ screenplay into a new vehicle for Red Skelton, changing the prizefighter of the original into a comedian and naming it The Clown (1953). Shorn of its hard-boiled masculinity, it bombed.

Frances Marion never worked in Hollywood again, and died in 1973 at the age of 84. In 1987, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was attempting to create a display featuring real Oscars from every year of the awards’ existence, they were having a problem finding one for 1930. Marion’s son Richard came through by donating the statue she had received for writing The Big House. When asked about how his mother had displayed her Oscars during her life, he replied that she generally used them as doorstops.

One of Richard Thomson’s earliest memories of his mom was walking into her bedroom early in the morning to find that she already had been up for several hours writing. “Her hair was down,” he recalls, “but she was sitting up with papers all over her bed.” The most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history — lonely, tinged by tragedy, yet still possessing a little girl’s imagination and heart — gutting out the stories that made a generation of Americans laugh and weep.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the underrated actors who brought Frances Marion’s ardent effusions to Oscar-worthy life.

The Ten Best Movies (I Screened) in 2009, Part II

Robert J. Avrech — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:44:30 +0000

Continuing from last week, here’s my list of the Ten Best Classic Hollywood Movies I screened during the past year. I realize that this list seems a bit, er, obscure and maybe even esoteric, but in truth, every film is hugely entertaining and suitable for most everyone.

It is sad that so few contemporary movie lovers are familiar with classic Hollywood movies in general and silent films in particular. Imagine if the history of music was suddenly swept clean of the work by Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach.

Well, it’s the same with classic Hollywood movies.

You are missing some works of genius and numerous gems.

Here are my top five films.

5. The Kid Brother, 1927, starring Harold Lloyd, and Jobyna Ralston. Writers: John Grey, Ted Wilde, Thomas J. Crizer, Lex Neal, Howard J. Green. Directed by Ted Wilde, J.A. Howe (co-director), Harold Lloyd (uncredited) Lewis Milestone (uncredited).

Harold Lloyd and Jobyna Ralston in The Kid Brother, 1927. Ralston was Lloyd’s leading lady in six of his most important films. She was probably his best leading lady.

The great silent comedians were Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. Chaplin’s Little Tramp was, perhaps the most popular and poignant in all film history. Keaton, the great stone face, was technically the most bold. Even today, film students worship Keaton’s technical innovations. But Lloyd, in his horn rimmed glasses, was the most ordinary of the great comedians. His trademark character, always named Harold, was eager, brash, clever and eternally optimistic. In short, Harold Lloyd was the most American of the legendary triumvirate.

In The Kid Brother, Harold Hickory, the Sheriff’s youngest son, is a weakling who always defers to his hulking big brothers. But Harold must recover stolen money and win the love of Mary Powers, Jobyna Ralston, a performer in a traveling medicine show.

This is a male Cinderella story, with Harold as the household slave.

In the opening scene Harold washes clothes in the butter churn and then using a string, runs the wash through a wringer, and finally attaches the string to a kite which floats in the air as a dryer. It’s a lyrical and effortless way of establishing Harold’s clever character and his low rank in the alpha male family.

The Kid Brother has, to my mind, the most romantic scene ever filmed.

After meeting and spending time with Mary in the woods, she departs, making her way over hill and dale.

Harold is so reluctant to part from her he climbs a tree to keep her in sight. The camera cranes up with Harold as he climbs.

He calls out to her: “What’s your name?”

She calls back: “Mary.”

As she continues along, Harold loses sight of her.

Harold climbs higher so he can follow Mary’s progress. The camera continues craning with him.

“Where do you live?”

“In the medicine tent.”

Mary strolls along.

The camera cranes even higher.

“Goodbye,” cries Harold.

She waves and walks away. Now, she’s just a dot in the landscape.

Harold is way up in the tree, but he’s so enraptured that he loses his balance, falls, bumping into one branch and the next, until he hits the ground. Dazed, he plucks a flower and tears off petals: She loves me, she loves me not.

It’s a breath taking sequence where movie technique perfectly expresses the inner longings of the main character.

Harold Lloyd is often accused of being cold and mechanical. But in truth, he was a great American romantic, and The Kid Brother might be his greatest achievement.

4. Souls for Sale, 1923 starring Eleanor Boardman, Mae Busch, Barbara La Marr, Richard Dix and Lew Cody. Written and Directed by Rupert Hughes based on his own novel.

Eleanor Boardman in Souls for Sale, her first starring role. She went on to star in King Vidor’s classic—she was Mrs. Vidor for a while—The Crowd.

Hollywood has always had a deep fascination with, um, Hollywood. Narcissism, a away of life in tinsel town, has given us an entire genre of movies in which Hollywood ponders its own meaning. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is the quintessential Hollywood story: bitter and corrosive, it views an existential pond where big fish eat the little fish in a vicious Darwinian struggle.

It’s easy to see Hollywood as a wicked place filled with phonies, sinners and broken people.

That’s why Souls for Sale is such an unexpected delight. This is a film that looks at Hollywood and discovers a world of hard work—the best kept secret in Hollywood—generosity, and warm camaraderie.

Remember Steddon—yup, that’s her name—the daughter of a small town minister who rails against the evils of Hollywood, impulsively marries Owen Scudder—great name—played by Lew Cody. But when he kisses her hand she’s gripped by a deep sense of revulsion. Terrified, Remember slips off the train, escaping her honeymoon night. Trekking through the desert, the runaway bride stumbles across a motion picture company shooting a film.

Before you know it—that’s how things happen in the movies—Remember becomes a wildly successful actress. But fame, fortune and true love are threatened when her husband oozes back into her life bent on revenge.

In her very first starring role, Eleanor Boardman plays Remember—I kept waiting for her parents to say: “Hey, do you remember why we named her Remember?” But no, there’s never any explanation for the name. She’s a sweet and virtuous small town girl who arrives clueless in Hollywood and rather than becoming a drug addicted nymphomaniac—the obvious choice—Remember flourishes in the loyal fellowship of movie folks.

It’s refreshing take on tinsel town and the film is suffused with sly and affectionate tributes to movies and the people who make them.

Boardman delivers a shrewd comic performance that anticipates screwball comedy by twenty years. But in her quiet moments Boardman allows her mask to drop and she lets us see Remember’s fears and insecurities. Boardman is hugely appealing and she’s got wonderful energy. It’s a shame that she retired so early, 1935.

There is rare footage of directors King Vidor, Fred Niblo, and Marshall Neilan. We see Charlie Chaplin directing A Woman of Paris and Erich von Stroheim preparing a scene for Greed. There are wonderful shots of early Los Angeles when orange groves dotted the landscape. It’s the Los Angeles of my dreams and Souls for Sale is the movie business that we all wish existed.

3. Piccadilly, 1929, starring Gilda Gray, Anna May Wong, Jameson Thomas, Charles Laughton, Cyril Ritchard, King Ho-Chang, Hannah Jones. Written by Arnold Bennett. Directed by E.A. Dupont.

Anna May Wong, as Shosho, the dancing scullery maid in Piccadilly.

Gilda Gray—famous for popularizing the shimmy—is billed above Anna May Wong as the star of this fine movie, but it’s Anna May who dominates just as she supplants Gray in the story.

Anna May plays Shosho, a scullery maid in Piccadilly, a popular London night club. One night, Wilmot, the owner of the club steps into the kitchen where he discovers Shosho entertaining the other dishwashers by performing a dance. Wilmot fires Shosho. A customer—Charles Laughton in his first screen appearance—complained of a dirty plate and the fun-loving Shosho pays the price.

Featured dancer Mabel, Gilda Gray, romantically involved with Wilmot, bombs in her solo dance—her lack of grace is shocking and I was unsure if this was intentional or just a sad commentary on Gray’s, lumbering talent—when her male partner, Cyril Ritchard—the future Captain Hook—departs for Hollywood. Desperate, Wilmot hires Shosho to perform an “authentic Chinese dance.”

I’m no expert but Shosho’s dance looks more Balinese, but hey, my knowledge of dance is limited to begging my wife not to watch So You Think You Can Dance while I’m within 100 feet of the TV.

Anna May Wong, (1905 – 1961) America’s very first American Chinese movie star—she was born and raised in Los Angeles, and her cousin was the great cinematographer James Wong Howe—spent time in the late 1920’s in Europe trying to get better roles when she grew frustrated by the limited parts offered her by Hollywood.

Anna May grew up in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles. She used her lunch money to attend local nickelodeons, and at home, she spent hours in front of the mirror practicing pantomime and acting out scenes she saw in the movies. Dropping out of high school in 1921, the determined young woman pursued a career in the movies.

Anna May Wong, the first and still greatest American Chinese movie star, studio portrait by Hurrell.

Anna May did become an American movie star but she was always limited in her roles by anti-miscegenation laws. Never allowed to kiss a white man, romantic roles were denied her and more often than not, the characters she played were doomed to grim deaths.

Piccadilly, directed by E.A. Dupont, is one of Anna May’s greatest roles. Her power as an actress was always her ability to project intelligence coupled with sensuality through slow, elegant gestures. Watch her with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express. Dietrich preens and poses, consciously hitting her key light, while Anna May blows her off-screen—they were actually good friends—as she plays a hand of solitaire and delivers her lines with a silken purr.

In Piccadilly, Anna May acts with her fingertips, with the inviting but scornful sway of her hips. She uses a lace shawl as a screen through which she studies and dominates the hapless Wilmot. The taut line of Anna May’s body—think of a bow under tremendous pressure—allows us to read Shosho’s conflicted inner life.

Anna May Wong as Shosho. The very line of her body reveals the inner life of the character.

Dupont planned to shoot a scene of Anna May kissing Wilmot, but the scene was cut. It must have been a devastating blow to Anna May. Europe, she discovered, was no refuge, and no better than Hollywood.

Anna May’s greatest disappointment took place after her return to Hollywood when she was denied the role—she was never seriously considered—of O-lan, the lead character in MGM’s version of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, 1937. The coveted role went to the Viennese Louise Rainer, who works, like the rest of the starring players, in yellow-face. Rainier, a highly competent if tediously sincere actress, won an Oscar for her performance. This was the year in which the following films were released: Stage Door, starring Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers, A Star Is Born, starring Janet Gaynor, Stella Dallas, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Nothing Sacred, starring Carole Lombard, Topper, starring Constance Bennett and The Awful Truth, starring—big sigh from yours truly—the very great Irene Dunne. Hollywood often gets it wrong. However, do take note, my astute friend Self-Styled Siren has a far more generous view of Rainer’s work.

Piccadilly, a lost film for many years, was recently rediscovered and restored, and with it Anna May Wong’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s greatest actresses should also be established.

2. Madeleine, 1950, starring Ann Todd, Ivan Desny, Norman Wooland and Leslie Banks. Written by Stanley Haynes and Nicholas Phipps. Directed by David Lean.

Madeleine, 1950, one of a trilogy of films in which Ann Todd served as inspiration and muse for husband David Lean.

“There is something unnatural about you, Madeleine.”

So says James Smith, Madeleine’s authoritarian father early in the film as she sits at her father’s feet, and as she does every night, and pulls off his boots.

David Lean, best known for such fine epics as, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and The Bridge Over the River Kwai, directed three incredibly powerful films starring his wife—one of six wives—the British actress Ann Todd. The Lean/Todd trilogy—The Passionate Friends, 1949, Madeleine, 1950, The Sound Barrier, 1952—are each, in their own way, small masterpieces that are, unfortunately, too often neglected by movie lovers.

Madeleine, based on a notorious murder and subsequent trial in Glasgow, Scotland, 1857, stars Ann Todd as Madeleine Smith, the dutiful daughter who is, in fact, not so dutiful. She refuses to marry the fine upstanding man her father favors. Instead, she is obsessed with and meets her impoverished, laudanum addicted French lover in the basement of their Victorian home—she is drawn to the basement in the opening scene as if pulled by a sexual magnet.

Madeleine’s lover—wonderfully played by Ivan Desny—is an oily rogue, a manipulative bohemian who yearns to take his rightful place in the Smith household. Whereas Madeleine is an unbridled romantic who wants to run away, escape the shackles of class and her family.

The irony is that Madeleine’s tyrannical father is right. The young man he has chosen for Madeleine is upstanding, honest, sensitive and warm. But Madeleine is too deeply in love with her wild romantic side to realize that the bad boy for whom she lusts is, well, poisonous.

From her basement, Madeleine, Ann Todd, arranges to meet her forbidden lover.

Ann Todd often gets a bad rap as a glacial beauty—she’s the ultimate Hitchcockian cool blond; he used her in The Paradine Case—with little acting ability. But the Lean/Todd trilogy should put this nonsense to rest.

After Ann Todd retired from the screen, she became a successful producer and host of wildly popular travel documentaries.

In fact, Todd was a respected theater actress who suffered a disfiguring car accident early in her career and her face had to be rebuilt.

Todd plays a role that can easily slip into a programmed performance: the young and proper Victorian woman who yearns to break free. It’s a difficult role because Todd has to maintain a mask of propriety, yet at the same time hint at the volcanic passion that motivates her every breath. But Todd delivers with just the slightest of movements: the arch of a brow, her fingers clenching and unclenching, her palms nervously smoothing her hair. It’s restraint within layers of restraint.

Lean’s camera placement is, as always, perfection. Here, with great subtlety, Lean suggests Madeleine’s almost sadomasochistic side by twice using POV shots of her lover gazing at her feet as she lies on the ground awaiting his embrace.

There are countless shots of Madeleine making deep curtsies to her father, superbly played by Leslie Banks. These repeated shots are Kabuki theater in Victorian Britain. Todd appears as her father’s subservient daughter but look at her eyes, she’s making a mockery of the ritual, she’s challenging her father and he hasn’t a clue. It’s subtle film acting, filled with quiet moments that are too often overlooked. For me, this Lean/Todd collaboration is a glorious if deeply muted masterpiece.

1. The Goddess 1934, starring, Lingyu Ruan, Tian Jian, Zhizhi Zhang, Keng Li, and Junpan Li. Written and directed by Yonggang Wu.

Lingyu Ruan, as The Goddess, 1934, the pinnacle of silent Chinese cinema.

Lingyu Ruan (1910-1935) was the greatest star of silent Chinese movies—lack of capital delayed China’s move to sound.

Lingyu Ruan is often dubbed the Asian Garbo. Which does a huge injustice to Lingyu Ruan, a far better actress. With no formal training, Lingyu Ruan instinctively broke from the highly stylized performances of Chinese opera and films. Instead, she brought a graceful, sincere, and refreshingly realistic style to her roles.

Lingyu Ruan’s father, an impoverished machinist, died when she was just five-years-old. She lived with her mother, a housemaid for a wealthy family. As soon as Lingyu Ruan finished primary school, she looked for work in order to help her mother. Spotting an ad for film actors, she went to a casting session and at age of sixteen, Lingyu Ruan got her first role in Husband and Wife in Name Only, 1927.

Throughout her short career, Lingyu Ruan created unforgettable images of traditional Chinese women: impoverished girls who lived under the heel of an oppressive feudal code; prostitutes exploited by tyrannical men; innocent girls seduced by wealthy sons; young women struggling in the bonds of marriage; and modern women who yearned for a more equitable place in traditional Chinese society.

In The Goddess, her deeply sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute trying to raise a young son, is the pinnacle of classic Chinese cinema. Ruan’s performance is deeply nuanced and disciplined. There’s a touching moment when Ruan watches her son in a school play. She smiles with such pride and love that your heart just breaks. It’s a haunting scene—so simple it could be overlooked—that it has imprinted itself in my memory as one of the great moments in movie history.

Tragically, Ruan’s unhappy private life was fodder for the merciless Chinese tabloids. In 1935, during production of her last film, a divorce suit and ugly newspaper stories caused her intense public embarrassment and private anguish. Her life unraveled in the public eye as her vindictive ex-husband slandered her through the tabloids.

Portrait of the great Chinese actress, Lingyu Ruan.

Out of shame, Ruan took an overdose of barbiturates. In her suicide note she wrote: “Gossip Is a fearful thing.”

She was twenty-four years old.

Her funeral procession was three miles long, attended by tens of thousands of fans. Three women committed suicide out of despair. Lingyu Ruan was a star for just ten years. She left behind a dozen movies. Her tragic heroines, free of false nobility, fed the romantic fantasies of an entire nation.

When I was in China my extremely cute Chinese Communist spy almost wept with joy when I expressed admiration for Lingyu Ruan’s work.

This great actress is practically unknown in the West and that is a pity.

© Robert J. Avrech

Esther Ralston: Why Do All My Husbands Want to Kill Me? Part II

Robert J. Avrech — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:35:03 +0000

Esther Ralston at the height of her fame, mid-twenties.

To read Part I of this series, please click here.

Blessed with a lovely, melodic voice, it’s something of a puzzle why Paramount dropped Esther Ralston’s option in 1929. Esther was a rising star who, between 1924 and 1929, starred or co-starred in twenty-five films. She would seem a natural for talkies.

But the mystery is soon cleared up as Esther explains:

Since I had only a year to go on my Paramount contract, the studio sent me a new contract with a talkie clause to sign. Knowing I had been brought up in the theater before going into pictures, George decided I should ask for a hundred thousand dollars to sign this talkie clause. He sent me alone to talk to Mr. Lasky and Mr. Zukor. They were courteous as always, but explained that the new talkie panic had them worried and they didn’t feel they should have to increase my salary until they were sure I would be adequate in talkies.

Once again, the destructive Svengali-Trilby relationship asserts itself as the guiding principle of Esther and George.

Unlike so many other stars who grew tired and cynical under the pressures of the frantic pace of production, Esther genuinely delighted in the hard work and was, by all accounts, well liked by everyone.

Well, almost everyone.

In her modest but hugely revealing memoir, Some Day We’ll Laugh, and years later in conversation with silent film historian, Anthony Slide, Esther vents about an unpleasant breach, professional and personal, with director Dorothy Arzner.

Publicity photo of Esther Ralston for Ten Modern Commandments, the film in which director Dorothy Arzner sexually harassed the young star.

Open about her homosexuality, director Dorothy Arzner, during production of Fashions for Women and Ten Modern Commandments, 1927, is in the habit of dragging Esther into her lap and groping her breasts.

Esther rejects Arzner’s crude advances and Arzner takes revenge by browbeating Esther, making her perform take after take of a single scene. Ironic, because Esther was known as One-Take Ralston.

Furious, Esther storms into Adolf Zukor’s office and announces that she will never again work with Arzner.

Esther Wants a Baby

Broke, with Hollywood re-gearing for the new era of talkies, George proposes that Esther go on the road with a vaudeville act. It is notable that George himself never once considers going to work. No, the structure of their dysfunctional relationship dictates Esther as breadwinner and George as, um, parasite.

Like the veteran trouper she is, Esther puts together an act billed as the “Golden Girl of the Silver Screen… in Person.”

Esther opens in 1929 at the Orpheum in Los Angeles. Playing to enthusiastic audiences, the tour moves to Chicago and then The Palace in New York. A month later, playing three shows a day, four on Saturday and Sunday, Esther is worn down, depressed.

Although it was a thrill to see people lined up for a block and a half waiting to get into the theater to see my act, I just wanted to go home to have a baby. George kept urging me to be patient, saying that having a baby might make me lose my American Venus figure, that I was still young and there would be plenty of time to start a family.

A crude manipulator, George threatens to commit suicide if Esther insists on abandoning the tour. Torn by her desire to start a family, and her husband’s control over her life and career, Esther sinks into silence and starts to lose weight. Alarmed at seeing his meal ticket in meltdown, George makes an appointment for Esther with a “Park Avenue specialist.”

I was thoroughly examined and, after I had dressed, I came out to the office where the specialist was talking with George. They both stared at me so solemnly that I was frightened. “What is it?” I almost screamed. “Why are you looking at me like that. Is something wrong with me?”

“Better sit down, my dear,” the doctor said quietly, then he told me the bad news. Evidently, my strenuous acrobatic dancing, my high kicks and so forth, had left me with one ovary completely damaged and the other only halfway intact. “I’m sorry, Miss Ralston, but I’m afraid you can never have children. I’m so sorry.” He said.

I was numb with shock. It just couldn’t be true. All I wanted out of life was to have children. Who cared about a career? What price being a movie star, here today gone tomorrow? No babies? Not ever? I wanted to die.

What is going on here?

I presented Esther’s narrative to a close friend, a distinguished physician. He pointed out that female athletes, and dancers—usually ballerinas—through endless training, rehearsals, and extreme diets, frequently lose their menstrual cycles, which leads to temporary infertility.

But Esther does not present as that kind of dancer or dieter. No, it seems that Esther was the victim of a cruel manipulation designed to keep her on the road and insure a cash flow.

I’m fairly certain that George Webb greased the palm of the Park Avenue specialist to offer the heart-breaking diagnosis thereby breaking down Esther’s defenses and making her even more dependent on her husband.

Esther agrees to finish the tour.

The Case of Lena Smith, 1929, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Released just as sound was coming in, this film, according to Esther, was her very best work. No copies are known to exist. Lena Smith is one of the most sought after lost films of the silent era.

Esther might be gullible, and she is most certainly uninformed about female biology, but she has true grit and faith in G-d.

Raised an Episcopalian, Esther confesses that for years she has been an earnest student of Christian Science. Convinced that G-d wants her to have a child, Esther summons a Christian Science Practitioner for prayer sessions.

In the days before antibiotics, when the most ordinary infection could result in death, scores of the Hollywood colony flocked to Christian Science. The great director King Vidor was one of the most visible adherents.

A few months later, her vaudeville tour ended, back in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer offers Esther a long-term contract worth $100,000.

Esther turns it down, explaining that she is, yes, pregnant.

With all due respect to Christian Science, I still believe that George Webb and the Park Avenue specialist conspired the false diagnosis to keep Esther working.

Esther and the Miraculous Turtle Cream

Meanwhile, George discovers a “scientist” who has invented a miraculous “turtle cosmetic cream” guaranteed to make women look years younger. In 1930, using the money Esther earned on her vaudeville tour, George opens “Esther’s in Hollywood” a spa on Yucca Street in Los Angeles.

In 1931 Esther gives birth to a daughter, Mary Esther, and Ralston looks forward to a quiet life in her mansion as a mother and wife.

But business and money management at “Esther’s in Hollywood” is not what it should be—big shock—and George arranges for another grueling vaudeville tour.

Playing to sold-out audiences, Esther is invited to England to deliver a Command Performance at the Palladium, the largest theater in the world.

Rather than be separated from her child, Esther hires a Nanny to help care for baby Mary on the tour.

Esther and the anti-Semites

Checking into the Mayfair hotel in London, Esther discovers that Eddie Kay, her musical conductor and arranger, and his wife Tessie are not registered.

“Why not?” I said. “All my company are to be registered here at this hotel. “But Madame,” answered the clerk, “I’m sorry, but we couldn’t register Mr. Kay. He is a Jew.”

“Restricted” hotels were an accepted part of the social landscape in Europe and America all through the 1950’s.

Esther immediately checks out of the Mayfair and rents a luxurious apartment directly across from the Marble Arch where Eddie, Tessie and Esther’s entire staff stay for the duration of the London tour.

Esther does not deliver a tedious lecture about fighting injustice and prejudice. She doesn’t make any grand claims for her righteousness. She does the right thing, and moves on with her story.

Admirable.

Esther is exhausted and homesick, for America, for her lovely mansion, and the golden California sunshine. But George books weeks of further engagements in Scotland and Wales.

We had been almost a year in England by now and I began to fret with homesickness. We had received a cable from our receptionist at “Esther’s in Hollywood” requesting an immediate five thousand dollars for new hair dryers. It seemed to me that our salon was beginning to cost more than it was bringing in.

I complained to George that it just didn’t seem fair that his mother, Mrs. Frey, his nephew Mac, and his youngest daughter, Marion should all be living in our “castle,” enjoying the California sunshine, swimming in my beloved pool, being waited on by Sing [the cook] while my baby and I were so far from home and I had to work so hard for every penny.

So badly has George mismanaged Esther’s finances that on February 27, 1933, Esther’s mansion and all its contents are put up for auction. Esther does not provide details of George’s financial mismanagement, but between bad investments, various swindles, and George’s degenerate gambling we can well imagine how another fortune is lost.

Esther makes a list of each creditor and accepts every job that Hollywood has to offer. Dollar by dollar, Esther pays off her considerable debts.

Quarreling all the time, George and Esther are bound in a loveless, dysfunctional marriage.

Esther Gets on the Very Bad Side of L.B. Mayer

Thirty-one years old, Esther is no longer the devastatingly beautiful ingénue who lit up the screen in the silent era. But Louis B. Mayer, the most powerful studio head in Hollywood, is still anxious to bring her to MGM.

He offers her $750.00 a week, a steep decline from the days when she was pulling in $2,500 a week, but Esther is more than grateful to sign the contract.

But there’s a catch. And it’s classic Hollywood.

L.B. Mayer has a massive schoolboy crush on Esther, and when she realizes that the powerful mogul expects, um, favors in return for roles, Esther spurns Mayer’s advances.

When I arrived at the studio the next morning, I was told to go at once to Mr. Mayer’s office. He wanted to see me.

“Good morning,” I said cheerfully as I entered his office.

Mr. Mayer glared at me and, shaking his finger at me furiously, he shouted, “Think you’re pretty smart, eh? Think you fooled me? Let me tell you, I can have any woman on this lot — Joan Crawford and…”

I stood up indignantly and interrupted his tirade. “Perhaps you can — any woman but Esther Ralston.”

“Just who do you think you are?” he sputtered.

“I thought, Mr. Mayer, I was hired as an actress, but evidently you had other plans for me.’

Getting up from his chair, Mayer paced up and down the room, shouting, “You sing your psalms, young lady, and see where you get! I’ll blackball you in every studio in Hollywood, and what’s more you’ll get nothing here!”

Mayer makes good on his promise. MGM sells Esther’s contract to Universal for a group of less than stellar projects which do nothing for her career, and as everyone knows if you’re not on an upward trajectory in Hollywood, you’re probably in a downward spiral.

Esther Ralston and Joan Crawford in Sadie McKee.

Esther’s one MGM film during that period is the Joan Crawford vehicle, Sadie McKee, 1934.

It is director Clarence Brown—Garbo’s frequent helmer—who insists on casting Ralston as the theatrical femme fatale, Dolly Merrick.

Esther’s part is small, but she sparkles in every scene. Even as a slinky tramp, Esther brings warmth to the character that keeps you off-balance. You want to hate this vaudeville villainess, yet at the same time there is the urge to melt into her arms.

Here’s a brief clip of Esther Ralston singing I Looked In Your Eyes with Gene Raymond. As you can see, Esther is magnetic, with a richly-toned voice. As Dolly Merrick, Esther plays a vaudeville femme fatale who steals Barry from good girl Crawford. Sadie McKee is not one of Crawford’s better known vehicles, but it happens to be one of my favorites. And Esther Ralston’s presence is one of the reasons this film has such appeal for yours truly.

–

In March of 1934, Esther finally sues for divorce from George Webb. True to form, Webb counter-sues, demanding $75.00 a week in alimony. The judge denies Webb’s claim and hands Esther full custody of their child Mary Esther.

Esther Rebuilds Her Life—Sorta

At last free from George Webb, a liar, a gambler, and swindler, Esther is free to rebuild her life and career, and hopefully choose her next relationship through the prism of hard earned experience.

However, the day after her divorce—the very next day—at a Hollywood party in Brentwood, Esther clamps eyes on Ted Morgan, a smooth crooner with a pleasing baritone.

Chatting intimately, Esther learns that Morgan’s wife has just run off with another man.

Reflects Esther:

I guess the fact that we were both unhappy victims of divorce brought us closer together, for I brought him home to Mama’s the next day for dinner.

In the meantime, Esther comes to the conclusion that though she can always earn money, she can’t seem to hold on to it. Thus, Esther engages a high-profile money manager who claims that his clients are a who’s who of Hollywood talent. Confident that, at last, she has found financial salvation, Esther turns over her entire savings to her new money manager. He puts Esther on a weekly allowance and —

— and if your stomach is churning as you read this, well, you have guessed correctly.

The money manager blows town, conning Esther out of all her money.

For those keeping a scorecard, this makes three fortunes Esther has earned and lost.

Esther Ralston is once again broke, adrift in a cocoon of bafflement and betrayal.

It is under these circumstances in June 1935—betrayed by a man she trusted, and forced to drastically downsize—that Esther accepts Morgan’s marriage proposal.

Admits Esther:

During these months, Will Morgan and I were seeing each other constantly and though it seemed that he was drinking an awful lot, I refused to see the danger signals. We were so in love.

Esther with Bill Morgan husband #2.

Really, at this point in the narrative I ‘m slapping my forehead like a Dexedrine fueled lab monkey.

Esther, baby, what are you thinking?

Of course, Morgan can’t buy a job in Hollywood and so he convinces the pliable Esther to combine their talents.

The Ralston-Morgan Vaudeville Act goes on a mildly successful tour across the U.S. No doubt, if it was just Esther head-lining, the box office would have been better.

Forced to leave daughter Mary behind, the pain of their separation is almost more than Esther can bear. And so when Esther’s agent tells her that she has several film offers back in Hollywood, Esther cancels the tour and hurries home.

Resenting Esther’s success, Morgan climbs into a bottle—a case of bottles.

One day, on location for The Girl From Mandalay, Morgan, a sloppy drunk, staggers on the set and disrupts production:

After this final humiliation, I took Mary and went to stay with Mama. I told Bill I’d had it with his drinking and I was leaving him for good. A few nights later, I drove back to our apartment in North Hollywood to pick up my belongings. I parked the car in front and as I got out, saw Bill waiting for me. He was drunk again, and as I turned to go back to the car, he grabbed me by the throat and tried to drag me to the apartment door, yelling, “You aren’t going to leave me, I’ll kill you first.”

Okay, kids, pull out your trusty scorecard: check off two husbands who have threatened murder.

Esther’s life, her dreadful choices in love, is like a Kabuki performance where movement and emotion are ritualized. Esther and the men in her life play their assigned roles to grim perfection.

Esther and Bill are divorced in 1938. Again, Esther is almost penniless and the sole support of her daughter.

What to do?

Esther drives cross-country to New York seeking work in radio and summer stock.

The American Venus is determined to get a fresh start.

But on her very first day in New York, in an agent’s office, Esther meets a young, well-connected show biz columnist who immediately sets his sights on Ralston.

Coming soon, Part III, and yup, husband # 3 also wants to murder Esther.

Lillian Gish: Dying for Her Audience

Robert J. Avrech — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:13:27 +0000

Lillian Gish

The great twin tragedies of the fate of silent films in the modern era is indifference and ignorance. And for those who have seen clips from silent films, they invariably view muddy, degraded prints projected at the wrong speed, hence the jerky motions that give the impression that all silent films are bad slapstick.

Of course, we all owe a great debt to Robert Osborne and TCM for programming so many fine silent films. At last, film lovers have the opportunity to screen a varied selection of silent films and appreciate the great craft that was abruptly short-circuited with the advent of talkies. The best silent films were a universal language in which image, motion and emotion were paramount.

Silent movies were shot and duplicated on fragile nitrate stock. In the few original prints I’ve been fortunate enough to screen the images are just stunning. The screen glows with a liquid, silvery radiance that’s impossible to duplicate on modern film or tape. The finest silent film players were geniuses who conveyed a world of emotion through the most subtle means.

The great director King Vidor, (1894-1982) whose career spanned eight decades—from early silent movies right into the sound era—directed Lillian Gish in a 1926 silent version of La Boheme.

At this point in her career, Gish was so powerful that she had contractual approval over script and director. The intensity of her work ethic, the dedication to her craft simply awed Vidor as he noted so many years later in his excellent 1952 memoir, A Tree is a Tree.

The title is very funny, an insider Hollywood joke. It’s a quote from a penny pinching studio executive who famously said: “A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park!” Hence, in early films, Los Angele’s Griffith Park was used as a location for cowboy movies, Civil War movies, New York’s Central Park, the Scottish Highlands, Versailles—you name it, Griffith Park served as a default location.

Director King Vidor

Here, Vidor describes how Gish rigorously prepared for and played her dramatic death scene in La Boheme:

When she arrived on the set that fateful day, we saw her sunken eyes, her hollow cheeks, and we noticed that her lips had curled outward and were parched with dryness. What on earth had she done to herself? I ventured to ask about her lips and she said in syllables hardly audible that she had succeeded in removing all the saliva from her mouth by not drinking any liquids for three days, and by keeping cotton pads between her teeth and gums even in her sleep.

A pall began to settle over the entire company. People moved about the stage on tiptoe and spoke only in whispers. Finally came the scene where Rudolph carried the exhausted Mimi to her little bed and her Bohemian friends gathered around while Mimi breathed her last. I let the camera continue on her lifeless form and the tragic faces around her and decided to call “cut” only when I saw that Miss Gish was forced to inhale after holding her breath to simulate death. But the familiar movement of the chest didn’t come. She neither inhaled nor exhaled. I began to fear she had played her part too well, and I could see that the other members of the cast and crew had the same fears as I. Too frightened to speak the one word that would halt the movement of the camera, I wondered how to bridge this fantastic moment back to the coldness of reality. The thought flashed through my mind, “What will the headlines say?” After what seemed many, many minutes, I waved my hand before the camera as a signal to stop. Still there was no movement from Lillian.

John Gilbert bent close, and softly whispered her name. Her eyes slowly opened. She permitted herself her first deep breath since the scene had started; for the past days she had trained herself, somehow or other, to get along without visible breathing. It was necessary to wet her lips before she could speak. By this time there was no one on the set whose eyes were dry. The movies have never known a more dedicated artist than Lillian Gish.

Lillian Gish, on her deathbed in La Boheme.

Miss Gish did not work with King Vidor again until 1946 when she played Mrs. McCanles in David O. Selznick’s Duel in the Sun. There’s a lovely and touching moment in the film when Jennifer Jones says to Gish: “I’ll be a good girl—I want to be like you.”

Whenever I’m in production, working with actors, deep in my heart I too hope that they want, consciously or not, to be like Lillian Gish.

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