2018: The Year in Siren Writing

This year has found the Siren doing most of her writing for paying outlets, which endeavors plus the demands of her brood have kept her largely off the blog. For those who haven’t been keeping up with the Siren’s writings, due to exhaustion, distraction, or because Max was polishing the Isotta Fraschini and forgot to turn on the computer, the Siren herewith presents an abridged list of what she was doing in 2018.

First on the list is something the Siren wrote for the Criterion Collection’s blog, The Current, on the exquisite and irreplaceable Danielle Darrieux. Alas, the very mention of that name brings the Siren to sad news about a friend who loved Darrieux above all others. This year, we lost one of the pillars of the Siren community: X. Trapnel, our own beloved XT, who died suddenly in the fall. He enriched the Siren’s life, and the blog would never have been the same without him. The Siren hopes he is somewhere meeting his beloved Mme. Darrieux at last.

By the time Darrieux was sixty-five, she had long since grown into an ineffable serenity and elegance, not just foreigners’ ideal of a Frenchwoman, but the French ideal as well. The first glimpse of her in Demy’s sung-through musical Une chambre en ville comes in black-and-white, like an echo of Darrieux’s past as well as the character’s. From the window of her spacious apartment an annoyed Madame Langlois is looking down on a worker’s demonstration. She can see her handsome young tenant, François Guilbaud (Richard Berry), in the front line facing down a vast army of police. Madame Langlois takes his presence among the strikers, as she takes many things, as a sign of terrible manners.

Not online: The Siren’s enthusiastic Sight & Sound review of Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film, by Alan K. Rode. If you need a last-minute Christmas gift for someone who loves classic film and/or Hollywood history, this would be an excellent choice — at more than 400 pages, it reads as swiftly and enjoyably as any biography the Siren has read, and she has read an inordinate number of such books, as her patient readers know.

...Curtiz also “worked people to death,” remarked Wax Museum’s Glenda Farrell, who still liked the director, although many (perhaps even most) of his actors did not. Early on, Rode drily remarks that Curtiz, “more than any other studio director… was responsible for the founding of the Screen Actors Guild.” Curtiz thought lunch was for sissies and until groups like SAG began to pester him, the director appeared to think going home and sleeping were dispensable luxuries as well. By the time Curtiz’s career was in full flower, and he was beginning his 12-film association with Errol Flynn, the director had settled down a bit, but not much, and the easygoing Flynn grew to detest the man who unquestionably did the most to make him a star. So did Flynn’s frequent co-star Olivia de Havilland. Yet all his life, Curtiz maintained a great ability to spot talent (he was an early booster of both Doris Day and the great John Garfield, to name just two) and a knack for drawing out a great performance…

The booklet essay for Criterion’s Blu-Ray release of King of Jazz. In 1930, the daring and ill-fated Carl “Junior” Laemmle put his chips on two big projects. One you perhaps have heard of, a trifle called All Quiet on the Western Front. The other was this extravagant two-strip Technicolor revue, an attempt to make a movie star of the portly bandleader Paul Whiteman. (Includes bonus sideswipe of Mordaunt Hall.)

In the end...production delays cost the movie more dearly than anyone could have foreseen. By the time King of Jazz made its bow, Hollywood had indulged its eternal tendency to run a trend into the ground, and revues were such a drug on the market that some other musicals were being advertised with taglines like “Positively not a revue!” There was also the little matter of what happened on Wall Street on October 29, 1929. The worst of the Great Depression was in the future, but the effects of the crash were already being felt.

The Museum of Modern Art showed a two-part series of splendid restorations of films from Republic Pictures, and the Siren wrote about them both for the late and very much lamented Village Voice.

There was one way to get [legendarily cheap Republic studio boss Herbert] Yates to pry open his checkbook, however, and that was to put Vera Hruba Ralston in the leading role. Vera Hruba was a former Olympic ice skater with a lithe and athletic figure, a face the camera liked only intermittently, and a Czech accent that no amount of coaching could diminish. When Yates met his version of Citizen Kane’s Susan Alexander, a girl fully forty years his junior, he was married with two kids. He signed Ralston to a contract in 1943, and thereafter this otherwise hard-nosed and entirely unromantic man spent every last one of his remaining studio years engaged in a fruitless effort to make Ralston a star, meantime divorcing his wife in 1948 and marrying Vera in 1952. Yates gave Ralston — billed variously as Vera Hruba, Vera Ralston, and Vera Hruba Ralston — his best scriptwriters, directors, and co-stars. For years, according to Scott Eyman, Yates bought the full back-page ad space at Variety and the Hollywood Reporter just for the opportunity to run a photo of Ralston with the caption, “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman.” It was rather touching, as even Yates’s frustrated employees would sometimes admit, but it was all for naught.

Part two, or as the Siren likes to call it, Republic Rides Again:

Then there’s Fair Wind to Java (1953), described by at least one critic as “the ultimate B-picture” (and once you’ve seen it, that’s hard to dispute). Vera Hruba Ralston often cited Fair Wind as her favorite movie. The Czech former figure skater’s casting as a Balinese dancer named Kim Kim (“My father was white,” the character explains casually) is the strangest in the movie, which is saying something when you have Fred MacMurray as a hard-bitten sea captain named Boll… Scorsese has often spoken of his fondness for Fair Wind — and indeed, it is hugely enjoyable in its crazy way, graced by an eye-searing Trucolor palette, barreling plot developments, indifference to plausibility, and dialogue like “It’s a little island called Krakatoa. No one’s ever heard of it!” 

Not online: An essay included in the British company Powerhouse's lavish Blu-Ray box set of Budd Boetticher films. The Siren notes, also for purposes of Christmas or other holiday giving or just plain old self-care, that this set is region-free. She wrote the essay for Comanche Station.

The lonely, high-up opening view of Randolph Scott on a horse, the only thing moving among the stones of the Alabama Hills, isn’t what establishes the valedictory mood of Comanche Station. No, it’s the slant of the sun. The light’s intensity has lessened and the shadows have lengthened. It’s late in the day— for the characters, for the series of movies Scott had made with director Budd Boetticher, for Scott’s career, for the classic Western itself.

Again for the Voice (lord, how the Siren misses it), an article tied to MoMA's big retrospective of the films of Emilio Fernández, a great Mexican director whose reputation in this country more than deserves to be revived.

In an age when “colorful” was almost part of a director’s CV — from the eyepatches of Raoul Walsh and John Ford to the foreign birthplaces of Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch to the itinerant macho-jobs years of William Wellman — Fernández went the extra mile. He pulled a stint in prison for his part in the failed rebellion, then drifted around the States, spending time (as he told it) as a cowboy in a circus, a salmon fisherman, a licensed pilot, a bartender, and, finally, as an extra in Hollywood, in the late Twenties. There, legend has it, Fernández’s friend, Dolores del Río, had him pose for her husband, the famed art director Cecil Beaton, for what became the Academy Award statuette. Though Fernández became stocky in his later years, one look at his naked torso in Janitzio — a 1935 movie in the series, in which he plays a star-crossed lover in a fishing village — offers pretty powerful evidence. He really does look like a walking Oscar.

A long and obsessively researched essay on the behind-the-scenes collaborators of Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, for Criterion's epic six-disc release "Dietrich and von Sternberg in Hollywood." If you click on no other link in this here post, the Siren hopes you do click on this one, because for the first three months of 2018, she worked her tail feathers off on this one.

“I never had a better assistant than Miss Dietrich,” the director told one interviewer, with lordly assurance. Still, von Sternberg paid this assistant the tribute of immortality. Other “assistants” went unseen by audiences and are much less frequently discussed. The story of von Sternberg and his colleagues, especially those who never appeared on-screen—the ones who gave dialogue to his characters and shape to his plots, who constructed costumes and sets, the woman whose makeup perfected Dietrich and the men who then lit that glorious face—can be difficult to tease out in part because von Sternberg was almost pathologically incapable of sharing credit. All these artists would have agreed that a von Sternberg film revealed his vision, down to the items on a character’s dressing table and the way Dietrich’s cheekbones were highlighted. But, as Baxter writes, though the director “liked to say he ‘dictated’ the look of his films, dictation is not creation. He needed talented individuals to realize his conceptions.”

The magnificent Stéphane Audran died in March, and the Village Voice asked the Siren to write a tribute. (Who else will ever do that, now that the Voice is gone? Alas.)

If someone asked me to choose the ultimate in Stéphane Audran scenes — not her best or most emotive acting, but a sequence that summed up her talent, her presence — I would choose an early moment in Juste Avant la Nuit (Just Before Nightfall, 1971), directed by her then-husband Claude Chabrol. Her character, Hélène Masson, is in the kitchen of her family’s spectacular modern mansion, baking a chocolate cake with her daughter and the girl’s au pair. She is mixing the batter with a wooden spoon, holding it up from time to time to check whether it has reached the proper consistency. Her posture is erect and graceful as she walks around the room with her bowl, chatting and mixing. Hélène has no apron over her Karl Lagerfeld outfit. There is no need, as Hélène probably has not stained an outfit since her days in lycée. The hard work of baking has touched neither her hair nor her maquillage.

For the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's March shindig, an essay on The Saga of Gösta Berling, a movie the Siren had somehow never seen. She fell in love with it, to the point that she read the Selma Lagerlöf novel. (She recommends the translation by Pauline Bancroft Flach, and not the later Penguin one, which is afflicted by the modern mania for rendering prose as flat, affectless, and literal as possible.)

...From a distance of almost a hundred years, it’s evident that Garbo—only eighteen years old and so beautiful it is said her close-ups made audiences gasp—is just one of many impressive things about Gösta Berling. As the story unfolds, the title’s ex-pastor, played by Lars Hanson, has been defrocked. Gösta’s preaching is so enthralling that his congregation is ready to forgive him for his latest drunken escapade, but then, spurred by idealism and a bridge-burning compulsion that gets him in trouble throughout, Gösta swings into a rousing condemnation of the parishioners’ own chronic boozing. His goose thus self-cooked, he sets out on the road.

The lovely folks at Criterion asked the Siren to write the booklet essay for one of her most favorite comedies, My Man Godfrey. Which is funny, because the Siren has spent much of the year reading the news and murmuring, "All I have to say is some people will be sorry someday." (Or, if occasion demands, "Life is but an empty bubble.")

There were hilariously dysfunctional families in American film before and after My Man Godfrey, but the Bullocks of 1011 Fifth Avenue represent peak lunacy. There’s devious Cornelia, played by the darkly beautiful Gail Patrick—“a sweet-tempered little number,” as the maid, Molly (Jean Dixon), calls her. There’s mother Angelica (Alice Brady), whose hangovers include visions of pixies (“I don’t like them, but I don’t like to see them stepped on”), and who is sponsoring a “protégé,” Carlo (Mischa Auer). Carlo’s sponsored talents—the ones that could be shown under the Production Code, anyway—involve a lugubrious rendition of the Russian folk song “Ochi chyornye,” a remarkable ability to make food disappear, and the single best gorilla impression in the history of American film.

Riffing on a very short thing she once wrote for the blog, the Siren also contributed an essay to Criterion's lavish Blu-ray for The Magnificent Ambersons. The Siren was happy to have the opportunity to praise "The Voice of Orson Welles" at greater length.

Welles was marked from the beginning by his prodigal gifts, speaking in complete sentences at age two, supposedly analyzing Nietzsche by age ten, performing Shakespeare in his teens, staging the landmark “Voodoo Macbeth” at age twenty—and yet the role his voice played in his spectacular youthful ascent isn’t analyzed often. That preternaturally mature instrument helped enable the orphaned sixteen-year-old and rather baby-faced Welles to literally talk his way into roles with Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Listen to the talk of an average teenage boy, even one who’s an actor, and ask yourself if anyone in their right mind would cast him in a commercial stage production as the evil Duke of Württemberg in Jew Süss, Welles’s first role at the Gate.

Rounding out a good year, assignment-wise, the Siren sang the praises of the eternally beautiful 7th Heaven for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's Day of Silents.

While Borzage was still preparing 7th Heaven, F.W. Murnau had arrived at Fox in 1926 to much fanfare and was filming his masterpiece, Sunrise, a production that continued even after Borzage’s film began shooting. (In an incredible feat of endurance, for a short period of time in January 1927, Janet Gaynor was shooting Sunrise exteriors for Murnau by day and returned to the Fox studio at night for 7th Heaven.) The German master’s presence exerted an influence on nearly everyone in the studio. Many critics have noted that certain 7th Heaven camera movements, such as the shot that follows Nana pursuing Diane into the street (achieved, Palmer recalled, by having eight men carry an eight-by-eight platform on which the cameraman rode with his tripod), bear Murnau’s influence. But Borzage’s emotional effects were entirely his own.

Anecdote of the Week: "She hated him."

Over on Twitter, the Siren has been been working on a daily hashtag called #OctoberAlternative, a thread that lets her post stills from movies that put her in an autumnal (and therefore good) mood. The movies are not horror, however, since the horror genre tends to cover October like kudzu and sometimes a person needs a break. Today’s movie was Gone to Earth, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s adaptation of a Mary Webb novel.

Filmed in the fall of 1949 in Powell’s native Shropshire, the film was lensed by Christopher Challis in some of the most stunning Technicolor the Archers ever produced. As the Siren wrote a while back, Gone to Earth stars Jennifer Jones as Hazel Woodus, a half-wild girl who roams the countryside with her pet fox, and is loved chastely by a Baptist minister (Cyril Cusack), and carnally by a ruthless squire (David Farrar). She marries the reverend, and he refrains from consummating the union, believing Hazel’s innocence shouldn’t be profaned. But the squire has no such scruples, and he continues to pursue Hazel, even as it remains clear that she belongs not to men but to the earth of the title. (The Siren wrote about the movie in tandem with Tony Dayoub, and a different segment of our exchange can be found at his place.)

It is one of Powell and Pressburger’s best movies, and Jones was never better. But there was a unlucky force present at Gone to Earth’s birth, and its name was David O. Selznick, who had begun an affair with Jones in 1942 that wrecked both his marriage to Irene Mayer and Jones’s union with Robert Walker. He had long since begun the obsessive control of Jones’ image and career that would mark the rest of his life. Selznick and Jones eventually left their respective spouses, and they had been married to each other only a matter of weeks before the start of filming.

During production Powell and Pressburger were assailed with the usual Selznick memos—no one escaped those memos—but paid them no mind. Selznick in turn largely stayed away, just showing up from time to time to check on Jones and take her on weekend jaunts. But when Powell and Pressburger screened the film for him, Selznick popped a Benzedrine and said, “I’m not satisfied with your cut, boys. I’m going to take this picture over.” Despite this threat the original version was released in Europe, where it didn’t perform well. Unfortunately, Selznick had obtained the North American rights. Eventually he reshot a third of the footage with Rouben Mamoulian at the helm, slashed away another half-hour, and re-released it in 1952 with the ghastly title of The Wild Heart. That version, hopelessly marred by all accounts except possibly Selznick’s, flopped, too. There is a Region 2 UK DVD available of the original Gone to Earth, but it has never been available on Region 1 in the US.

And now for what prompted this post, which concerns some matters the Siren has wanted to write about for a while. Since the Siren and Tony wrote about this film seven years ago, there have been a few things published about Jennifer Jones, notably a long section of the late Jean Stein’s West of Eden. Jones doesn’t come off particularly well in it. Like Edie: An American Biography, West of Eden is a compilation of interviews, and most of the people interviewed seemed to look down on or outright dislike Jennifer Jones. Dennis Hopper, who lived with the Selznicks for a time along with his then-wife Brooke Hayward, remarked that Jones was eventually a disappointment to Selznick: “She couldn’t fulfill what he had in mind for her as an actress. She just wasn’t that good.” Jones’s obsession with clothes and appearance is detailed at length; she’s described showing up two and a half hours late to her own dinner party, making the rounds of the guests, disappearing, coming back in a second dress, then leaving and returning in a third dress.

Her son Robert Walker Jr. speaks of her with sympathy, but he has some sad memories. And indeed there is a lot to regret in the way Jones’s life played out, particularly in how she approached being a mother. “It was quite obvious that she wasn’t there for her children for a while,” says plain-spoken Lauren Bacall. The most tragic of the Selznicks was undoubtedly David and Jennifer’s daughter Mary Jennifer, who committed suicide in 1976. “By the time [Mary Jennifer] was seven,” says Brooke Hayward, “it seemed Jennifer had lost interest in her.” Jones herself attempted suicide more than once, although a couple of West of Eden interviewees imply that they didn’t believe she was serious about it. She was in therapy for years and apparently had affairs with at least a couple of her therapists.

There are a lot of folks on the classic-film blogs and classic-film Twitter who dislike Jennifer Jones, sometimes because her acting doesn’t click for them, often for having broken Robert Walker’s heart. (Walker, it should be said, was an alcoholic, and the marriage may have been doomed in any case.) West of Eden was a bestseller, and is full of the kind of anecdotes and observations that attach to a star’s image and don’t easily rub off: Nutty. Vain. Bad mother. Not that good.

The Siren has written of her regard for Jones as an actress, and she persists in seeing Jones the woman with some sympathy. It isn’t that the Siren believes West of Eden isn’t true, although the Siren wouldn't have asked Dennis Hopper, a Method actor from an entirely new generation, for an evaluation of Jones as an actress. It’s that there are always more angles to the truth about anyone.

Michael Powell had a different angle on Jennifer Jones. It is undoubtedly colored by his low opinion of Selznick, but like the people in West of Eden, he is telling his own version of events. In Million Dollar Movie, the second volume of Powell's autobiography, pokes gentle fun at Jones’s provincialism, such as her complaining to Chris Challis about Europeans’ refusal to speak English, or describing the volcanic island of Stromboli as “kinda cute.” But Powell admired her acting — “Jennifer was splendid” — as well as her dedication to her part. He tells of how she spent every spare minute with the film’s tame fox, developing a bond with Foxy that even surprised the trainer. She was always cuddling the many other animals on set and rebuking the crew for laughing at them, because animals hate being laughed at. “She went through the film,” said Powell, “as if she were the real Hazel playing herself.”

As for Jones the person, what Powell offers is one of the saddest pictures of a toxic relationship you will ever read. When Selznick visited, his conversations with Jones went like this: “ ‘... We could go to Istanbul first, honey.’ ‘I don’t know, David. You decide,’ Honey responded, without opening her eyes.” Otherwise, Selznick stayed away, and relied on word from “his spies,” as Powell put it.

Late in filming Powell found himself having to shoot some interiors at night. The “set” for these scenes were makeshift studios set up in local buildings. One night the scenes went slowly, and Jones was left in the bar of the pub set drinking the local cider, which Powell said “could set your head spinning” after a couple of pints. Finally it came time for Jones’s entrance, only she refused to come when summoned by the assistant. Powell went to see what was the matter. And the matter was that Jones was drunk.

‘How much has she had?’ I said to the scared barman. He was a local extra.

‘Quite a bit.’ 

I held on to her mug, but she grabbed another and was doing the Anna Christie bit, slumped across the table. ‘Well, what are you and Mr. Fucking Selznick going to do about it?’

It was not the Jennifer we knew, the eager and nervous girl. It was a tragic woman speaking. She went on, ‘Don’t try to play the director with me, Micky. You don’t know what it’s all about, but I do. How would you like to be murdered? Murdered every night and lie there waiting for it? What do I care about you and your picture? Screw you! And screw your picture and screw … Mr. … Mr. Selznick, the greatest producer in the world … the … ’

From there her language got a lot worse, and Powell realized his filming was done for the night. He called for a car, rugs, and a bucket. Jones was guided into the car, Powell sat next to her, and as the driver went round and round in large circles, Jones was sick, and then she began to talk, and talk.

Out it all came.

She hated him. He had forced himself into her life uninvited, been repulsed again and again, had broken her marriage, destroyed her husband, alienated her children, and was such an appalling egoist that he believed his attentions could compensate for all the harm he had done. He had enslaved her with a contract that promised to make her the greatest star in the world, without the least knowledge of how to do it, and expecting other people to do it for him. He was dragging her about Europe as if she were the captive of his bow and spear, and everyone assumed that she was madly in love with him. She hated him. But worst of all, he had decided that they must be married, not because he wanted to give her children a stepfather, not because he wanted a child himself from her, but because he wanted to show the whole of show business that he was not like other men. He had brought her to Europe to take her away from her family and friends. He took her with him everywhere … She dreaded each moment that they were left alone. They only peace that she had had been on Gone to Earth. We were all so kind and she loved everybody and she loved Foxy and it wasn’t like being on a film at all. But in three weeks the film would be over and then what would she do? … She wished she could escape — run away — but there was no escape, none, none, none! None of us could understand what her life was like. Nobody could understand what it was like living with a man like David.

Eventually Jones fell asleep on Powell’s shoulder, and they took her back to her hotel.

Million Dollar Movie contains a coda where Powell has dinner with Jennifer Jones, now Mrs. Norton Simon, at her Malibu mansion in 1978. (Selznick had died of a heart attack in 1965.) Powell says Jones was heavily made up, but she didn’t change her dress or disappear during the meal. He also says “she talked about David O. without rancour.”

“We were all crazy about Jennifer,” said Lauren Bacall, “but we saw the flaws.”

Seeing Out 2017 With the Great Lee Grant

The last few months of 2017 have found me craving escape, and I’ve been rewatching Columbo episodes to help me unwind before bed. A couple of weeks ago, I curled up with Ransom for a Dead Man from 1971, which stars Lee Grant as a highly accomplished attorney with a boring old husband and a boring young stepdaughter. Grant’s character shoots the husband and spends the rest of the 90 minutes securing her inheritance, while coolly treating the suspicious stepdaughter like she’s the one who’s nuts. The woman is so steely that her idea of relaxing is flying a plane over a nice big set of mountains. I love it, as I always love Lee Grant.

As an actress, Grant uses everything: her voice, even the smallest gestures, her listening and concentration, her extraordinary feline beauty, and most of all her humor. She brings a sense of life’s madness even to her most dramatic roles. Of course, like many another talent, Lee Grant had to find her own way to cope with Hollywood’s dearth of good parts for older women. Unwilling to compromise on the kinds of projects she wanted, she shifted to directing, amassing another impressive filmography.

Artist, blacklist survivor, liberal activist, and trailblazing feminist: Lee Grant has always been an idol to me. So the chance to interview her for the Los Angeles Times, ahead of the TCM Film Festival’s three-film tribute (Detective Story, In the Heat of the Night, The Landlord) this past April, was easily a highlight of my life, let alone 2017.

When I walked into her roller-rink-sized apartment in Manhattan, accepted a cup of tea and settled in, Grant mentioned her New York childhood and the apartment where she grew up, lovingly described in her 2015 memoir, I Said Yes to Everything.

“Which you haven’t read,” she added.

“Oh, but I did read it. All of it,” I bragged, ready to be teacher’s pet.

“Great,” was the deadpan response. “We don’t have to do the interview.”

Needless to say, my admiration for Grant turned into outright love at that moment.

The result of our conversation ran in the LA Times and can be read here. But she had so much to say that was worthwhile, especially to a film fan, that I wanted to include other parts that were left out for reasons of space.

# # #

Farran Nehme: I want to start with Detective Story [play 1949, film 1951]. You were such a distinctive actress right out of the box. You used a voice that was not your own. You had a lot of very specific actions for this very nervous person who can’t believe she’s been arrested.

Lee Grant: The voice I picked up when I was at the Neighborhood Playhouse, in language and speech class. When I went into the Neighborhood Playhouse, I had a little-bitty voice way up here because my mother and my aunt thought that rich ladies [shifts to high] spoke all the way up here, like they saw in the movies. [back to normal voice] And so I went into school, and they took a recording, and I heard myself for the first time. I heard [up high] this voice coming up way up here. [back to normal] And so they taught me to speak from the chest. And one of the assignments I had was to listen to other people’s voices. So I was on a bus, and I heard these girls talking, in the seat in back of me. Like, “Vere else? Vere else should I go?” The r was v. “Vat do you think ve should do?”

And so I was transfixed by the new language, and I brought it into class. And then after I graduated, when I got this call to go up for [the Broadway production of] Detective Story, they offered me the female, the ingenue lead [played by Cathy O'Donnell in the movie]. And as I wrote, I couldn’t say the words. He [the detective] asks, “What color are his eyes?” and... [the ingenue] says “brown and green, flecked with gold.” And I said, "Can I play the old lady?" Because at that time the shoplifter was described as 40. And I was 23 or 24 at the time. So I got the old lady part. And that’s the kind of part I always wanted.

FN: Even though it was smaller.

LG: Well, you know, those big parts are not the most interesting parts. And those big parts...you know, every other woman’s part in that was fucking boring. It kind of set my agenda for life. Because the big parts were not only thankless, but they depended on you to fill the theater and bring in the box office. So you not only had a boring part, but everything depends on you. And that was so not fun for me as an actor. And so I pretty much, except for playing leads in television, I pretty much always stuck to the most interesting part I could play.

FN: So then, of course, after winning at Cannes and being nominated for the Oscar, you were sucked into the maelstrom of the blacklist.

LG: The year that I was nominated for the Oscar, 1952, was the year that I couldn’t work in TV or film anymore. For 12 years. From age 24 to 36.

FN: Key years for an actress.

LG: Well! Hel-LO! Especially in Hollywood. Your career is over at 36. I was terrified when I [went back to] Hollywood that my age would be known, because I was being cast in parts that were 10 years younger. And that the FBI would find out that I was working. You know, that whole 12 years of hiding and fear.

FN: You came back fully as forceful a movie actress as you’d been before.

LG: First in Electra. [That would be the 1964 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Sophocles' Electra, directed by Joseph Papp and performed at the opening of the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park.] I say it because the whole focus was on me. I wasn’t doing a character part… And so the rage that I had that was stored up in me for 12 years was given the kind of— I mean, this is Greek tragedy, and it was me in rags and barefoot on the stage in Central Park, where all of the things that were suppressed were let loose. It was the Greek catharsis… I was working for him [Papp] regularly, and I was with him the next summer when I got the call to do [the TV series] Peyton Place… I could have stayed and done that kind of work forever. Or gone to LA and changed my life and gone on to money.

FN: Was that part of it? Money?

LG: Oh, totally. I had none, and I had a little girl to support. It was just me and Dinah [Manoff, Grant’s elder daughter].

FN: So you accepted the part in Peyton Place, as the blacklist was ending. But you did do a few movies before that. You did a movie called Middle of the Night [1959].

LG: Yes. That was during the blacklist.

FN: And you did another film in the middle of the blacklist that I'm intrigued with, directed by Cornell Wilde, called Storm Fear [1955]. [Grant laughs heartily] I haven’t seen it but I want to track it down. It looks like an interesting part for you.

LG: Oh, it’s terrible. That was the movie in which Dinah was conceived. Because it would give us money enough to have a child. [At the time, Grant was married to writer Arnold Manoff, who was also blacklisted.] So all those jobs were connected to what was possible.

FN: So at least Storm Fear brought you Dinah.

LG: Bungalow 3 at the Chateau Marmont.

FN: I couldn’t find that movie in your memoirs and I thought, she doesn’t like it.

LG: It was a disaster.

FN: Middle of the Night [1959] though, is a lovely movie.

LG: Fredric March, was oh, he was so beautiful in that, and so was Kim Novak. It was the only picture in which I felt she was absolutely present, that there was that shyness in her, that I’m not really this big tall glamour girl, I’m really a shy typist, yearning for a father. I just thought, such a lovely film. And the director [Delbert Mann], whose name escapes me, as a lot of names do, this was during the blacklist. He gave me a part in a movie. Small part, but it was a part in a movie, during the blacklist. And so I’m just so grateful for those guys who put themselves in jeopardy to hire me.

FN: In the Heat of the Night [1967] was such an important film for you personally and also in general. A landmark. And another example of a small but telling role. Your character is the first one who gives us the sense of the murder victim as a human being, with your shock and grief when Sidney Poitier tells you the news. And you say, “Is it hot in here”?

LG: I think a lot of that was improvised. I don’t know if that was a line in the script. But Norman [Jewison] gives so much freedom to his actors. I met with him and [the film's editor] Hal Ashby once, and I knew that part. I had a sense that they knew about me, that they knew about the blacklist, they were very political people. We never discussed it. And when they spoke to me I just went into that place, of the loss. Just talking back and forth, I went into that woman. And I don’t think we shot more than two or three days. I got there and Sidney and Rod embraced me: “Come and have dinner.” I went to bed, I got up, I was the woman.

And then we improvised that scene. And I remember Haskell Wexler following me with the camera. And Sidney and I had this dance. This kind of Strindberg dance. And then it was over. But that sense of that bubble, of allowing an actor to go into that place that unfortunately I knew only too well, and to see where it took us both, was something that very few directors would do. You know, “It’s the line, it’s the line, it’s the line.” This was not. I didn’t know what would happen. And Sidney didn’t know what would happen. And so it’s that exploration.

[snip]
FN: You’re also in one of the most famous scenes, when you’re standing there during the investigation, and Rod Steiger asks, “Well what do you they call you up there in Philadelphia, boy?” and Poitier responds, “They call me Mr. Tibbs.” And after, you are the one who interrupts and says “What kind of people are you? I’ve lost my husband!” But when the camera is not on you, I still can feel you watching and listening. Were you there, when those lines were filmed?

LG: Of course. Method actor. And so was Sidney, and so was Rod. We’re serious, and we’re there to support each other.

FN: I don’t think it would play the same way if we couldn’t feel you there.

LG: No. Nor would he be able to play it the way he did, if he didn’t have my support, my character there.

FN: So that was a triumph.

LG: It was more than a triumph. That film was life-changing. Nobody saw a Mr. Tibbs before, like Sidney. Sidney broke ground for black actors, for romantic leads, forever. Sidney did that. I did a documentary on Sidney when I was doing docs for HBO and American Masters. And I saw where that strength in himself and that vitality and the humor came from. Cat Island [Poitier’s childhood home in the Bahamas]. He came from a place of freedom, where the people in charge were black. It wasn’t white on black, it was black. And he brought that to the United States and he brought that to film. He brought that sense of dignity and rage at inequity. It was a natural thing for Sidney.

[The next exchange concerns Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), directed by Ernest Lehman. Grant had a bad time with Lehmann, whose talent she admired, but whom she called in her memoirs “an angry, small man with his neck pushed forward,” a description so good I apply it to a different person nearly every time I turn on the news. During the last week of filming, Grant’s character, Sophie Portnoy, had a hospital scene where the woman in the other bed was played by an Actors’ Studio alumna who had one line. Lehman hated the actress’ line delivery no matter how she delivered it, screaming at the woman for an hour while Grant tried to wait it out so she could play a key scene with Richard Benjamin as her son. Finally, as the shattered actress began weeping, Grant could take it no longer, and yelled at her director: “Stop it, stop it! You’re torturing her to death, you little shit.” Grant raged on at Lehman, “Get out of here!... Go to the camera trailer and direct from there. Dick and I will do the scene without her line.” Lehman went. They finished the scene. Grant noted that a line can always be fixed in postproduction, and Lehman was “playing Erich von Stroheim.” When she saw Portnoy’s Complaint in the theater, one time only, Grant said it “made me shrink back in horror. It was not a good representation of Jewish family life.”]

FN: You had that rage too. The story on Portnoy’s Complaint, when you were working with Ernest Lehmann. I felt that story revealed something really fundamental about your personality, when the actress was being bullied. Would you agree that’s part of your character?

LG: Absolutely. I cannot bear endangering and bullying. I can’t bear it.

FN: There can’t be many actresses that have thrown a director off his own set.

LG: [pause, then a chuckle] No, as a matter of fact, I don’t think that there have been.

FN: So you met Hal Ashby when you doing In the Heat of the Night, and the other movie at the TCM film festival is The Landlord [1970]. How was that as a filmmaking experience?

LG: Well, they had Jessica Tandy for the part. Older than me. And I knew that part so well. It was so much a part of the personalities of my mother and my aunt. The wonderful, ridiculous part of them. Not that they weren’t great and loving people, but there was a ridiculous part that they and this woman had. So I fought very hard [for the part]. And I saw it recently, and I loved it. I loved myself, I loved Pearl [Bailey, who’s superb]. And of course Hal had been the one who picked out my hairstyle and the clothes for In the Heat of the Night. And so we became friends, and this was his first movie. So that was a continuation of the relationship. Norman produced it, and Hal was directing it. And Hal had this unique take on everything, all of his movies had a unique, totally undone, fresh way of looking on things.

FN: And how did that extend to working with the actors? Because you worked with him not only on this, but five years later on Shampoo, which won you an Oscar.

LG: Hal’s credo was, “Surprise me.” and that was for all his actors. And what could be more talent-provoking than to say to someone, “Surprise me?” It was just delicious.

FN: There’s a lot of surprising moments in that scene with Pearl Bailey. At one point you’re stretched out on the floor….

LG: Yes!

FN: The wonderful way you say, when she asks if you’ve had lunch, [whispers] “I don’t have lunch.”

LG: I love it myself. And I think, “where did that come from?”

FN: Did either your mother or your aunt skip lunch?

LG: It wasn’t the skipping lunch. It was the [trills] “daaaarling.” It was that whole rich-lady-when-they-weren’t-rich. You know, rich lady, a persona, that they took on, that I was dying to explore.

FN: You talked about being afraid of having your age disclosed at certain points in your career. And yet some of your best parts—The Landlord, Detective Story— you’re playing someone older, and in fact you sought that out. Is there any kind of contradiction there?

LG: It’s the part. It’s the part. And the making myself younger and asking [the] Mayor to change my driver’s license to five years younger [Note: I Said Yes to Everything details how she did exactly that] that had nothing to do with the part, that had to do with the hiring. And when actors say, “How old are you?” “Oh, I’m 46.” [clucks in disapproval] “Ohhhh. I thought you were like in your 30s.” That’s hireability. That’s an actor protecting their hireability. That’s exactly what it’s based on. It’s not ego. It’s not. It’s that there is a date—what’s it called on the milk?

FN: The sell-by date.

LG: The sell-by date! There’s a sell-by date in Hollywood. And all of us women are acutely conscious of that sell-by date. I worked with the most beautiful actresses that were in Hollywood, who knocked it out of the park at the box office. Then one, two years later, the dailies come up and the heads of the studio are saying, “Eh, she looks old, she looks fat.” … And so juggling your liveability, your milk date, is a very important thing for an actor who’s supporting a child in Hollywood. And also one who was deprived of work for just as many years as I worked in Hollywood. There were 12 years I was out of work, then there were 12 golden years. And I walked away from it because I knew that my date had come up after the Oscar. I knew that I would not get the kind of parts in the [same] kind of movies. They were not being made anymore.

FN: Like Shampoo.

LG: Like Shampoo.

FN: Where you played a beautiful woman who’s getting it on with Warren Beatty. And you still felt that was it?

LG: It was an extraordinary film. That was of its time. The 70s was the time for directors. And Coppola, Spielberg, all those were new directors then. And they were making the kind of film that isn’t usual anymore. They were breaking entirely new ground. And… it was coming to an end.

[snip]

FN: When we move to your documentary work in the 1980s, I was staggered by the breadth of subject and how ahead of your time you always were. What Sex Am I, about transgender issues. Battered. Down and Out in America … As a documentary filmmaker, clearly you’ve been drawn to political topics.

LG: The blacklist was my education. I didn’t know anything. I was not interested in school. Really my education came from Tolstoy and Chekhov and reading. So those 12 years were my education. I learned, close to home, at home, what politics was all about. And what life was all about.

FN: And what was politics all about, when you looked back?

LG: Well, it was not that far from what we have now. It was McCarthy. And it was anybody. … I mean, I spoke at a man’s memorial. An actor’s memorial [Grant is referring to Joe Bromberg; she gave a eulogy at his memorial service in 1951. Bromberg, a longtime character actor from stage and film, had been named as a Communist by the notorious Red Channels magazine and called to testify in June 1951 before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he took the Fifth. He died of a heart attack in London less than six months later, age 47.] I was 24. And I said [Bromberg] was afraid of going in front of the Un-American Activities Committee because he had a heart problem. And two days later, I was on a list which didn’t allow me to work in films or television anymore. You didn’t have to do much. [I was] faced with an ethical problem after that. Do I want to work in film or television, and go to the guy who does Red Channels, and say ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, the Un-American Activities Committee is really fun?’ The choice was clear.

FN: For you it was.

LG: It was. And also, I was in love with those people. The blacklisted people in California were a new breed. I never knew anybody like that. Ring Lardner, Zero Mostel, Sol Kaplan. And we were all living in 444 Central Park West. They were like professors to me. They were the education I never had. And I got very deeply involved with that outraged part of me, that you see. And the unfairness. As a kid, I could see what was fair and what wasn’t fair. That’s like in my DNA. And this unfairness was so palpable. For actors not being allowed to act, because they showed up at a meeting or they signed their name to something? And they’re not allowed to act? It was just enraging to me. That was my motor. And it was a very good one. It was a very good one.

And it was the motor for all those years when I kept quiet in Hollywood. Because I was so scared they’d stop me from working, that when I got out [of the acting business], I could finally say the things that I kept my mouth shut about when I was working.

FN: When you were working as an actress, you did not go out of your way to be political.

LG: No. I was scared of it… When you live long enough, from 24 to 36, under one condition, and then suddenly the music starts and you’re on this sunny island with the sand and the colony and the friends, it’s like, "Wait a minute! Where am I? Is this true, or isn’t it?"

FN: You once said that in your documentaries, “I can cover what the media distorts or doesn’t cover at all.”

LG: It’s my voice. It’s a voice I wasn’t allowed to use it for a long time. Documentaries are a way of exposing the thing that needs to be talked about. I was lucky enough to get three of them on television….

I’ll tell you what I’m working on now. I’ve made a five-minute video on "The Battering of Hillary Clinton." The battering and destruction of Hillary Clinton. This is a new place for me. I don’t know how to do any of those smartphones. I worked with a young student so he could put together things that I want to have seen. And I am going to do everything I can to get it out in and go, what’s the word?

FN: Viral?

LG: To go viral.

FN: So the treatment of Hillary Clinton hit you hard.

LG: Very, very hard. That’s a battered woman. How dare they.

(You can see "Battered: The Assault on Hillary Clinton" here, on Youtube.)

Claude Rains: An Actor's Side-Eye

Think of Claude Rains, and what usually come to mind is The Voice. That liquid, caressing baritone, with just enough of an English accent. Voices don't come much sexier than Rains'. (If you need reminding, or just because he is excellent in it, here is a recording of "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole," a classic episode of the radio show "Suspense" that stars Rains along with Vincent Price.)

Recently, however, by the simple expedient of noodling around for good photos of Claude Rains (on whom the Siren, like her idol Bette Davis, has a raging crush), the Siren made a discovery. An intriguing discovery, if she says so herself, and she does.

In addition to speech so beautiful that David J. Skal's biography of Rains is called An Actor's Voice, Rains had a world-class side-eye.

In fact, until a challenger comes along, the Siren, by the authority she has invested in herself, awards Claude Rains the prize as The Greatest Side-Eye of All Time.

And here's a curious note about The Voice, and the unique sidelong look he brought to multiple roles over the course of a great career: The evidence suggests both had their roots in adversity.

Claude Rains, who brought a silky hint of culture, wit and high birth to so many roles, was born into a London family of small means in 1889. He had 11 brothers and sisters; in an era of measles, diptheria and a thousand other childhood scourges, many of the Rains children died in infancy. Only three of them, including Claude, made it to adulthood. His father, an actor of sorts, veered from one job to another, and was prone to beat his son for the smallest infraction. His mother spent time in an asylum, and Skal speculates that she suffered from postpartum depression. Young Willie (his birthname was William Claude) had a strong Cockney accent Skal says was picked up in the London streets, as well as both a lisp and a stammer. He got rid of them all by his late teens as he embarked on a career in the theatre, moving from call boy to prompter to speaking roles, and studying elocution books religiously, practicing every exercise.

In 1916 he volunteered for the famed London Scottish Regiment, known around these parts as the Most Devastatingly Attractive Regiment of All Time, including as it did Basil Rathbone, Herbert Marshall and Ronald Colman. Rains was deployed to Vimy Ridge, where months later his outfit was hit by mustard gas. A shell exploded near him and the last words he heard, before he lost consciousness, were "Well, they got Rains."

When he woke up in the hospital, he had lost nearly all the vision in his right eye, and his vocal cords were paralyzed. The voice came back, of course, but with a slightly rougher cast that movie audiences would grow to love. The blindness was permanent. Skal says "it would remain a closely guarded secret" right up to Rains' death in 1967.

It's hard, if not impossible, to know whether this contributed to the signature Rains glance, perhaps as one way of keeping a scene partner in his sightlines, without drawing attention to the right eye. What is indisputably true is that a sidelong look from Claude Rains is more intense than many another actor's head-on stare.

It wasn't an indiscriminate thing. He was too fine and precise an actor for that. You won't find it much, for example, in Mr. Skeffington, one of the Siren's favorite Rains roles, where he has the title role as the near-saintly man who loves Bette Davis' cold-hearted flirt. But when he needed it, hoo boy.  Side-eye is modern slang for a glance of derision, and certainly Rains could do that, so scathingly you imagine whoever is in the scene with him had to put up a fire-screen. But Rains had infinite variations, until that look became an art. With it, he could convey tender love, bitter betrayal, cynicism, defeat, lust, fear, laughter and a sense that the world is mad.

Behold. The Siren has collected evidence.

Publicity photo, or, The Come-Hither Side-Eye, in which Rains at his handsomest appears to glance away
 because you, yes you dear fan-person, you drive him mad with passion. Speaking of which...

Crime Without Passion (1934): "You're blonde now."

Anthony Adverse (1936): Calculating, with a hint of licentiousness. Rowr.

Stolen Holiday (1937): "No, of course I haven't concocted one of the greatest
financial frauds in French history. Bisou-bisou, darling."

They Won't Forget (1937): The Siren can't joke about this one; it's too grim, and fact-based to boot.
 All the same, that's a hell of a look.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): In a scene with Basil Rathbone, former comrade from the Scottish Regiment, the Rains sidelong glance does not hesitate to upstage the Baz something fierce.

Four Daughters (1938): The rarely deployed twinkly version. 

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941): Precisely the look to convey to a subordinate, in this world or the next, that he has made a very big boo-boo.

The Wolf-Man (1941): "Down, boy. My billing's higher than yours."

Building up a "psychic bellyache" in Kings Row (1942).

Now, Voyager (1942): The look of a psychiatrist who realizes he's taking the wrong person to the sanitorium.

As Casablanca was peak Rains, in the public memory if nothing else, so also is it Peak Side-Eye, as here

and here...

and here...

...and of course, here.

Notorious: The "Yes, That's the Low-Cut Gown of the American Spy I Married" Side-Eye

Publicity for The Unsuspected (1946): "I dare you to suspect me."
(Wonderful film, another of the Siren's favorite Rains outings.)

Deception (1947): Side-Eye Emphasizing the Betrayed, Although Admittedly Crazed and Controlling, Lover 

Lawrence of Arabia (1962): Assessing just how much trouble T.E.'s "funny sense of fun" is going to cause him.

Some more good stuff about Claude Rains:

The Notorious screen-grabs and the ones from Now, Voyager are from the movie writeups at The Blonde at the Film.

His career in horror movies, from John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows.

Karen at Shadows and Satin speculates it was Rains who got the first million-dollar salary.

Moira Finnie at Movie Morlocks has a tribute that mentions the signature look.

A biographical essay at The Hollywood Art, with quotes from Rains' only daughter, Jessica.

Charles Laughton: Actor as Artist

The folks at New York City’s Film Forum have just started a three-week, 35-film tribute to Charles Laughton. Obviously, they love the Siren and want her to be happy. That’s her working theory, anyway. April of this year will mark a full decade since the Siren began spinning in her corner of the Web. And Laughton was one of the first people she chose to write about.

What makes you adopt an actor? How do you decide that here’s a performer you will seek out, regardless of the vehicle? The Siren is always drawn to an actor who takes a 20-foot-high screen and gives you a focused, intelligent performance that fills out every square inch. That’s Laughton. His kind of acting is, sadly, not very fashionable anymore. Even Simon Callow, who wrote a fantastic biography that focuses almost entirely on the acting, admits Laughton’s fame these days is tied to The Night of the Hunter, his one-off directorial masterpiece. Laughton’s acting is “virtually unknown by anyone under 40,” Callow wrote recently.

Or, in some cases, worse than forgotten. “Laughton's mannered performances are liable to elicit laughter today,” sniffs one writer reviewing Callow’s book. This prompts the Siren to a rare display of temper. Mannered? What could be more mannered than some contemporary actors who wait for the camera to discover each tiny effect as they overact their underacting? (That is, if indeed they are actors; of late the Siren has endured too many nonprofessionals cast by wannabe Bressons.) You can keep that kind of pallid realism, where the goal is to be the closest thing to real life. Sure, it’s close. And real life is being on hold with the airline, or flossing your teeth, or staring into the middle distance while trying to recall whether you took your vitamins. The Siren doesn’t require tedium to be all that accurate.

Give her someone like Charles Laughton, who aimed big, even if from time to time he failed big. Give her the existential truth he dredges up, say, at the climax of Mutiny on the Bounty. God no, it’s not “realistic,” but for all time and no matter who else plays him, there’s Captain Bligh, standing in a rowboat, bellowing: “Casting me adrift 3,500 miles from a port of call! You're sending me to my doom, eh? Well, you're wrong, Christian! I'll take this boat as she floats, to England, if I must! I'll live to see you — all of you — hanging from the highest yardarm in the British Fleet!”

Now if you were an actor in class, assigned the unenviable task of recreating that speech, your action might be something like “placing a curse.” Captain Bligh is, in this MGM production of 80 years ago, a villain, a man who cares more about breadfruit than the human beings under his command. But as an actor, Laughton knows obsessiveness can bring about disaster, or it can keep a person alive. Bligh is transferring all his passion to the task of survival, so he can have his revenge. And Laughton points his hand as though he could reach up and tie the rope around Clark Gable’s neck himself. He’s not merely shouting, he layers hatred and determination under every syllable, pronouncing “ChrisCHUHN” so that the very name carries the wrath of the Almighty.

In other words, this is an actor who performed with ferocious totality. That’s what it takes to etch a character in the public mind. When people joke about Henry VIII picking up half a chicken and tearing the meat off with his teeth, they’re not remembering Holbein. They’re evoking Charles Laughton. Lon Chaney created a good Quasimodo, in the 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one that was quite close to the 19th-century illustrations of Victor Hugo’s book. But when Disney cleaned up the tale of the hunchback and the gypsy, to puzzling effect, they were, quite openly, doing a prettified version of Laughton. That’s because it was his Quasimodo, falling in love with Maureen O’Hara’s Esmeralda in the course of a single shot, who broke hearts. These images are there because Laughton’s performances put them there.

He achieved his effects through subtle methods as well as grand ones. For Rembrandt, a biopic directed by Alexander Korda, Laughton immersed himself in the artist’s work for weeks on end. It’s a somber movie, focused on Rembrandt’s tragic private life, and also on how his paintings gradually lost favor, even as Rembrandt was at the peak of his genius. Aided by the sensitive lighting of cinematographer Georges Perinal, Laughton approaches a canvas as though acceding to its demands. “Every man has a destined path,” says Laughton’s Rembrandt. “It leads him into the wilderness but he must follow it with head high and a smile on his lips.” It is no surprise to learn that Mike Leigh, in interviews, cites Rembrandt as a key influence on Mr. Turner.

Charles Laughton was born in 1899, the son of hoteliers. He worked until his early 20s in his parents’ hotel, starting at the lowest rung of the trade at the insistence of his formidable mother. His upbringing was prosperous, and he went to private schools such as Stonyhurst. He didn’t begin his acting career until his early 20s, after overcoming the strenuous disapproval of his family.

But Laughton, somehow, never identified much with privilege. Off-screen he pulled away from “toffs” all his life. When he played a bank clerk, a servant, a schoolteacher, he brought a rare and deep understanding of what it means to work hard for meager pay and nonexistent rank. And Laughton also reveled in showing what’s behind the petty exercise of power, say by a Victorian toff with his invalid poet-daughter in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, or a bootmaker of a similar era in Hobson's Choice, or, in The Big Clock, a CEO who finds a single light burning in a broom closet at his corporate headquarters.

He served in World War I as a private, saw time in the trenches, and was exposed to mustard gas in the last vicious weeks before peace. It damaged his throat and left him with painful, recurring hives for the rest of his life. The emotional effects of his service are harder to discover, because Laughton preferred not to speak of them. Still, Callow points to a possible connection between the ignoble terror of certain moments in This Land Is Mine, and the memories of war, and that feels right. In Jean Renoir’s superb movie about the occupation of a small (obviously French) town, there is a scene where Laughton’s Alfred Lory, a schoolteacher, looks out the window of his cell and sees his headmaster being marched to a firing squad. Lory was supposed to call to him: “Professor Sorel! Professor Sorel!” On the first take, Laughton gripped the bars on the window so hard they broke off.

Laughton had a stormy, complicated marriage to Elsa Lanchester that lasted from 1927 until his death in 1962. He was gay, and Laughton’s era was not, of course, hospitable to same-sex relationships, although the older he got, the more affairs he had, and the more frequently he would confide in people. (As he took a drive with Robert Mitchum during the filming of Night of the Hunter, Laughton confessed to his star that “there is a strong streak of homosexuality in me.” Mitchum’s priceless response: “No shit! Stop the car!”) Most good actors can suggest sexual undercurrents driving their characters, but Laughton treated desire, even in murderers like those in The Big Clock and Jamaica Inn, as an outgrowth of the mind, not merely a physical urge.

Seeing a big portion of Laughton’s work at Film Forum should dispel the notion that he was always massively overweight; he’s in pretty good shape in Mutiny on the Bounty, for example. He was an aesthete who prized the best and highest in music, in literature and in art. (One bond he had with Jean Renoir: Laughton had bought Renoir pere’s The Judgment of Paris for $35,000 in the 1930s.) But this man who loved beauty saw none in himself, no matter if Marilyn Monroe said he was “the sexiest thing she’d ever seen,” no matter if Marlene Dietrich told him before they started Witness for the Prosecution that she’d always yearned to play opposite him. “I look like a departing pachyderm,” he once said. The Siren never reads that joke without a wince. His looks did mean he would never be a leading man, but that is our good fortune; how many Hollywood idols could have created just one of Laughton’s monsters?

The Film Forum series shows that Laughton was also exceptional at more ordinary specimens of humanity. In The Suspect, directed by Robert Siodmak, Laughton is cast as a version of Dr. Crippen, a rare sympathetic figure in the annals of true crime — not least because Crippen may not have actually murdered his wife, a possibility the film toys with, but basically rejects. Philip Marshall (Laughton) is chained in marriage to a vicious shrew (Rosalind Ivan, rehearsing her character in Scarlet Street, but doing it well); inevitably, he falls in love with a gentle young woman (Ella Raines, who seemingly spent much of the 1940s cast as the foil to murderers). Made on an obviously low budget, it is still a fine movie, and Laughton and Elsa Lanchester considered Marshall to be one of his best creations. The tension comes from the question of which will win out, Marshall the murderer, or Marshall, the man who says, with infinite sadness, “I like people and I’ve never wanted to hurt them.” At a key late moment, Marshall is afraid that his secret is about to be discovered during a quiet social evening at home. As his own son fumbles around the spot that could reveal all, Marshall keeps smiling; you can watch the gradual transition, as Laughton’s smile turns into a ghastly mask of dread.

To a director, Laughton on set meant there would always be more than one temperament around, and Siodmak said later that The Suspect forced him into an unusual approach. When Laughton one day barged in declaring that every take had been wrong, all wrong, and would have to be redone, Siodmak responded by reeling around declaiming the actor's lines himself. Laughton became convinced he’d finally encountered a director who actually was a lunatic, as opposed to merely behaving like one. And after that, claimed Siodmak, his star was as gentle as the rain.

Jean Renoir was patient and kind, as he seemed to be with everyone, and mentioned Laughton fondly in interviews. During Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick had his hands full, what with the glory that was Rome and the grandeur that was Kirk Douglas, and let Laughton and Peter Ustinov rewrite most of their scenes together. Billy Wilder, who helped Robert Stephens to a breakdown and James Cagney to leaving the business, described making Witness for the Prosecution as delightful. (The Siren has watched that movie over and over again — it’s Laughton’s funniest, most wholly endearing performance. His scenes with Lanchester are perfection.) Otto Preminger (rather surprising, this one) treated Laughton with the utmost courtesy during Advise and Consent. He probably realized the actor was dying of cancer and that Senator Seb Cooley would be Laughton's last role. Laughton's physical condition caused him to play Cooley (obviously written as a portrait of Strom Thurmond) with spidery stillness. But Preminger also said Laughton asked for direction and was eager to take it.

Other times it was a different story. Even Laughton’s friends and admirers said he was hard to work with. Those directors who emerged with good memories tended to be ones who recognized that Laughton’s extreme seriousness was no act. Garson Kanin, who directed They Knew What They Wanted (long out of sight, not Laughton’s best work, and not part of the series), claimed to have respected Laughton, at least before shooting began. Laughton told Kanin that to play an Italian-American farmer, he would immerse himself in Vivaldi, Dante and Michelangelo. In his book Hollywood, Kanin all but calls this a sham.

But the fact is, that was absolutely Laughton’s approach, as it had been with Rembrandt. Alfred Hitchcock could have testified to that as well. When Laughton was unable to get his walk right as the sinister squire of Jamaica Inn, he refused to continue. He came back the next day saying he’d discovered how to do it, by listening to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance.

Hitchcock, however, responded to this sort of thing about as well as Kanin did. Hitch liked his actors to be either consummate pros, who got the job done without fuss, or malleable, tentative souls he could push around as he liked. Laughton was the worst of both worlds: a headstrong talent who needed as much time and patience as any neophyte. Laughton's malevolent judge in The Paradine Case (poor Paradine Case, the Siren loves you even if no one else does) was a somewhat better experience. But Hitchcock told Pia Lindstrom years later, with placid malice, “The hardest things to photograph are dogs, babies, motor boats and Charles Laughton.”

Mind you, the Siren understands Hitchcock’s point of view. To see the way Laughton struggled, and directors struggled with him, you need only look at one 70-minute documentary: The Epic That Never Was, which Film Forum is showing on Feb. 22. Made in 1965 for the BBC, it pieces together what’s left of an effort to film Robert Graves’ I, Claudius in 1937. Laughton, who’d already been a memorably depraved Nero in The Sign of the Cross, was obvious casting as the stammering Roman who feigns stupidity in order to stay alive, and ends up as emperor. Josef von Sternberg, who’d just ended his string of sumptuously erotic films with Marlene Dietrich, was likewise a natural to film the dissipation of the ancients.

As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Instead it was a disaster that ended with Merle Oberon (cast as Messalina) wrecking her car and her producer husband Alex Korda deciding that a nice tidy insurance settlement beat the heck out of making this movie.

More than anything, Laughton was ill-matched with Von Sternberg, who wrote, “An actor is rewarded with attention out of all proportion to his services. An actor is turned on and off like a spigot, and like the spigot, is not the source of the liquid that flows through him.” Laughton admired Von Sternberg greatly, but this was not a director who was going to understand why his spigot was studying the exact way a Roman would address the gods. There are many outtakes of Laughton stopping mid-scene, or up and leaving the set. You could say Von Sternberg lacked sympathy. “Acting is nothing remarkable,” he wrote, and meant every word. And in fairness, more often than not, when Laughton stops, it’s difficult at first to figure out why. He sounds fine. Sometimes he sounds great. Imagine you’re Von Sternberg, or, if you prefer, Hitchcock, with the crew seething and the hot breath of the studio executives steaming up the set, and all that’s between you and the film you can already watch in your head is this ACTOR and his insistence on forging things in the smithy of his soul.

“Jesus Christ, Charles, just hit your mark and say the line.”

And then, Laughton addresses the Senate … and soars. In one scene he becomes every belittled, misjudged man who ever stood up and said, this is not who I am. At last it is possible to understand why Laughton placed such significance on the interior. He was acting the other takes, and they were good; in this one, he is being, and it is art.

Those who talk only of the single film Laughton directed, and shrug off the rest, are making a grave mistake. Laughton the director could never have made the shimmering, perfect thing that is Night of the Hunter, if it hadn’t been for Laughton the actor.

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The schedule for Film Forum's Charles Laughton series can be found here. A restored Spartacus is screening this spring after the series concludes. Several rarities are being shown, including Forever and a Day and Arch of Triumph, neither of which the Siren has seen (yet). Also, though Laughton's part amounts to a glimpse, the dazzling Piccadilly is worth your time and includes one of Anna May Wong's best roles.

The Siren has in the past written about Ruggles of Red Gap, The Big Clock, Jamaica Inn and the charming Deanna Durbin vehicle It Started With Eve. She prefers David Cairns on The Man on the Eiffel Tower to her own post, which was written in a state of extreme irritation from the lousy DVD she watched.