What I Watched With My Mother: The Also-Ran Edition

After a long hard slog of a December, the Siren has emerged, ready for updates. And she has excellent news: Our hard work to put The White Shadow online for viewing has been recognized by the Online Film Critics' Society, with a special award to the "For the Love of Film" blogathon, Fandor and the National Film Preservation Foundation for our fundraising efforts. This is a wonderful accolade that is shared by everyone who contributed to the blogathon.

And our work has benefited many, many people. The online streaming of The White Shadow has proven so popular (almost 40,000 viewers and counting) that the NFPF has decided to keep it available for viewing on their site through Jan. 31. So watch, and watch again; we worked hard and we earned it.

Meanwhile, back chez Siren, your sometime blog hostess was entertaining her mother over the holidays, and after long days of decking the halls etc., we'd unwind by watching a number of old movies. Re-capping that viewing seemed like a good way to start 2013, so here are brief impressions of What I Watched With My Mother. The next post will feature the ones we liked best; this is the Also-Ran Edition. The Siren will get the one true dud out of the way first, since Mom always told her the meal goes better if you start with the food you like the least.

Susan Slept Here (Christmas Eve movie)

Ugh.

Not "ugh" because it's a romantic comedy about a 17-year-old (Debbie Reynolds) and a 50-year-old (Dick Powell). (Yeah yeah, Powell's character claims he's 35. So do a lot of people.) The Siren's been happy with May-December story lines before, including Love in the Afternoon, The Constant Nymph, and To Catch a Thief. No, it's "ugh" because whatever it takes to make this couple remotely plausible, let alone palatable, neither the stars, nor screenwriter Alex Gottlieb, nor director Frank Tashlin have it. Maybe a more obviously appealing, crush-able male lead might have helped (one friend suggested Robert Mitchum). Maybe, although the Siren (who's 0-6 with Tashlin now) finds that this director's interest in Eros goes no deeper than the first wolf-whistle. Powell looks more interested in what's in his highball glass than anything else. And if you don't buy what the script is selling, then this movie is tedious and crude, just a bunch of labored jailbait gags about whether or not Susan, whose mental age seems to hover around 12, will Sleep Here.

What Mom said: "I think you would have to see this when you're a kid and fall in love with it. Otherwise it's hard to overlook how icky it is."

Background to Danger
World War II spy caper that we watched for Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and those gentlemen were the best things in it, naturally. Good stuff includes Lorre, as an agent of Our Soviet Allies, sitting cross-legged on a desk and demanding a better class of vodka. There's also a striking shot of Greenstreet walking away from the camera--his coat drapes off his incredibly wide shoulders like a set of curtains, and he looks like a medicine-show wagon trundling down a street. The Siren liked the Turkish setting and the trains and the way that all the romance and stranger-danger of compartments is put to great use. The director was Raoul Walsh, the cinematographer was Tony Gaudio, William Faulkner did uncredited work on the script--why, you might well ask, is this such a mix of good, bad and meh? It isn't nearly as consistent and accomplished as Jean Negulesco's The Mask of Dimitrios one year later. One reason is that Dimitrios wisely foregrounded Lorre and Greenstreet and used an Eric Ambler plot to much better effect; Background to Danger is baggily constructed, with more than its fair share of convenient double agents and talking killers. The major problem, however, was nailed by Mom: "This needed Humphrey Bogart." Instead you get George Raft at his most humorless and mechanical. Also includes Brenda Marshall looking marvelous in Soviet Chic, all high-necked sweaters and astrakan-collared coats. Unfortunately, all she does is hand Lorre vodka (although that's an important task, goodness knows).

What Mom said: See above.

They Came to Blow Up America
Alfred Hitchcock supposedly based Saboteur on a true story of German agents sent to sabotage the American war machine; but by the time he got through with the story, almost no trace of the real incident was left. This 20th-Century Fox programmer, in its flag-waving Hollywood way, sticks much closer to the facts of "Operation Pastorius," with details like the German submarine landing right off Amagansett (even enemy agents want a taste of the Hamptons). The film begins with a disclaimer noting that for the sake of national security, the true story of the saboteurs can't be told yet. Which is good. We wouldn't want John and Jane Q. leaving the Rialto convinced that one of the saboteurs was only play-acting for the good of the country, because FBI Agent Ward Bond asked him to. That heroic non-saboteur is George Sanders, wearing his "B-movie heartthrob" hat. He's so handsome and drily funny that the creaky theatrics go down easy. The best part, though, concerns Anna Sten as Sanders' disgruntled not-ex-wife (it's complicated), whom Sanders denounces as crazy to a Nazi commandant ("she throws things, you know"). Sten steals the movie with her two big scenes, further confirmation that whatever folly was associated with her years in Hollywood, it had nothing to do with her acting.

What Mom said: "It would be nice if FBI agents really did show up to tell you that your kids are OK." (At one point Ward Bond visits Sanders' worried Papa (Ludwig Stossel) to reassure him that his son doesn't really wanna blow up America.)

Stolen Holiday
A 1937 Michael Curtiz film about the Stavisky Affair, a topic that has so much potential that it's frustrating to see how off-handedly it's treated here. Kay Francis plays Nicole Picot, a couturier's model who's recruited by Stavisky--oops I mean Stefan Orloff (Claude Rains) as arm candy while he pitches his financial schemes to wealthy businessmen. And here's the first problem; she knows Orloff is crooked, and Rains is (god knows) playing him crooked, and yet the script wants us to believe that Nicole nevertheless does not understand that Orloff is fleecing most of the French upper crust. The Siren loves Francis, but this is a damn-near-unplayable part that nicely illustrates the kind of tosh the actress was starting to get from Warner Brothers as her career waned. And as if there weren't enough for the woman to cope with, she doesn't take that "stolen holiday" with Rains, who's mighty alluring even if he was a half-foot shorter than Francis. No, she runs off with Ian Hunter, who one year later would distinguish himself as the fifth-sexiest man in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Pleasures do include Rains intimidating his nervous Ponzi-schemers; but while there's a little crash course in French bond-issuing rules, it's a waste not to show more of Rains reeling in the suckers. Nicole becomes a dress designer herself, so Kay's Orry-Kelly wardrobe is breathtaking, particularly the spangled dress above, which has what may well be the lowest neckline in 1930s cinema. And there's the airplane Kay and Claude take to Switzerland, a British-made eye-popper that looks as though they decided to bring the double-decker bus concept to air travel.

What Mom said: "It would have been more interesting if she fell in love with Rains."

Christmas with George and Zsa Zsa

The Siren has had a busy holiday season that has included, in addition to the usual hoo-ha, many unexpected household tasks. She's kept up her spirits via activities like seeing Playtime in 70-millimeter and replacing Jingle All the Way in the Barnes and Noble DVD Christmas display with Auntie Mame. We all have our little holiday rituals.

Posting has been more than usually spotty, a situation that may alter a bit in January (we can only hope), but the Siren simply can't leave her blog bare for Christmas, although Myrna is doing her best for the banner. The Siren has posted a summary of this splendid, heart-warming Christmas story once before, but she assures you that of the many versions out there, the one to read is Brian Aherne's.

It is (probably) Christmas 1953, and the storied, brain-stumping marriage of the lovely Zsa Zsa Gabor and George Sanders is on the train to Reno, you might say. Zsa Zsa has begun to comfort herself with the attentions of "a famous international charmer" (probably Porfirio Rubirosa). Sanders reacts as any ordinary husband would; he decides the situation offers the perfect way to reduce his potential alimony payments. And here Aherne takes up the tale of Sanders:

Late at night on Christmas Eve, wearing dirty blue jeans, a sweatshirt and a beard...

[Pause. Chew on that image for a minute. Pour yourself a Christmas cocktail. Down it in one. Can you picture it yet? Me neither. Carry on.]

...wearing dirty blue jeans, a sweatshirt and a beard, accompanied by two detectives and carrying a brick that he had carefully gift-wrapped, [George] stealthily crossed the lawn of Zsa Zsa's house and placed a ladder against the wall. Followed by the detectives, he then climbed to the balcony outside her window. All was silent and dark inside when abruptly he shattered the glass with the brick, opened the catch, stepped into the room, turned on the light and, holding out his gift package, said "Merry Christmas, my dear!" Zsa Zsa's companion sprang up and rushed into the bathroom--too late, for the detectives had got their incriminating photos before the sleepers could realize what was happening.

Zsa Zsa behaved with perfect aplomb. Smiling and putting a lacy dressing gown, she said, "George darling! How lovely to see you! You are just in time to get your Christmas present, which is under the tree. Let's go down and have a glass of champagne and I will give it to you." She led the way downstairs, laughing gaily, gave George his present, gift-wrapped, and poured champagne for the detectives, who were enchanted with her. Indeed a good time seems to have been had by all on that festive occasion, except by the gentleman in the bathroom.

When the impending divorce was announced, their statements to the press were brief and typical. "George is a wonderful man and I shall always love him," said Zsa Zsa. "I have been cast aside like a squeezed lemon," said George.

The Siren thinks it's the detail of gift-wrapping the brick that really makes this anecdote. During the holidays, a time of stress for many, may we all behave with the grace and good cheer of this weirdly well-matched couple.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Joyous Festivus, Happy (post-) Hanukkah, Gleeful Kwanzaa and a generally loving, warm and gentle-spirited holiday to all my patient readers. You make this occasionally rather cobwebby corner of the Web so very, very worthwhile.

You're Much Too Modest

It is a complicated business, and we are very insecure, we actors. We all feel--and fear--we are going to be found out at any moment. Someone is going to point and say, 'You are really not very good, are you?'
--Julie Christie

The Siren, as she's often said, likes and admires actors, more perhaps than some of the profession's members like themselves. Like all artists, the good ones usually have an accurate sense of their own work. But over her years of obsessive reading, the Siren has seen cases where something throws off the radar.

Not always, of course. Katharine Hepburn rued the reception of Sylvia Scarlet but was clear-headed enough to tell people, much later, that the film was simply ahead of its time. Peter Ustinov acknowledged the reverence accorded Lola Montes, but added in Dear Me that "there were precious few signs of this destiny during filming." Joan Fontaine had a lousy time making Rebecca but has said more than once that she knows it will always be her most celebrated role. Others, like Barbara Stanwyck, were too coolly professional to run down their own work.

Now and again, though, you'll come across an actor dismissing something that was good to great. The Siren is fascinated by these instances, not from smug hindsight, but because it goes against the common perception of stars as egomaniacs. You can speculate about the reasons, beyond genuine variance in taste, why an actor might be too hard on his own work. Maybe the actor hated making the movie. Maybe the movie was a box-office bomb, and the actor figured the public and the critics at the time were the best judge. Maybe the movie didn't fit with the image the actor wanted to project. Some, like Norma Shearer, never warmed to a great film (in her case, The Women, an unhappy experience for her) and instead venerated a lesser one; Shearer was fond of her performance in Romeo and Juliet, an opinion not widely shared these days.

And sometimes the actor just had, or learned to have, contempt for the entire business.

Here's a small collection, then, of actors being more critical of themselves and their movies than the Siren, and in most cases plenty of others, would say is warranted.

According to the reference books which consider it worthwhile collating such trivia, I have made about seventy films. Glancing down the list, I find I made things like Action in Arabia, Lured, and The Scarlet Coat. I can only assume that I was paid handsomely for them, but I am at a complete loss as to what action there was in Arabia, or who was lured where, and why. As to the scarlet coat, did I wear it, and if not who did?

George Sanders, in Memoirs of a Professional Cad, shrugging off Lured, an excellent thriller from the great Douglas Sirk that features our man George at his rakish best. The other two the Siren hasn't seen. The Scarlet Coat--a drama about Benedict Arnold in which Sanders, by some dreadful misjudgment, was NOT cast as the infamous traitor--was directed by John Sturges, and the Siren is willing to bet it's better than the actor says. Action in Arabia--well, he may have us there, but look at the synopsis and tell me you're not intrigued.

The worst picture, bar none, that I ever made.

Mary Pickford's tribute to Rosita in Sunshine and Shadow. While the collaboration with Ernst Lubitsch seems to have been happy at the time, Pickford later claimed the film gave her no end of trouble. She carried a grudge against Rosita for the rest of her life, not including it in the films she later handed over for preservation. It was extremely well-reviewed, however, and Scott Eyman has good words for it in his Lubitsch bio. The Siren hasn't seen Rosita (hard to track down) but come on, it's Lubitsch. How bad can it be?

She was in the middle of complaining about what a piece of crap the film was, and how lucky Rita Hayworth was because she turned it down…

Ava Gardner encounters Farley Granger in Rome during the filming of The Barefoot Contessa, as told in Granger's Include Me Out. Gardner, bless her, had little good to say about her entire career, as can be seen in her famous interview with Rex Reed. True, not everyone feels the love for The Barefoot Contessa, but the Siren has some heavyweights on her side.

You liked that?

Bette Davis' incredulous response to Whitney Stine's praise for Beyond the Forest. Davis spent years telling everyone the picture stank. The Siren says this King Vidor is a lot better than Duel in the Sun. Molly Haskell called it Davis' "wildest and most uncompromising film;' Kim Morgan admires it, too.

Kitsch.

In Maximilian Schell's documentary, that's Marlene Dietrich's word for most of her Hollywood work, including the glorious execution scene in Josef von Sternberg's Dishonored and, if memory serves, The Blue Angel. Whether or not Dietrich, at that point in her life, truly believed it was all mostly kitsch is an open question, but say it she did, with the full force of the German pronunciation.

Movies bore me, especially my own.

Robert Mitchum discusses his career. In contrast to Dietrich, the Siren believes Mitchum meant this, to the extent that he ever meant anything he said. Although Mitchum always did have good things to say about The Night of the Hunter. Which brings us to...

I played in the movie, which was about the battle between good and evil. Parts of the film were excellent, but it was not fully sustained because Mr. Laughton did not want to 'ruin' Robert Mitchum's image by having him a play a thoroughly wicked man. In the earlier days of films, it would have been considered a triumph to play evil convincingly.

That, along with a terse paragraph about Charles Laughton's admiration for D.W. Griffith, constitutes Lillian Gish's entire tribute to The Night of the Hunter in The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me. She did express similar thoughts to her director during filming, but Laughton biographer Simon Callow maintains that Laughton's allusion to Mitchum's image was basically a joke. Gish's curt assessment, and weird critique of Mitchum's seductively chilling work, may have owed something to dissatisfaction with her billing. The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood in the Fifties quotes her agent as saying that when Gish saw the movie poster, with only Mitchum and Shelley Winters advertised, she "blew her top."

Ridiculous. I made the picture because I couldn't afford a suspension--not with a daughter, a husband and a household to support.

Maureen O'Hara's verdict on Sinbad the Sailor, maybe not a pinnacle of art but an absolutely corking movie the Siren has adored since childhood. For the record, O'Hara is delightful in it. O'Hara also disliked Forbidden Street, another one the Siren thought quite fine. This Land Is Mine gets passing reference in two sentences, neither of which mention the director. Then again, good movies that actors neglect in their memoirs could be a whole different post. E.g.…

The four pictures I made at Warner Brothers were not great pictures, but they were very good pictures and excellent entertainment. In their category I do not see their like being as well made today.

The Siren's perennial crush, Basil Rathbone, gives backhanded praise to Tovarich, Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Dawn Patrol. Those four movies, all of them lovable and three of them eternal classics, take up just under two (2) pages of Rathbone's charmingly off-topic autobiography. Rathbone allows as how Errol Flynn was "monstrously lazy and self-indulgent," albeit genial, and Olivia de Havilland was very pretty. On the other hand, you do get quite a bit about Rathbone's dogs.

For its time, Side Street was a good-looking, well-made film that was not able to rise above the banality of its story.

Farley Granger again. The Siren says Granger, a smart man, underrated this excellent Anthony Mann noir. At least Granger gave himself credit for Strangers on a Train and Senso. Another actor with the same last name was much more cutting about his own career.

I've never done a film that I'm proud of.

Stewart Granger's oft-quoted line wasn't strictly true, as he did admit liking a few roles, such as Saraband for Dead Lovers, but he never thought much of his own abilities.

I don't want to be a silly temptress. I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures.

Greta Garbo. Of course. When the Siren first encountered that remark she thought Garbo kind of had a point, until she found out the star was talking about the splendid Flesh and the Devil.

Mediocre.

Montgomery Clift's summation of his work as Matt Garth in Red River. He was no huge fan of the overall film, either, particularly the end, and on that aspect he has some critical company. But when Clift watched it in a cinema, he knew Red River would make him a star. And so, according to biographer Patricia Bosworth, Clift went on one last pre-fame drinking binge, applying himself to the task with such intensity that he wound up in a New Orleans jail.

A crock of shit.

Humphrey Bogart offers his opinion of Billy Wilder's beloved Sabrina to a reporter on set. If he ever revised that evaluation, the Siren has not located where.

I did things like Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. I don't know what those films were about. The women I played in them were not very empowered.

Julie Christie. We can debate Heaven Can Wait--the Siren enjoys it--but surely most of us hope she's changed her mind about Shampoo.

The picture was a big hit in spite of my wooden performance. I have only kept one review during my life. It is of Dodsworth and appeared in the Detroit Free Press. 'In this picture we were privileged to see the great Samuel Goldwyn's latest discovery--all we can say about this actor? Is that he is tall, dark and not the slightest bit handsome.' It has the place of honor in my lavatory.

Thanks to William Wyler's unvarnished manner and multiple takes, David Niven hated making Dodsworth. But he's very good, better than he was as Edgar Linton in Wuthering Heights, during which shoot William Wyler made Niven equally miserable a few years later.

There was the first of several visits to Italy to act for various aspiring Fellinis and Antonionis, among them Dario Argento, in Profondo Rosso, a.k.a. Deep Red; Deep Red Hatchet Murders; Dripping Deep Red; The Hatchet Murders and (why?) The Sabre Tooth Tiger. It could be said that there is often a connection between the absence of quality in a film and the number of its aliases.

David Hemmings on one of his more famous movies, from his 2004 memoirs. The Siren adds that when Glenn Kenny encountered Hemmings in Toronto just after 9/11, the actor was not so harsh.

Well, that wasn't much.

Joan Bennett, overheard as she left a 1981 tribute screening of The Reckless Moment. Given the present-day reputation of Max Ophuls' film, and Bennett's superlative performance, this is probably the biggest jaw-dropper of the bunch. It was not an opinion Bennett reached only in crotchety old age; Brian Kellow's biography records her saying years before that The Reckless Moment was "nothing exceptional…not like The Woman in the Window or Scarlet Street." Argento fans can also take note of Kellow's observation, about Suspiria's later cult status, that "it is unlikely that Joan knew or cared."

I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951)

The Siren's mentioned the previous life she spent behind a jewelry counter. She recalls one slow morning spent poring over a society column about a New York designer and his haute summer doings in the Hamptons, and her coworker's loud snort: "Sweetie, don't let the yacht fool you. He started out pushing racks around the garment district. He's tougher than you and me will ever think about being."

This nostalgic vignette came to mind when the Siren spent a sick day watching I Can Get It for You Wholesale, the 1951 Twentieth-Century Fox melodrama about the Seventh Avenue rag trade here in Little Old New York. Fashion has doubled, maybe even quintupled its everyday presence since the 50s. Now we play "who wore it best?" for all the world as though anyone strolling the local mall knows exactly how the latest Alber Elbaz should be draped. But the Siren strongly suspects the industry has stayed as tough as ever. She only wishes this movie, so brilliant through a good stretch of its running time, had done the same.

Filmed on location, I Can Get It for You Wholesale has any number of things going for it, but two stand out. First there's the street photography, night and day, crowds and traffic and windows from Seventh Avenue to Central Park. Director Michael Gordon was, on the evidence of this movie as well as Pillow Talk and Portrait in Black, good, if not quite great; we'll always have a hard time knowing how much Gordon really had, because his career is bisected by the blacklist. Gordon has a flair for amusing shots, like an errand boy with his hand cradling a dress dummy's boob, and the camera tracking around a grand dinner-dance to reveal the main characters stuck out behind a pillar. He could keep the action flowing. And the New York street scenes, via DP Milton Krasner — trust the Siren, you will plotz.

The second, and primary, thing: Abraham Polonsky's script (from Vera Caspary's adaptation), which will put the true lover of New Yorkese into a euphoric trance. Leads and character actors such as Marvin Kaplan and Charles Lane reel out line after glittering line, from the poignant

If I had money, could you learn to love me for my money?

to the flowery

Miss Boyd, you have the simple and astonishing beauty of an old-fashioned straight razor.

to the existentially profound

A young man needs a bankruptcy. It helps him to mature.

to the profoundly vaudeville.

—Haven't we treated you right?
—You want more money?
—We'll give you a raise.
—You wanna take your wife to Jones Beach? I'll lend you my Buick.
—Take my Cadillac.
—Take my wife!

My beloved auteurist friends, this is why the Siren has been known to roll her eyes when told a great director could direct the phone book or whatever platitude you will. In this case, it's the reverse. You'd have to work at messing up that dialogue. The script sings. At times Gordon is just getting the hell out of the way.

Harriet Boyd (Susan Hayward) is a model on Seventh Avenue, back when the profession was a lot more B-girl than Bundchen. She's had it up to her cute little keister with pawing buyers and slick salesmen, and she's ready to use her design talent. Harriet lures Sam Cooper (Sam Jaffe), the "inside man" who can run the dressmaking end, and salesman Teddy Sherman (Dan Dailey, as good as you'll ever see him), with the promise of their own firm, selling frocks at $10.95 in wholesale 1951 dollars. To get what she wants, Harriet will be every bit as tough as that Hamptons-swanning designer. She needs the life-insurance money her mother is hoarding, but Ma wants younger sister Marge to have it so she can start a cozy washer-dryer-baby household, despite Harriet's solid objections:

Harriet: With money she can marry anyone she wants.
Ma: A nice outlook on life.
Harriet: It's the outlook men taught me.

Ma, whose maternal warmth recalls an Easter Island statue, refuses to fork over, so Harriet manipulates sis into giving her the dough anyway, in a set-up worthy of Scarlett O'Hara. (That's a part for which Hayward was a contender, by the by, and here you can tell why that's not so far-fetched.) Afterward sister, Ma and brother-in-law, none of whom are the slightest bit interesting, obligingly take a powder. The partners conquer Seventh Avenue, but Teddy has a yen for Harriet, and there lies both Harriet and the movie's undoing.




The Siren has written before of her soft spot for Hayward, who isn't often trotted out these days when people discuss Great Stars of the Past. Hayward was born Edythe Marrener in Flatbush, and no matter what the role, Brooklyn swung in her stride and sanded the edges of her husky voice. She got her start as a teenaged New York model, which probably gives extra brush to the brush-offs Hayward delivers in the film, but she was no high-flown Method actress. Hayward was one rock-hard cookie.

But the Siren says when the part fit her, Hayward could play the hell out of it. TV Guide has one of the few I Can Get It for You Wholesale reviews on the Web, and it cluck-clucks through a story about Hayward's movie-star airs. Hey, the Siren loves the stars who love their status, whether it's Hayward signing a gazillion autographs, Bette Davis showing up on 1970s talk shows to blow smoke and imitate her imitators, or Gloria Swanson playing herself in Airport 1975 and ruining the suspense because face it, nothing and nobody's gonna kill Gloria Swanson. What's the appeal of someone who approaches stardom like this gal? Brother, says the Siren, in her best Brooklyn, you can have that.

Harriet in all her gimme-gimme glory is Hayward at her best. She moves like she knows she's beautiful, she smiles like she knows what she's gonna get, she snaps her lines like she knows what's working against her.

"Didn't you hear me? I'm proposing to you," says a flummoxed Teddy. "What do you expect me to do, throw my arms around you?" is Harriet's tender response.

One more thing: this is a George Sanders movie, too. He shows up about a half-hour in, at a Dressmakers and Buyers' Ball, where he's seated at the dais. Of course. Did any man in Hollywood history, or indeed the history of anywhere, ever look so completely right seated at a dais? Sanders plays J.F. Noble, the Bergdorf-type magnate who wants Harriet to design evening gowns and who also wants Harriet for himself, a promising development both ways. You don't know how it pains the Siren to reveal that Sanders' appearance signals that we have about 30 minutes of great left. After that, it's comeuppance time for Harriet. Oh, you still get good stuff and standout Sanders, such as, "It seems to me that you could resign yourself a little more gracefully to being rich and famous." And Sanders also manages to turn "Good evening, Mr. Sherman" into one of his funniest lines.

But — and it's so obvious this is where we're headed, the Siren isn't even going to call it a spoiler — it's time for Harriet to Learn a Few Things About Love.

I Can Get for You Wholesale is based on Jerome Weidman's Depression-era novel about a man named Harry who, so Wikipedia tells us, gets what's coming to him and learns to appreciate love. (Later, the story morphed into the Broadway musical debut of Barbra Streisand, which interesting tale can be read here.)

It's a truth universally acknowledged in Hollywood that a single woman in possession of excess ambition must be in want of a man. That she'll die without a man, nothing matters without a man, she might as well call in Mario Buatta and have her uterus turned into a breakfast nook without a man. Still, it would be a mistake to say this applies only to women; many's the manly magnate presumed to need love more than money, too. After all, it is love, or his version of it, that proves the undoing of Charles Foster Kane, and we all know how the Siren feels about that one. And it's a mistake to chalk things up to the era, when here's winsome Anne Hathaway in 2006's The Devil Wears Prada doing the exact same thing.

Over at Senses of Cinema, Andrew Marsden says Polonsky changed the novel's "anti-Semitism arising from its treatment of Jewish businessmen into a story about the oppression of women in the world of business," and adds that Fox "softened" the dialogue. The Siren doesn't know if that softening extended to Harriet's fate, but it should be said that Teddy wants her to have a career, just a career on his salesman-of-the-people terms.

Sweet shade of Fannie Hurst, it's frustrating, though. It isn't that the romantic choice boils down to George Sanders versus Dan Dailey, which is…the Siren doesn't even have an actor-to-actor metaphor for that one. It's more like choosing between a movie star and a windup tin mouse. It isn't even that Harriet's going all mushy is about as believable as when William Makepeace Thackeray tries to convince you that his fabulous Becky Sharp is (dramatic pause) a murderess.

No, the rub is that the trick Teddy and Sam pull on Harriet, an S.O.B. move if ever there was one, is for her own good. Done out of love, you see, which makes it so much more pure than Harriet's own scheming.

Despite her dislike of the denouement the Siren highly recommends the film, which you can see at MUBI. It's one of Hollywood's nasty ironies that the lavishly talented Polonsky, himself no bed of roses, also was defanged by external forces. The Siren likes to believe that Polonsky looked back at Harriet Boyd from time to time and thought she got a raw deal, too.

The Siren by Request: Village of the Damned (1960)

Greg Ferrara of Cinema Styles has an excellent post up about science fiction and his discontents, in which he defends, at length and with great wit, the notion that Star Wars isn’t science fiction. The Siren isn’t fully convinced--I mean, the blasters, and the hyperspace, and all those computers with the cunning little buttons--although, as she stated, she isn’t an aficionado. But the Siren recently was accused, in a couple of different forums, of uncritically thinking everything old is great, which peevish, unfounded nonsense caused her to tear her crinolines when she threw herself on the chesterfield in a fit of pique. So she is delighted to show herself gravitating toward relatively modern movies in this genre, while the fabulous Greg is over in his corner admitting he prefers older movies. The age of miracles hasn’t passed, as dear Ira Gershwin once wrote in a beautiful, and quite old, song. Onward.

Now that we take up Village of the Damned from 1960, (requested by Laura of Who Can Turn the World Off With Her Smile?) can we agree to agree on something beforehand? You can call it a science fiction movie, you can call it a horror movie, you can call it an allegory, but here at the Siren’s place, let’s face it, Village of the Damned is one thing above all. It’s a George Sanders movie. As such, it has several things that one expects, such as dry line deliveries, well-cut suits, occasional cocked eyebrows, and George doing his secondary type of role, after all-around cad--that of somewhat effete intellectual.

It also has some things you don’t expect from Sanders, such as him going dewy over his wife’s pregnancy, interaction with a child that doesn’t involve (as Kim Morgan once suggested) snapping “you’re too short for that gesture,” and most startling of all, Sanders fainting in his very first scene. A swoon by George Sanders, the King of Unflappable? It’s like confronting an opening in which Lee Marvin folds cloth napkins.

Village of the Damned, filmed in glorious black-and-white by DP Geoffrey Faithfull, is set in a bucolic, out-of-the-way English village, at first so postcardish you half-expect Margaret Rutherford to swing by on her bicycle, but later darker, dingier. The opening has a fairy-tale hook, as Gordon Zellaby (our George) is on a phone call with his brother-in-law Alan (Michael Gwynn), a military officer, and faints dead away. But it isn’t just Gordon, it’s the whole village out cold. Eventually they come to, and things seem to return to normal. Except that suddenly, every woman in the village of childbearing age falls pregnant (a wonderful British idiom that suggests causes both active and passive).

In the course of a few short months, the women give birth at the same time, and before you know it, the kids are growing up at a decidedly inhuman pace. The children are blonde, hyperintelligent and preternaturally adult. The authorities suspect something is up and want to deal with the children en masse. But Sanders, a professor whose beautiful wife is one of the ones who’s given birth, is adamant that the children should be left alone so they can be observed. He even volunteers to teach the little darlings himself in a one-room schoolhouse, like some horror nerd’s idea of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. Leaving the creatures alone turns out to be as lousy an idea as it was in The Thing From Another World, if not quite as spectacularly ill-judged as in Alien.

Here’s something to ponder--why do scientists so frequently get it in the neck from science fiction? By which the Siren means, for example, movies where the man (or woman) of action looks at the alien, and its dripping fangs, and the way it’s casually fiddling with the radio buttons in order to scramble communications with the Air Force, and the man (or woman) of action sensibly suggests blasting the thing. But the scientist is all, “No, we have to study it! We need to make friends! Just hold out your hand and let him sniff it!” The Siren would attribute this theme to the Cold War anxiety that gives so much classic sci-fi its subtext, but it crops up in later entries too. She thinks a thread common to many science fiction movies is, ironically, deep fear of science. (One great science-fiction movie that’s about embracing science? Close Encounters. It’s unusual in that regard.)

Sanders is well-suited to a part that shows scientific curiosity killing the cat, and, unexpectedly, he tethers his performance to domestic emotions he rarely shows in other movies. Sanders reacts to becoming an expectant papa as a cerebral man experiencing one of life’s elemental joys. He doesn’t have sexual chemistry with the gorgeous Barbara Shelley, who’s playing his wife, but such is the age difference you might not buy that anyway. Instead, his eyes follow her as if he can’t believe his luck, and you feel for him keenly when he realizes her pregnancy wasn’t luck at all. When Sanders proposes to teach the children himself, it’s the act of a man who’s been burned by domestic emotion, going back to the sphere where he always felt more at ease, anyway. It makes his final act all the more poignant.

"People always ask how did I get such good performances out of you lot. Simple--I asked you to do nothing except be still and stare. Children fidget and I wanted you all to be absolutely still and steady and just stare. Very unchildlike, and, of course, very unsettling."
--Director Wolf Rilla addresses the youngest members of his Village of the Damned cast for a reunion on the U.K.’s Radio 4 in 2003; quoted in The Guardian, 12/4/03

What the Siren really liked about Village of the Damned, aside from the star, was the way an alien invasion was integrated into ordinary middle-class anxieties. There’s the fact, first of all, that the aliens invade wombs, not airspace. That opening is weirdly sexy--the men are out for the count, but what are the women experiencing? Apparently they don’t remember a thing, which is too bad for us as viewers; surely the Siren can’t be the only one dirty-minded enough to wonder about cross-galaxy mating. (Then again, if alien sex turned out to be like Demon Seed, an interesting movie that didn’t quite make the Siren’s list, it’s all for the best.) There’s a marvelously tense scene with a young girl going to her doctor, grappling with the calamity of an unwed pregnancy in 1960, and trying to explain that she didn’t even do anything to get herself in this state. The anxieties of the men, whether it’s one deluded enough to think he’s the papa or one who's seethingly certain he isn’t, are also sharp and believable.

"I knew it was an unusual part. I quietly liked it...having these very adult qualities and having control over the adult. Imagine having that power--and I could taste a bit of that. You realise how powerless you are as a child. I don't think I found it too much of a stretch, that part!"
--Martin Stephens (David Zellaby), ibid.

And the children themselves, with their flaxen hair and glowing eyes, are there at least in part to confirm our suspicion that there is something more than slightly creepy about a perfectly composed, adult-acting child. They’re a bit like miniature Georges, with their ramrod posture and their grammar so perfect they even differentiate between “shall” and “will.” Of course, to this day, the children mostly remind people of quite another group, especially after we see one of them as a toddler, telepathically commanding his mother to dunk her hand in boiling water after she accidentally overheats his bottle, one of the few genuinely frightening moments in a movie that’s more about anxiety than primal terror.

"I don't think any of us were aware of it then, but of course now they remind you of the Hitler Youth, blond-haired Aryan children and all that. I'm convinced that was an unintentional subtext; after all, the war was still fresh in our memories. But none of us had any idea of the impact it would make."
--Rilla, ibid.

What the Siren didn’t like about Village was the military; god they’re a bunch of stiffs, with their maps and their brow-furrowing, even more than usual in a science-fiction film where the fate of the planet winds up resting with a civilian. Despite the movie’s crisp 78-minute length, every time it veers back to a meeting room with a map or a great big table or a desk and a telephone, suspense withers and time turtles.

Thank goodness for George, as always, finally accepting the fact that his son is never going to be fellow academic material and may in fact do something frightful, like try to take over the planet. The final scene, with the children surrounding George in a grim parody of classroom dynamics, now goes into the Siren’s large mental file of favorite Sanders moments.

Son of Fury (1942)

The Siren had a great time with Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamine Blake, which she just saw on impulse. Besides, you know what this blog really needed? Another George Sanders movie, that's what. We were running low.

Given her love of swashbucklers and Sanders, the Siren probably would have seen Son of Fury ages ago if it weren't always billed as a "South Sea Island-er." We all have certain plot elements that make us groan, and when the Siren hears about the South Seas she practically howls. As sure as death, taxes, and Hugh Hefner's girlfriends using too much self-tanner, you will get:

1. Flowers everywhere, waving palm trees, cute little huts, a secluded lagoon (see no. 4);
2. The king/chieftain/whatever, initially itching to kill the Handsome Western Stranger but abruptly turning all wise and avuncular;
3. At least one native girl, usually played by an actress from any corner of the globe except the South Seas, giggling over the HWS;
4. the HWS going swimming with the native girl in the secluded lagoon, so you get lots of underwater shots and the girl dog-paddling in a flirtatious manner;
5. the native girl falling in love and living only to serve her HWS, and the HWS falls in love too because the girls back home are such a drag with their shoes and their petticoats and their bad attitudes and the way they never once think to serve you fish wrapped in a banana leaf.




This shit is so persistent that some of it pops up as late in 1984 in the revisionist version of The Bounty. The Siren finds the setting bearable only if there's a fun twist, like everybody getting washed out to sea at the end of The Hurricane. And the Siren warns you that the South Seas portion of Son of Fury hits all the points. Fortunately the tropical paradise stuff forms only about one-third of the movie, and the other stuff, including Frances Farmer, Sanders and Tyrone Power, is great. Plus, John Carradine is loping around the island with Power, louche and gloomy as ever, and Carradine pulling his endless tape-measure body out of a hammock takes some sting out of Gene Tierney in permed hair and a sarong that drapes carefully over her belly button.

The plot hews closely to the ur-swashbuckler theme of usurped inheritance, with evil baronet Sir Arthur Blake (Sanders, bien sûr) forcing the real heir, his allegedly illegitimate nephew Benjamin Blake (Roddy McDowell), to become his bonded servant. Ben sticks around long enough to grow into Tyrone Power and fall in love with his beautiful cousin Isabel, played with gusto by Frances Farmer. Fed up with his brutal uncle, Power runs away to the South Seas in order to make his fortune so he can come back and get even.

Now when people discuss Sanders, a frequent topic is his way with a drily funny line, and as Addison DeWitt his delivery is a joy forever. But think also to Addison and Eve in the hotel room. As Sam Staggs and others have noted, the scene suggests S&M roleplay to the point where Baxter's collapse onto the bed is a climax in more ways than one, Sanders leaning in for the kill: "And you agree how completely you belong to me?" So often he is playing a man reserved to the point of iciness, but one you just know is a world-class freak once the bedroom door slams shut.

All of Sanders' best roles employ this side of him, and Son of Fury is one hell of an illustration. When the movie opens Sir Arthur is bare-chested and pummeling the stuffing out of some bit player, as part of a late 18th-century amateur boxing match. It isn't the way Sanders lands the punches that tips you off about Sir Arthur, it's the way he savors the moments between, eyes widening and chest heaving in anticipation. Later he beats Roddy McDowell and plays it the same way, prompting the child to declare, "I'll never submit." Hmmm.




But the high point arrives during a masquerade ball, where Sir Arthur catches Ben (now Power) making a passionate declaration of love to Isabel. Sir Arthur summons his nephew to the stables. They enter and have a nice long moment of eye contact before Sir Arthur declares that it's time to continue Ben's education in the "manly art of self-defense," adding, "it is time you learned to give as well as take." They punch one another to the tune of more roaring double entendres--the Siren's favorite, spoken by Sanders of course, being "Take off your coat and your education will begin."

A minute or two later, as the Siren was reeling back on the couch trying to convince herself that yes, she'd heard what she just heard, Power takes an almighty overhead wallop from Sanders and collapses on the floor. And Sanders pulls a whip off the wall and starts flogging him, and there's shots of Power unconscious on the floor, profile prominent and lashes fluttering. The ball guests pound on the stable door and finally break in and someone grabs Sanders' whip out of his hand and begs him to stop "for mercy's sake." Sanders staggers off, sweaty, panting and spent.

People, this is one dirty scene.

Alas, that's the last of Sanders for a while, although once we've dispensed with the island idyll he does come back, thank god. Power flees to Bristol where he's sheltered by a barmaid, played with unaffected sweetness by Elsa Lanchester in a nice couple of scenes. He stows away on a ship bound for the Spice Islands and becomes part of the crew, but not without getting knocked around by the first mate. Power gets physically chastised a lot in his movies, ever notice that?

Anyway, all the sexuality pouring off Sanders makes for a nice contrast with Power, who had a purity that seemed to come partly from his wondrous looks, and partly from something innate. To some it reads as closed-off or wan, to others (like the Siren as well as Myrna Loy, who confessed to being in love with him) it's key to the actor's appeal. Power could play attraction, infatuation and love quite well; base lust, not as much.




So when Power jumps ship with Carradine and meets Gene Tierney, whom he christens Eve (blech), their scenes play even cuter than such stuff usually does and they have to carry off the romance via their beauty. It sure isn't chemistry; Power plays much more believably against Farmer in the earlier scenes. Tierney was very young and utterly exquisite, but what could she do with a screenplay that demands she learn English by looking at Power with shining eyes and chirping, "Earth!" while pointing up at the sky. The Siren kept hoping Sanders would show up shipwrecked, but no dice. No, we go through all the scenes enumerated above, and Power dives for pearls in a really baggy set of swimming trunks, and finally a ship arrives to take him back to England and revenge.

Director John Cromwell has a number of good-to-great movies on his resume, but not much auteur cred. Son of Fury is too uneven to make a solid case for his talents--for that you'd need Caged or The Racket or (the Siren loves this one) The Enchanted Cottage. Gareth McFeely points out that Cromwell seems much more interested in the English scenes than in the island paradise, and the Siren seconds that emotion. For that matter, she could say the same of Arthur C. Miller, the brilliant DP who also shot How Green Was My Valley. The island is just pretty; the streets and rooms of England are enthralling. Miller had a way of lighting scenes so that the foreground looked lushly detailed, sharp and accurate, but the background was left in inky shadows that suggested an era without electricity as well as acres of more period stuff stretching beyond the confines of the set. Plus, everyone looks gorgeous. Even Henry Davenport.

Back in England, Power has brought Farmer a string of pearls and declared that he still loves her. (Farmer is throatily sexy and sinister in her few scenes; it is sad indeed to recall that this was her last movie before she was institutionalized.) Farmer's response is to betray her cousin to Sanders. It's no avail, however; Power's legitimacy is revealed in a court scene and Sanders must hie back to the ancestral manse and plot his next move. It's all building to the final confrontation between Sir Arthur and Ben, but the scene preceding that inevitable fight is the last one to relish in Son of Fury.



Sanders slinks into Farmer's bedroom and says he hopes "you won't forget your poor old father after he's broken and humbled," while looking like he's no such thing. Farmer points out that she's doing fine, since Power has asked her to remain as his wife. And just when you thought Sir Arthur could not possibly get any more deviant, he sidles over to his daughter, picks the pearls up off her neck with a caressing little flourish and purrs, "Now that has possibilities." Moments before Power barges in, Sanders is sitting at the table eating grapes, with little finger-wiggles after each one meets his mouth.

All this, mind you, in 98 minutes. So, is Son of Fury a lost classic in need of reappraisal? Well, no. But it was so much fun the Siren wanted a cigarette afterward.

Tis the Season for Re-Viewing

For the longest time the Siren refused to look up anything about the New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg because she preferred her imaginings of the man--essentially, Uncle Henry in Understood Betsy. There's Verlyn is in the parlor of a 200-year-old farmhouse in Vermont, having his niece or nephew read Sir Walter Scott by an oil lamp while he mends some tack (whatever tack is).

Well, Verlyn is actually a rather trim fellow and much younger than Uncle Henry, and his farm is apparently in upstate New York. The Siren is happy to report, however, that his taste in reading material isn't too far from Uncle Henry's. Verlyn's a Dickens man, something which always makes the Siren feel comradeship with a writer. And he loves Eliot, and he likes to re-read his favorites:

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

The Siren was struck, when reading these paragraphs months ago, at how you could easily substitute re-watching movies for re-reading books. The Siren wants to see some of the Oscar bait out this month (Up in the Air) and some of it she does not. (The Road--are you bloody well kidding me? I don't care how good it is, I am not doing cannibals for Christmas. And that goes double for Precious.) Well, the Siren would love to be one of those encyclopedic cinephiles who has seen everything, new and old (howdy, Glenn, Peter, Andrew, David and the whole sidebar gang) but she keeps running into the same secret, shameful vice:

She re-watches movies. A lot.

One of life's great pleasures for the Siren comes when, like a dolled-up old broad hitting the jackpot at the slots, she flips over to Turner Classic Movies and hits a well-loved film. Somehow it's better when it's random, and not the process of careful selection at the DVD shelves. There's a particular thrill to turning on a TV and finding a movie that suits your life or week or mood precisely, like Mr. Blandings coming on last week as the Siren unpacked, or White Heat popping up just when the Siren needed a shot of Cagney. And when you tune in to a scene you adore, it's like running into a well-loved friend on the street.

The holiday season is a good time for re-viewing, as you naturally hunger for familiarity and warmth. So, in the spirit both of confession and renewal, the Siren is naming, strictly in the order in which they pop into her head, 10 films she's seen about 10 times, and a favorite scene (or two or three). Some I've mentioned before, some I haven't, but you aren't going to find surprises on here. This isn't a list made to impress. It's made to make the Siren happy.

1. The Maltese Falcon: Chipping away at lead. "Well sir, what do you suggest? We stand here and shed tears and call each other names, or shall we go to Istanbul?"

2. The Thin Man: Myrna: You asleep?
Bill: Yes!
Myrna: Good... I want to talk to you.



(Not only does the Siren cherish this scene, she's played it.)

3. Citizen Kane: "A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl."

4. Rules of the Game: The hunt. Octave and Christine in the greenhouse.

5. Letter from an Unknown Woman: Joan, suddenly come back to life in Jourdan's memory, holding the gate for him once more. The Siren has probably seen this movie only about six times because it kills her but she's listing it anyway.

6. The Band Wagon. All of it, but I particularly love trying to figure out what "Louisiana Hayride" is supposed to be doing in the show within the movie. The most utterly incongruous number in the history of American musicals, if you ask the Siren, and that is some accomplishment.



7. Footlight Parade: My favorite 30s musical. Any scene with Cagney makes me happy.

8. Now, Voyager: Claude Rains. Bonita Granville at her bitchiest. "My mother. My mother! MY MOTHER!"

9. Twentieth Century: "I close the iron door..." (A catchphrase with an old boss of the Siren's.)

10. The Pirate: The "Nina" number. Such perfect Gene Kelly, in so many ways.


Oh, what the heck. It's the season of generosity. Here's 10 more.

11. My Favorite Wife: Cary Grant in the elevator. Irene Dunne laughing over the shoe salesman, with one little hand gesture to indicate the guy's height, and another for Cary.

12. A Night at the Opera: When the orchestra strikes up "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" the Siren falls over, every time.

13. Stagecoach: "Looks like I got the plague, don't it?"

14. Captain Blood: Some of the 1930s' most amazing eye candy, but the Siren's favorite is Basil Rathbone, lounging around that prison. Ah, Basil.


15. Shadow of a Doubt: Joe and Herb, discussing the perfect murder. The most obvious counterpoint in the world ("on the nose," in a popular phrase the Siren can't stand for some reason) but Hitchcock makes it perfect, building on their innocent chatter until you find it as unbearable as Charlie does.

16. Stage Door: Any time Eve Arden or Lucille Ball is on screen. "A pleasant little foursome. I predict a hatchet murder before the night is over."

17. All About Eve: Not mentioned much, because it isn't one of those famous barbs, but Sanders, purring to Barbara Bates: "Tell me, Phoebe, do you want someday to have an award like that of your own?...Then you must ask Miss Harrington how to get one. Miss Harrington knows all about it."

18. Mildred Pierce: "Not too much ice in that drink you're about to make for me."

19. To Be Or Not to Be: The Siren's favorite part of the running gag: "So they call me Concentration Camp Erhardt." "I thought you'd react like that."

20. Singin' in the Rain: Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont is a desert-island performance if ever there was one. "What do they think I am, dumb or something? Why, I make more money than Calvin Coolidge--PUT TOGETHER!"



That's all the Siren will allow herself, but if anyone wants to chime in with a few of their own, that would make her happy too. Consider it a gift.

Life with Zsa Zsa, Or the Importance of Closet Space

Joy oh joy. The Siren has found her copy of George Sanders' Memoirs of a Professional Cad. This was purchased some months ago for $95 on Amazon and it was worth every penny. The Siren let out a whoop of joy when she uncovered it in a box otherwise devoted to shoes and small trinkets.

So, to celebrate the Siren's sloughing off of Verizon and return to the land of high-speed Internet connections, here is dear George on the household organization involved in being married to Zsa Zsa. It sounds rather like perpetual unpacking.

During the five years I was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, I lived in her sumptuous Bel-Air mansion as a sort of paying guest. My presence in the house was regarded by Zsa Zsa's press photographers, dressmakers, the household staff, and sundry visitors and friends with tolerant amusement.

I was allotted a small room in which I was permitted to keep my personal effects until such time as more space was needed to store her ever-mounting stacks of press clippings and photgraphs.

I was accustomed to austerity and it was no great sacrficie for me to dispose from time to time of some of my belongings so as to empty drawers in my room and make them avaiable for the more vital function of housing Zsa Zsa's memorabilia...

It was a kaleidescopic life and there were large areas of fun in it, yet there came a time when I felt I simply had to get away. Providence came to my assistance in the form of an offer from the great Italian director Roberto Rossellini...

I sought out Zsa Zsa to inform her of my decision. I found her under the hair dryer going over the guest list for her next party. I managed to attract her attention by waving my passport in front of her and conveyed my intention of leaving for Italy in sign language--the noise of the hair dryer precluding conversation. She regarded me indulgently for a moment and then with a sunny social smile returned to the sober scrutiny of her guest list.

Some amusingly chosen shots of the happy couple at Cinema Styles.

Brian Aherne's A Proper Job

After writing about Brian Aherne's account of his friendship with George Sanders and Sanders' unforgettable advice on how to write memoirs, the Siren just had to order her own copy of Aherne's autobiography, A Proper Job.

And it's a wonderful book, despite Aherne's rather slighting his Hollywood films to devote more professional reminiscences to his theatrical career. Aherne was British and seems to have had the attitude often attributed to British actors, that films should be what one did to supplement one's theatrical calling. His career as a Hollywood actor was never as front-rank as that of his first wife, Joan Fontaine, a fact she alluded to with some asperity in No Bed of Roses and which he also admits, in a roundabout fashion. And his theatrical career had some brilliant high points, including his having originated the role of Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street on Broadway opposite the legendary Katharine Cornell.



Aherne was handsome and showed definite sex appeal in movies such as the strange and wonderful Sylvia Scarlett, as well as Merrily We Live and The Great Garrick (now available via the Warner Archives and yes, David Ehrenstein, the Siren promises to order it). But for whatever reason--luck, timing, lack of a killer instinct, probably all of the above--he never became a huge star. (CinemaOCD has a good rundown of his Hollywood parts here, with a link to many of the pictures from A Proper Job.) Eventually he moved gracefully into character parts, maintaining a stage career with roles like Professor Higgins in the touring production of My Fair Lady.

But the Siren has found that often it's the people on the margins of stardom who give the best picture of Hollywood life, and Aherne's book is remarkable not only for his intelligence, but for the compassion with which he treats the Hollywood figures he knew. It isn't hard to imagine why the saturnine Sanders kept returning to Aherne for companionship, year after year. Aherne was not a judgmental type. Even when describing a taxing experience, such as working with Bette Davis on Juarez, he does so wryly: "I even found Bette Davis attractive, when I played Maximilian to her Carlotta and, brilliant actress though she is, surely nobody but a mother could have loved Bette Davis at the height of her career."



While Aherne doesn't go out of his way to disdain the movie colony, he does permit himself the occasional joke at its expense. At one point the actor goes into a small California bookshop and complains to the manager that the poetry selection is too slight: "'What's the use of carrying more?' said the man. 'Only you and Katharine Hepburn buy it!'"

The small, precise portraits of Hollywood notables include John Gilbert, spinning out his contract while the studio tries to make him so miserable he will terminate it. "If motion pictures don't want him, where can a great screen star go? What can he do?" asks Aherne. "The gods and goddesses cannot jostle with the crowd, cannot take a job in an office..."

Aherne doesn't bother to add, but the reader can deduce, that he preferred his own fate. He found diversion in farming and flying, eventually married a woman with theatrical ancestry but no ambitions, took the roles that still came and took pleasure in things like the commotion of Sanders' occasional visits. Aherne does show some regrets, as when he ruefully describes how he lost the part of Sidney Carton to Ronald Colman, or how he repeatedly turned down Captain Blood (thus ensuring that Jack Warner forever cursed him for saddling the studio with the ever-troublesome Errol Flynn). But Aherne evidently felt it was better to be an occasionally working actor than a burnt-out star.



If any additional evidence was needed, there was also the fate of Aherne's good friend Ruth Chatterton. He advised her to take the part of the wife in Dodsworth, but Chatterton told him it would end her career to appear as a middle-aged woman. She took it anyway, gave a brilliant performance, and never got another Hollywood offer. Chatterton, whose Pre-Code talkies continue to bowl over critics, wound up in the Connecticut countryside, writing books and living happily with her husband until he died. Hollywood, however, never did come around to pay the great Chatterton her due:

I am happy to remember that my wife and I visited [Chatterton] shortly before her death. The walls of her bar were hung with photos of friends whom she had entertained lavishly at her home on Palm Drive in earlier days. I asked her if she had ever heard from any of them. No, she said, and when she had played Los Angeles some years before not one of them of had even sent her a word. She was alone with her four dogs when she died, and her body lay for three days on the floor, watched by her dogs and surrounded by the mute faces of her former friends.

Aherne gives a wistful description of an afternoon at Pickfair toward the end of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's marriage. As Aherne's visit wound down, Pickford entered and, spurred by not very much, went to the window, looked out at the garden and spoke "almost tragically of the futility of ambition and the evanescence of fame." Aherne hastens to add that after her career ended, Pickford found great comfort in religion and Buddy Rogers. But he doesn't sound entirely convinced himself, and the Siren found herself thinking Billy Wilder's initial casting instincts were not far off when he approached Pickford about Sunset Boulevard.

And the Siren was mightily amused by the description of Marlene Dietrich: "She baked me a fabulous Viennese cake; she is a great cakemaker." According to Maria Riva, who was deeply fond of Aherne, he was making a great deal more than cake with Marlene. But the lady was alive and still technically married at the time the book was published, and chivalrously Aherne breathes not a word of their affair, though he admits to wondering "how I could manage to bake Miss Dietrich." George Sanders must have rolled his eyes over such determinedly uncommercial discretion.

But the story that caught the Siren was one she had never heard before, that of Aherne's affair with the stage actress Clare Eames. Eames was married to playwright and director Sidney Howard, who later wrote the screenplay for Gone with the Wind. Howard was in London to direct his play The Silver Cord, and Aherne was cast opposite Eames. All went smoothly until Howard returned to America and the play began its run, whereupon the attraction between the two actors swiftly became a headlong, passionate romance. "I forgot she was a married woman with a child," says Aherne. "I forgot she was six years older than myself. I forgot my Puritan upbringing. I forgot that I was nothing but a penniless young actor. I heard the angels sing. I was lonely no more."



The affair, as might be expected, caused as much pain as it did joy. Early on Eames gave Aherne a copy of Anna Karenina. The actor fretted that he "might become her Vronsky;" Aherne must have known he already was. Howard, according to his rival, played Karenin to the hilt. "He did not care for Clare, but he cared deeply about what people said," says Aherne. Howard "cut off financial support, refused a divorce, and insisted upon the return of the baby and her nurse."

Over the three years of their relationship Eames and Aherne struggled to find work. Howard's stature made New York nearly impossible, and the romance coincided with the British acting unions cracking down on the use of American actors. Eames tried at one point to reconcile with Howard, but it didn't work. "Young as I was, I doubt I fully realized the tragedy of her position," says Aherne, and he evokes Anna Karenina once more when he describes his lover slipping into her former house to see her child when Howard was out. Eames was sick, and getting sicker, although Aherne never says precisely what the trouble was--severe abdominal pain, is all we are told.

Finally, as Aherne was playing a wordy, difficult part in a dismal failure of a play, Eames became extremely ill. She had an operation, and the night after it took place Aherne slogged through a nightmarish performance in front of a tiny audience. When the curtain finally came down, a car was sent and Brian was driven, through a driving rainstorm, to Clare's bedside. They told him she needed sleep, but the rain had turned into a deafening thunderstorm, and Clare died as he held her hand.

"I went on blindly running for the next twenty years," says Aherne. You don't have to be as romantically inclined as the Siren to wonder if he ever stopped. Joan Fontaine certainly felt Clare's ghost when she married Aherne a full decade later. In her memoirs, Fontaine paints a picture straight out of Rebecca: Barely finished with her honeymoon, she was dragged to Connecticut to visit Eames' dying aunt, and found herself staring at pictures of Brian and Clare on the piano.

The daughter Eames stole time with was Jennifer Howard, who married Samuel Goldwyn Jr. in 1950. Their four children included Tony Goldwyn, most famous for playing an evil yuppie in Ghost.



It is this scene, which took place only a year or so after Clare died, that the Siren can't get out of her head. It is as cinematic as anything she has ever found in a star's memoirs. Aherne had returned to Hollywood, but in a stage production of Barretts, again with Katharine Cornell. The audience for the opening included everyone from the Thalbergs to Charlie Chaplin.

Afterwards, Ruth Chatterton gave a smart party for Miss Cornell at her beautiful house in Beverly Hills. Stepping back from the buffet with a plate in my hand, I bumped into someone who stood, hard and unyielding, behind me. I turned in surprise; it was Sidney Howard, looking straight in my eyes, a few inches away. He said, 'I seem always to be in your way, Brian!' For an instant we looked at each other, and then I said, 'I am sorry, Sidney,' and moved away. I never saw him again. He remarried and died tragically, crushed by a tractor against the wall of his barn in Massachusetts.