Wild Boys of the Road (1933)

The Siren may not have posted much over the last month, but she did manage to watch a fair number of movies, for a change. December was William Wellman month on TCM, a happy development. You can add William Wellman to the Siren's list of Favorite Directors With Shaky Auteur Status, along with Mitchell Leisen, Jean Negulesco and the award-laden but Cahiers-dissed William Wyler. The Siren saw Night Nurse ("You mother!") and rewatched a bunch of old favorites (no amount of Mr. C's pointing out what the Foreign Legion was really like can dim the Siren's love for Beau Geste). The revelation, however, was Wild Boys of the Road, an uneven but sporadically brilliant movie, sort of what might happen if you sliced out two scenes from an Andy Hardy film and used them to bookend They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.

After watching a Depression-era movie the Siren often turns to one of her favorite works of social history, Since Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen. Published in 1940, the book has the advantage of immediacy, and the Siren hasn't read anything that betters Allen's descriptions of daily life in the Terrible Thirties. Still, it must be admitted that Allen is not especially good on the movies, drawn as he is to prestige pictures. Here's his introduction to an aside on Hollywood's output:

As for the movies, so completely did they dodge the discussions and controversies of the day--with a few exceptions, such as the March of Time series, the brief newsreels, and an occaisonal picture like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and They Won't Forget--that if a dozen or two feature pictures, selected at random, were to be shown to an audience of 1960, that audience would probably derive from them not the faintest idea of the ordeal through which the United States went in the nineteen-thirties.

To which the Siren responds, "yes and no." Back we go to the Pre-Code debate below--the crackdown in 1934 had the not-so-coincidental effect of trimming back overt social critiques. From that point on, escapism became the far more dominant mode for big-budget Hollywood productions. But if you watched enough genre movies, you still might get a clear enough picture, and if you watched pre-1934 films you would definitely know how hard the times were. And Joseph I. Breen locked up a lot of Pre-Code movies, so Allen's memory of early 1930s cinema may have faded. Wild Boys of the Road, from 1933, offers a particularly bitter and, the Andy Hardy ending perhaps excepted, accurate indictment of the Depression's cruelties.

The beginning of the movie might fit more comfortably in Only Yesterday, Allen's history of the 1920s. Eddie (Frankie Darro) and Tommy (Edwin Phillips) are teenagers concerned with cars, girls and getting into the local dance. Tommy, whose mother takes in boarders, is barely clinging to the middle class. Eddie has his own car and a father with a steady job. But Eddie soon comes home to find his parents talking quietly and desperately at the dining room table: the father has lost his job. Eddie sells his beloved car for scrap, but despite handing the $22 he makes over to his father, he can't find anything steady to help at home. Unwilling to become a burden on their parents, he and Tommy decide to light out for the territories by hopping freight trains.

Wellman filmed the boy's wanderings on location, and the decision gives the long middle section of the film a depth and darkness the Siren has seldom seen in American movies of the era. The two main actors were quite petite, and Wellman plays this up when filming the dangerous task of getting on and off the trains. The sense of peril, of the speed and size and impossibility of stopping the moving train, makes you realize how something like Sullivan's Travels has glossed over the difficulties. (Wild Boys renders train-hopping several times more terrifying, for example, than watching Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones.) The cars themselves are dark, cold and offer no protection from predators.

Once on the train the boys meet fellow drifter Sally, who is hopping freight trains disguised as a boy. (Sally is played by young Dorothy Coonan, whose later marriage to Wellman lasted 42 years and produced seven children). There's a humorous bit where Sally, unjustly accused of stealing food, lands a hard blow on Eddie's face that sends him scampering to the other side of the boxcar, even as he realizes he's just been hit by a girl. But Wellman still films this in a way that conveys Sally's vulnerablity--she's horizontal, on one side of the frame, face out of sight, two boys looming over her. You sense the physical dangers for these kids at every second. Later, when the threesome join an expanding army of transient children, Sally's comparative luck is re-emphasized as another girl, left alone in a boxcar, is raped by a guard (Ward Bond, in one of his few turns as a rotten apple). When the crime is discovered the boys, already forming their own rough social code, surround and beat the guard (to death, it's implied).

Attempts to find help get nowhere. Sally, Eddie and Tommy descend upon her aunt. The aunt, it becomes clear, has a brothel to run, but at least she seems willing to help. But police raid the place and the kids must go on the run again.

The number of kids on the train grows until Wellman captures an army swarming off the boxcars in an unforgettable image of social breakdown--his camera never lets you forget that these are children. The fear you feel for them reaches a harrowing climax in a scene frequently excerpted in Wellman tributes. Tommy is jumping off the train with the others, but like a much younger kid he doesn't watch where he's going. The boy's head strikes a metal crossing sign with enough force to send him to the ground, dazed, as a train approaches. Tommy tries to crawl away, but he can't make it in time, and his leg is crushed.

The Siren can't imagine watching this film in 1933, especially as what it depicts is no exaggeration. Allen tells us that by the beginning of that year, estimates put the number of transients at about a million: "Among them were large numbers of boys, and girls disguised as boys. According to the Children's Bureau, there were 200,000 children thus drifting about the United States." Adults having failed them, the kids in Wild Boys form their own city in the sewer pipes, taking care of each other in a set-up that probably gave the socialist-hating Breen the willies. The brief period of safety is broken up by cops, acting on orders to clean out the area. The police are sympathetic--"How do you think I feel?" snaps one, "I have kids at home myself"--but they still turn on the firehoses, and the central trio must move on again.

Toward the end there's a James Cagney moment, which Goatdog nails beautifully in his review (by far the best review available on the Web, by the way):

When the police chase Eddie into a movie theater after he inadvertently gets involved in a holdup, the theater in question is showing another Warner Bros. release, the Lloyd Bacon–directed Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade. This goes far beyond cross-promotion and into a covert criticism of escapist entertainment (perhaps specifically answered by Preston Sturges with Sullivan's Travels). Footlight Parade is about Chester Kent (James Cagney), who creates live musical prologues for films; during the chase, Eddie ends up onstage where such a prologue might occur, James Cagney looming over him mid-tapdance. Eddie has become one of Kent's prologues, a bit of escapist entertainment for the audience members, who get an extra vicarious thrill out of Eddie's suffering.

The movie winds up with Eddie, Tommy and Sally before a judge. Society, having manifestly failed the kids for the rest of the movie's running time, is suddenly ready to step up to the plate. All three kids will be taken care of, happy days are here again. As Goatdog notes, no one says the name "Roosevelt" but they might as well have his picture looming over the judge's shoulder instead of the equally subtle NRA poster. This ending was altered by Warner Brothers from a far more downbeat original, but Wellman manages a bittersweet coda. Eddie, overcome with happiness, steps outside the courtroom and does a couple of back flips. He turns around, still giddy--and meets the eyes of Tommy, whose leg is gone forever. Tommy gives a melancholy smile, Eddie returns it--but the point is made. Some marks from bad times are permanent.

Bette Meets 90-Take Willie

(The Siren returns from hibernation to join in Goatdog's William Wyler Blogathon. Please follow the links at his place for more on the great, yet curiously underappreciated Wyler.)


She was difficult in the same way that I was difficult. She wanted the best.--William Wyler at the American Film Institute tribute to Bette Davis





It was 1931. Bette Davis was 23 and still new on the Universal lot, scrambling for parts like the other starlets. William Wyler was 29, "not a very good director" by his own admission and struggling to prove he deserved his break despite the (justified) perception that he owed his job to being Carl Laemmle's relative. Davis was auditioning for a part in A House Divided and had hurriedly put on the only size 8 dress she could find. The dress was cut low, and when Davis walked by, Wyler remarked in a voice that carried to every corner of the crowded soundstage, "What do you think of these dames who show their tits and think they can get jobs?" The humiliated actress didn't get the role, which went instead to future flameout Helen Chandler.

So when Wyler, now contracted to Samuel Goldwyn and on his first loan-out to Warner Brothers, showed up to film Jezebel, Davis reminded him of his taunt--and the irony, now plain, that he had made the remark about an actress more willing than any in Hollywood to forego sex appeal when the character required it. Wyler searched his memory for the incident and drew a nice tidy blank, but he apologized to Davis and said he had been having a hard time in those days.

As filming began Davis must have known about Wyler's reputation for repeating takes until the actor was a nervous wreck. Henry Fonda was warned by Humphrey Bogart, who'd made Dead End with Wyler the year before, "Jesus, don't touch it. Don't go in there." But Wyler also had a string of excellent movies under his belt, having guided fine performances from a hopeless alcoholic (John Barrymore in Counsellor at Law), an actress in the twilight of her career (Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth) and even an actress whose chief qualifications at the time were dazzling beauty and a bed shared with a prominent producer (Merle Oberon in These Three). Davis knew her own self-discipline and fine talent, and she made her bet on Wyler.

Besides, the attraction between actress and director was already evident.

Although Jezebel is often described as a sop to appease Davis after she didn't get Scarlett O'Hara, the Siren's research indicates this isn't the case. The play (produced in 1933, three years before Margaret Mitchell's novel was published) was purchased for Bette Davis by Warner Brothers in 1937, while David O. Selznick was still actively searching for a Scarlett and no decision had been made as to casting. Selznick saw Jezebel , no doubt accurately, as the Warners' way of cashing in on the anticipation surrounding Gone with the Wind and was furious. So in fact, according to GWTW historian William Pratt, Jezebel (which was released in March 1938, eight months before Selznick ever met Vivien Leigh) was the factor that put a period to any chance Davis had at the part. Davis herself always denied the "consolation prize" idea, but in her sunset years she loved to intimate she had come close to Scarlett. Alas, that isn't true either--she was never very high in the running. As early as 1937, when Selznick was working out distribution deals, he rejected an offer from Warner Brothers that was contingent on casting Errol Flynn and Bette Davis and told friends that he would cast Katharine Hepburn as Scarlett before he would consider Davis.

Despite its being forever linked with GWTW, Jezebel is its own animal, a movie just as concerned with the fate of a strong-willed woman in a rigid society, but more harshly realistic about the ways society revenges itself. As a girl the Siren much preferred Scarlett to Jezebel's Julie Marsden. She hated the way Julie is humiliated, not merely in the excruciating ball sequence, but also when she is coldly rejected in favor of the vacuous Margaret Lindsay (a perfectly cast actress whom Davis couldn't stand in real life). Ashley makes his sexual attraction to Scarlett quite clear, but once Henry Fonda rejects Julie, it as though he never loved her at all. Later in life the Siren came to see that Jezebel--while it cannot compare with GWTW's vast historical canvas, indelible characters and peerless production values--is the more biting social commentary.

That may seem impossible, given that Wyler's pictures generally affirm rather than challenge social convention, helping to explain the appeal to Oscar voters as well as the films' rejection by those who prefer "termite art." You can read Jezebel as a straightforward women's tale of the comeuppance of a first-rate scheming bitch, and no doubt that is the tale Wyler and Davis thought they were filming. The movie approves of her treatment, audiences then approved of it and audiences today usually do as well. Witness the reviews that refer to the character as "Jezebel," instead of her name, and speak of her "deserved" humiliation at the Olympus Ball. But director and actress, through their careful attention to Julie's character, create something more complicated. Together Wyler and Davis show us an intelligent and headstrong woman who can exert her will only in petty, useless acts of rebellion. Then they show Julie stripped of her autonomy, first in part and then completely.

True to its stage roots the movie has three acts, well-summarized by Nick Davis as The Dress, The Duel and The Disease. Julie Marsden is engaged to Preston Dillard (Fonda) and happily stamping her size-five riding boots all over him. She loves Pres but, with few other outlets for her restless energy, she amuses herself by constantly testing his love. Infuriated by his refusal to leave a board meeting to attend a ballgown fitting with her, Julie rejects her regulation white dress in favor of a vivid red one that is being prepared for the town's most notorious courtesan. (As the town in question is New Orleans, we must be talking about one hell of a whore.) This is a beautifully set-up scene, Julie on a dais and surrounded on three sides by mirrors. Aunt Belle (Faye Bainter, showing why Stinky Lulu has anointed Wyler the Patron Saint of Best Supporting Actresses) and the dressmaker form a Greek chorus of warning and disapproval. (The Siren pauses to ask why, in the 1930s, dresses symbolizing wanton behavior always had some sort of swaying fringe to them. Was it hearkening back to the more sexually liberated 20s?) At first Pres refuses to take his scarlet-clad woman to the ball, then, stung by Julie's suggestion that he is afraid to defend her, he escorts her and sees to it that she is shamed in front of everyone she knows.

According to Davis, Jezebel's script gave the Olympus Ball short shrift and the production manager allotted a half-day to shoot it. Wyler took five days and turned it into the best scene in the film. It is, in effect, a drawn-out death scene, in which you watch the death of Fonda's love for Davis, the death of the old, confident Julie who is certain of her man's love, and the death of Julie's place in society. It is stunningly filmed but wrenching to watch, as they join a full dance floor only to have the other couples leave it, until gradually they are the only ones dancing. The formation is as old as time--the woman in the center, those condemning her forming an unbreakable circle, and the man Julie loves dragging her into the middle to extend her agonies just that much longer. As brilliant as the camerawork is, the Siren finds the scene just about unbearable. Not until MASH, as Sally Kellerman hit the ground in a vain attempt to cover herself, would the Siren encounter a scene that showed such soul-deep humiliation of a woman.

Pres leaves for the north and Julie shuts herself away on her plantation, Halcyon, only emerging to ride her thoroughbred horse in a way that risks breaking her neck each time. Comes word that Pres has returned. Julie, seeing her chance at last, dons the white dress she had rejected a year before and greets Pres, sure of her welcome. "I'm kneelin' to ya, Pres," she croons, sinking to the floor in an unmistakable evocation of a bridal dress being removed on a wedding night. And the Siren always wants to scream, "Get up! get up! don't DO that!" It's almost as lacerating as the ball, because the audience knows what Julie does not--Pres has come back with a Yankee bride. Before Pres can tell her, in comes Amy (Lindsay), Aunt Belle in tow. And here you can see Wyler's hand, because the Davis of Of Human Bondage or Dangerous might have flung her emotions all over the set. Instead, she keeps her eyes focused on Fonda and speaks two words without much emphasis, yet they snap out like her riding crop: "Your wife?" And then you see her denial turn to coiled, deliberate fury, directed at Amy with the politeness Southern women always muster best for those whom they truly hate.

Julie, desperate to win back Pres, begins to manipulate her old beau Buck (an unusually animated George Brent) into provoking Amy at every turn. Pres's brother, Ted, staying at the plantation for plot reasons that remain murky to the Siren, gets more and more hot under the collar until finally he challenges Buck to a duel, which Buck does not survive. Despite the fact that a belatedly remorseful Julie tried to stop the duel, she is blamed by everyone, including the loving Aunt Belle, who delivers the title line in unforgettable fashion: "I'm thinkin' of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God." Act two is over.

Before everyone can leave Halcyon in the same manner Julie once cleared out the Olympus Ball, Act Three is upon us--yellow fever results in quarantine. Julie responds in classic Southern-hostess fashion, telling the guests who now hate her guts, "Ladies and gentlemen, my home is yours, as always." Just in case we didn't realize that yellow fever was serious business in antebellum New Orleans, we get a series of intertitles screaming, "YELLOW JACK!" Ah, how the Siren loves intertitles. Pres hears of his brother's duel and for once it is the nominal hero who swoons dead away. But of course, the leading man can't just faint like a sissy so we learn Pres has come down with the dreaded yellow fever. Julie, suddenly (and, to the Siren, suspiciously) fired with noble purpose, persuades Amy to let her go with Pres to the island where yellow fever victims are being warehoused. The movie ends with Julie cradling Pres's head in her lap, as a simple wagon takes them down to the wharf and an uncertain fate. The swelling music and noble expressions want us to think Julie is choosing redemption through almost certain death. The Siren would much rather think Julie has no plans to die--she believes she's going to nurse Pres through his illness, and she's angling for another chance to hold her man.

So, let's talk about "90-take Willie" and how he directed his actors. The standard image of Wyler is of a director shooting take after take, and when the frustrated actor shrieks "what do you want from me?" he responds with something along the lines of "I want you to do it better." But the image of a rather inarticulate, ESL director doesn't quite play. From an early point Wyler chose his own subjects and his own writers, and he always chose adult stories, frequently from well-known literary sources, and scripts by the best writers in Hollywood. That doesn't suggest a man incapable of telling an actor precisely what he wanted. Wyler reportedly believed that repeating a scene broke down an actor's defenses and unlocked new approaches, but that doesn't mean he never had meaningful discourse with his actors. This fine tribute, by director Josh Becker, repeats a story about Henry Fonda enduring 40 takes of a scene on Jezebel. But Fonda himself recalled it somewhat differently, in an interview in Mike Steen's Hollywood Speaks:

I guess it's rather well known that there are actors who didn't like Wyler, just like there are actors who didn't like Ford or Fritz Lang, etc., because Wyler was known to want to shoot a lot of takes. You know, fifty takes and that kind of thing...I had a very good experience. Wyler and I got along famously. We're still friends. He never took fifty takes, though he might have taken thirty! But it was never without a reason. I've worked with John Stahl [on Immortal Sergeant] who was a director who would take it over and over again without telling you why. It was as though he was saying "If they're going to give me actors like this, what are you going to do?" You know? But with Wyler, every time he did it again he gave you something to think about. He'd say, "This time in the middle the scene react to a mosquito bite." These inventions would just come to him. He was rehearsing with film really! And that wasn't bad because I like rehearsals. So it was a good experience with Wyler, and I liked it very much.

Bette Davis later said that the moment when she began to trust Wyler's direction completely came when he forced her to watch dailies of a scene in Jezebel where she was coming down a staircase. He had shot the scene some thirty times, annoying the living daylights out of her. But when she saw the rushes, she realized that one take had "captured a fleeting, devil-may-care expression" on her face that was perfect for Julie. After that, she endured the takes. And like Fonda, she claimed that Wyler did make suggestions: "He'd remain silent, take after take after take, then when I was exhausted, he'd give a suggestion that would turn the whole scene around and make it live." She also said he "never asked you to make a move that wasn't logical. If you told you to go to a window, there was a reason for it."

With the auteur theory has come the persistent critical notion that directing actors is somehow a minor talent--that it is better to be Fritz Lang, insisting that everyone hit those chalk marks, driving people to near-breakdowns and consequently seldom having the same leading actor twice, than to be William Wyler, with your name attached to many great performances but (allegedly) not to any one overarching vision of film. The Siren says it's a fine thing to be either one.

There is a book to be written about William Wyler and Bette Davis. The story has the arc of a perfect women's picture. There's that inauspicious first meeting. There's the new meeting years later, on the set of the movie that would win Davis her second Oscar (and the first she truly deserved). Move through the director and star having a torrid extra-marital affair, carried on in the days of studio "morals clauses," when adultery came with the very real risk of ruined careers. Then Davis having an abortion during the filming of the even greater The Letter, and never telling Wyler. Continue with Davis' tale of how her single, highhanded act destroyed their chance for marriage. Then the last film together, where conflict reaches a level than ensures they never work together again. Finally, a meeting on Wyler's set much later in life, where Davis claimed, "I still saw that old gleam in his eye..."

Yes, a good story. But not as good as the movies they made together.

(Material on Davis and Wyler's personal relationship comes primarily from I'd Love to Kiss You: Conversations with Bette Davis, by Whitney Stine. Other sources include A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn and David O. Selznick's Hollywood by Ronald Haver.)

The Siren's Top 9 Objections to the AFI Top 100

Because she likes the number 9 better than the number 10. In reverse order, the Siren's problems with who made it, Ma, and who didn't:

9. This morning, my daughter was playing with a set of wooden blocks. There are 30 blocks in the set. Her twin brother reached out and tentatively grabbed one block. This left her with 29. His sister let out a howl that could probably be heard in Newark: "No, MY BLOCKS! MINE!" And I had the same conversation as always. There are a lot of blocks here. Your brother can have his one block.

What reminded the Siren of this scenario was the presence, once again, of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai on this list. These films weren't merely created by a British director, like Vertigo. They are culturally and thematically British, about British history and British empire. Who cares about which country put up the money? Kwai had one American star and two American screenwriters, it is true, but one writer was in France and the other in London because we had, you know, made them leave in order to get work.

We have a massive film industry. We have our own blocks and furthermore, unlike this morning's combatants, we are not four years old. We don't have to take away movies from the British. (The Siren assumes that the howls over the prior inclusion of The Third Man as "American" must have made a dent, since its omission can't be explained otherwise.) And while we are on the subject, A Clockwork Orange, despite Kubrick, doesn't make much sense as an American movie either.

8. No Fritz Lang. Come on--no Scarlet Street? no Woman in the Window? Well, the second one has been hard to see for some time. The Siren hasn't seen it since the 1980s, but its DVD-less state is about to be rectified.

7. Sophie's Choice really isn't a good movie. It is a pretty bad movie with one great performance and an unforgettable climax. The other movies on the list that the Siren considers unworthy can be justified in terms of cultural impact or later influence--even (the Siren swallows hard) something like The Sixth Sense. But Sophie's Choice was recognized as a deeply flawed movie even at the time, and if it had lasting influence on anything other than subject matter and Meryl Streep's (well-earned) career the Siren has missed it.

6. The Siren loves James Cagney. Worships him, in fact. And she loves Yankee Doodle Dandy. But if you are going to do only one Cagney, the one to do is White Heat.

5. Similar beef with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Swing Time is great, but everyone knows Top Hat is the one to beat.

4. You out there, yes you, the one whining about Citizen Kane. Cut it out. No, it is not a "boring movie." No, it did not achieve its status strictly because of "technical stuff." It is one of the most thematically complex movies ever made in this country, an astoundingly rich statement on American success and American failure, as relevant today as it was in 1941. The Siren finds Paradise Lost boring. Nevertheless she does not waste people's time by trying to argue that this means Milton is overrated.

3. If, however, you wish to argue that The Magnificent Ambersons has as much of a right to be here as Kane, the Siren will listen.

2. Famous exchange at Ernst Lubitsch's funeral:

Billy Wilder: No more Ernst Lubitsch.
William Wyler: Worse than that. No more Lubitsch pictures.

While this thought depressed the hell out of Wilder and Wyler, a lack of Lubitsch does not unduly ruffle the mandarins of the AFI. That is ten different kinds of wrong.

1. As Ebert points out, this list is more a marketing tool than anything else, designed to shift DVDs. Given the amount of attention the list generates, and the fact that it is compiled by "filmmakers, critics and historians," does it have to be so SAFE? So many Oscar winners. So many epics and adventure stories, so few women's pictures, so little grit. Everything already widely seen and widely available. Live a little, guys. Is a bit of a surprise too much to ask?

Postscript: Mucho morning-after discussion on this, of course. Edward Copeland tracks the ins and outs on the list, and M.A. Peel at Newcritics looks in depth at the Top 10. Here is Chuck Tryon, giving his thoughts on the value of lists in general, and speculating about the "why" behind some of the MIA. Jim Emerson gives his thoughts, and links to his own list at the bottom of the post. Lots of love to the Reeler for the best two-word summary of the AFI list, and his constructive suggestions for alternatives. A list of "100 Forgotten Films"--now that is something the Siren could applaud.

Still more--Daniel at Check the Fien Print has no tolerance for the D.W. Griffith entry, and a lot of skepticism over how it was chosen.

The Strange Fame of Frances Farmer, Part Two

(Part two of the Siren's thoughts on Frances Farmer, fact and fiction. Part one is here.)

Come and Get It (1936) is a tale of the Wisconsin logging industry. Frances Farmer begins the movie as Lotta Morgan, a melancholy singing floozy at a loggers' beer hall, and ends it as Lotta Bostrom, the floozy's namesake daughter. Before we say anything else about this movie, from its two (actually three) directors to its mangled message, let's start by saying Farmer is good. Not fire-and-music good, but good. In the first half, directed by Howard Hawks, she is close to wonderful.

As Lotta Morgan, Farmer is pursued by Barney Glasgow (Edward Arnold), a buccaneer type you'd pick as a future tycoon even if you hadn't seen "based on a novel by Edna Ferber" during the credits. The actress is at her best in the beer hall, warbling "Aura Lee" in a warm contralto, working the room and shrugging off the wolves. At first she's only mildly interested in Barney and his pal Swan (Walter Brennan, with a Swedish accent that must have influenced Jim Henson). When Barney moves to outsmart a shell-game being run by the beer hall's owners, he has Lotta stand nearby for good fortune, despite Farmer's warning that she's bad luck (how's that for hindsight irony?). When Barney wins big, at first Lotta connives with the hall owner to slip the logger a drug and fleece him of his gains. But Barney treats her like a lady, not a tart, and Farmer touchingly shows how the logger's kindness makes her reconsider the plot to swindle him. She discards the Mickey Finn she had prepared, and in a brawling, funny scene that's so Hawks it hurts, Farmer, Arnold and Brennan bust up the hall in a hail of flying metal beer trays. (The scene looks dangerous, and probably was.)

But Barney's ambitions outstrip his love for Lotta. He courts Lotta, but he marries a lumber boss's daughter. Lotta turns to Walter Brennan for comfort. Let me type that again, in case it didn't sink in. Lotta turns to Walter Brennan for comfort. If nothing else convinced the Siren of Farmer's abilities, that scene would have. Not many actresses could make you believe that a woman would rebound to a man who says "Yumpin' Yiminy"--but Farmer accomplishes it.

So the first Lotta disappears, and Farmer's performance never has the same magnetism, though she is still pretty good. The movie takes a jump in time, and Barney is now married with two grown children. He goes to visit Swan and Swan's daughter by the long-dead first Lotta. Barney spots this second Lotta, also played by Farmer, and is bowled over. In a futile attempt to turn back time, Barney spends a lot of money trying to buy young Lotta's affections. She, in turn, falls in love with Barney's son Richard (a high-billed but underused Joel McCrea).

One problem with the second half is that Farmer as Lotta must protest that she has no idea, no, really, absolutely no idea that Barney sees her as anything other than a surrogate daughter. The actress is thus faced with the choice of playing young Lotta as either the biggest ninny in the Great North Woods, or a heartless wench conning an infatuated old man. Her solution is to play Lotta as very gifted in self-deception. It almost works, but not quite. She does have some good scenes later on, including one where she pulls taffy with McCrea. As directed in Hawks' inimitable style, this activity is both a nostalgic bit of Americana and suggestive as all hell.

Unfortunately for Farmer, late in the filming Hawks ran afoul of producer Sam Goldwyn. As Todd McCarthy relates in his biography, Hawks put off having Goldwyn see the rushes as long as possible. The director used Goldwyn's bout of pneumonia as one excuse, claiming he didn't want the producer to exert himself unduly. Eventually Goldwyn figured out something was up, saw the footage and took to his bed with a relapse.

Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg points out that the producer's reaction was somewhat justified. Ferber wrote a screenplay that was close to her novel, employing her usual device of viewing history as it affects one rags-to-riches family. Howard Hawks merrily ignored Ferber, hired frequent collaborator Jules Furthman to help with rewrites, and proceeded to film a Hawks movie: Two buddies have adventures as they both fall in love with a husky-voiced, strong-but-shady lady. Plus, the book has an environmental message that Hawks tries to ignore. All that's left is the screen crawl at the beginning, with a vague reference to robber barons who "took from the land and never gave back," and a later remark by Joel McCrea's character, that if his father had replanted the forests his current job would be a lot easier. Ferber was angry that her major reason for writing the book was tossed overboard, but she should have paid more attention to the early logging sequence. Even William Wyler said it was the best part.

The logging scenes were filmed on location in Idaho by second-unit director Richard Rosson. Please believe the Siren when she tells you that even if you have not the slightest interest in Farmer or her story, this sequence alone is worth renting the DVD or setting your TCM reminder. Huge trees are sawed down, falling amidst other trees still standing. Then the camera pulls back to where the trees are being dismembered for shipping, and the scale of the destruction becomes apparent. Massive logs piled several stories high are hit with blasts and roll, in enormous waves, down to where they will be shipped. One man seems to jump clear barely in time, in a shot that remains terrifying even after 70 years. Everywhere the snowy landscape is dotted with stumps. The logs are sent down a river clogged with sawdust and twigs and topsoil. The images combine the conquering swagger of a Hawks film with a panoramic view of man's wanton destructiveness. The catch is that the splendor of the logging scenes overwhelms the rest. The remainder is pretty good, but to equal the impact you'd need Eisenstein, not an uneven dual-generation family saga.

In any event, before Goldwyn even got out of bed, he had a frank exchange of views with Hawks, and Hawks was gone. Goldwyn called in Wyler, who didn't want to do it, for reasons ranging from professional courtesy to lack of affinity for the material. But Goldwyn threatened to put Wyler on contract suspension and take over Wyler's Dodsworth, then in its final stages. Wyler agreed.

Farmer was miserable. McCarthy relates that from the beginning she had given herself to Hawks' tutelage (a pattern he was to repeat, most notably with Lauren Bacall). To get the part in the first place, she had gone with Hawks into the Los Angeles red-light district to look at streetwalkers and study their movements and personalities. She wore her costumes at home to learn how to move in them, and worked with the director to ensure that even her voice was pitched differently for the two characters. Now she was faced with "90-take-Willie," and she hated him. "Acting with Wyler is the nearest thing to slavery," she said. McCarthy quotes Wyler's response: "The nicest thing I can say about Frances Farmer is that she is unbearable."

Figuring out where Hawks leaves off and Wyler begins is no trouble at all. About a half-hour from the end, the movie suddenly becomes rather restrained, and before you know it, there's a garden party going on. There is a father-son fight at the party, but it occurs in a drawing room and consists of just two blows. The fight was Hawks's idea, but the Siren thinks he would never have resisted the temptation to have Edward Arnold and Joel McCrea throwing each other over the flower arrangements. Farmer's character breaks up the fight, in what McCarthy points out is a foreshadowing of Joanne Dru's similar function in Red River. But Farmer's intervention is ladylike, not that of a strong woman telling two stubborn men to knock it off. The Hawksian woman has become an Edwardian doll.

All in all, Come and Get It does make for sad viewing, as Farmer's greatest director was also her biggest lost chance. Joel McCrea tartly remarked that Hawks "brought her on and then left her high and dry. Well, Hawks didn't care about anybody except himself." Farmer "inspired Hawks in his most concerted effort yet to create a feminine screen persona from scratch, and the early Lotta certainly stands as the first fully realized prototype of the Hawksian woman," writes McCarthy. But Frances never worked with Hawks again.

(Background on the filming of Come and Get It is from Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, by Todd McCarthy, and from A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn. There is a nice collection of stills from the movie at this Frances Farmer fan site. The picture above shows Farmer as the young Lotta.)

The Strange Fame of Frances Farmer

There is a strange sort of screen fame, where the pitiful fate of an actor is far better known than anything in the artist's filmography. Marie Prevost is one of these, thanks to a misspelled serenade from Nick Lowe; others include Fatty Arbuckle, Wallace Reid, Maria Montez, and Jayne Mansfield.

The queen of this sad category must be Frances Farmer. She made only sixteen films, and most ordinary people haven't seen any of them. Only about three are still known to even the most ardent movie buffs (in descending order of repute, Come and Get It, The Toast of New York and Son of Fury). Her fame was kept alive via a largely bogus "autobiography," a lurid chapter of Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon and a wildly inaccurate biography. In this, Frances is in keeping with her company, too. Much of what you hear about these Bad-End Actors isn't true. Fatty Arbuckle was almost certainly innocent of rape; Jayne Mansfield was not decapitated in the car crash that killed her. (And the Ur-Source of much of the bad information is Hollywood Babylon, so much so that you start to wonder if this bilious man got anything right except the crime-scene photographs.) Farmer's brutal fate needed little embellishment, but the legends printed by various writers became the facts. And the "facts" eventually led to a Hollywood biopic, and the finest performance Jessica Lange ever put on film.



Frances as a whole isn't a particularly good movie. It is more of an endurance test than anything else--over two hours of watching a beautiful, sensitive and intelligent woman destroyed by the sorriest collection of gargoyles you ever saw in your life. Roger Ebert's review maintains that no one thing is blamed for Farmer's downfall, but in fact Farmer herself largely gets a pass. She does drink a lot, but sheesh, who can blame her? Her life is one betrayal after another, by Seattle, by her mother, by the studio, by reporters, by Clifford Odets, by her ghastly mother again, by the mental health system, by the local military, by a glory-hound doctor and finally by Ralph Edwards and This Is Your Life. There is a fictional "Harry York" character, played by Sam Shepard, who keeps popping up at times when Farmer or the script seems to need him. The device came in for a lot of criticism, but at least he gives the audience time to breathe before the next catastrophe befalls Farmer.

That this horror show is watchable at all is almost entirely due to Lange, who is believable, charismatic and sympathetic. She takes Farmer from her fiery, idealistic teens to hollowed-out middle age with seamless honesty. The false notes are in the script, never in Lange's characterization. It is quite the tribute to Lange that many scenes are as clear in the Siren's memory as the day she saw the movie, for the first and only time, in 1982. Lange's line deliveries are so perfect. I can still see her, radiantly beautiful at a Hollywood party, and hear her quiet but lacerating riposte to a conniving yellow journalist: "You seem like an intelligent young man. Can't you find a more dignified way of earning a living?"

Few people can sit through Frances more than once, although critic and blogger Kim Morgan recently managed it. It is a shame, though, that the movie advances the central myth about Farmer's life, that she received a lobotomy in a Washington state mental hospital. All available evidence indicates it never happened. Another indelible scene in Frances, almost as horrifying as the lobotomy, has her being gang-raped by soldiers from the local military base. This is also a highly dubious tale. And while the movie does portray her drinking, it elides Farmer's other contribution to her own destruction, amphetamine abuse. (She started taking Benzedrine to keep her figure, which tended to be a bit more corn-fed than even 1930s Hollywood preferred.)

So the Siren, like most people, knew Frances only through the 1982 biopic and the myths it enshrines. Until this month, the Siren had never seen a single Farmer picture. The one thing all sources agree upon, however, is that Come and Get It, the odd little logging epic begun by Howard Hawks and finished by William Wyler, was the best movie Farmer ever made. Jessica Lange has said it was the only film of Farmer's that wasn't a chore for her to sit through. The Siren recently sat through this one herself, and finally saw the real Frances at work. The through-the-years film gave Farmer a chance to play mother and daughter, tramp and trueheart. Everybody says Farmer was a loss to the screen, that she had great potential, but is it true, or just another story?

(Look here for part two of "The Strange Fame of Frances Farmer.")

More Takes on William Wyler

The Siren is delighted to see that the comments section for her post on Dodsworth has become a little love-in for the great William Wyler. The director occupies an odd spot in the cinephile pantheon. You wouldn't call him underrated, since his filmography makes him impossible to ignore. Yet somehow he doesn't get the same quality of attention as other directors of equal or even much lesser stature. Compare the wan little entry on Wyler in Wikipedia with the Hitchcock and Spielberg entries and you start to see what I mean.

He does consistently get his due when it comes to performances. His actors knew what they had with Wyler, even if his take-after-take style left their nerves shattered. Gentle Audrey Hepburn got her head bitten off by the director on the set of Roman Holiday when she couldn't cry on camera. The astonished Hepburn burst into tears, Wyler got his take and Hepburn, of course, later got her only Oscar. Ruth Chatterton, as noted, ended by hating Wyler's guts, but she lived long enough to see Dodsworth alone of all her movies retain its fame with the general public. "I would have jumped into the Hudson River if he told me to," said Bette Davis, who fell passionately in love with her director during the filming of Jezebel. Her second film with Wyler, The Letter, is the Siren's pick for the most subtle and penetrating performance she ever gave in a career filled with great roles. (According to Whitney Stine, Davis also liked to tell how costar Herbert Marshall managed to irritate "90-Take Willie" no end by just repeating "I'd be happy to do it again, Mr. Wyler," in that sterling-silver accent of his.)

Less frequently mentioned, but to the Siren's mind just as important, is Wyler's phenomenal ability to give his movies a sense of time and space. From the slum that abuts a luxury high-rise in Dead End, to the still, airless elegance of Washington Square in The Heiress, to an under-patronized bar in The Best Years of Our Lives, you enter the picture's world with total intensity and intimacy. So his actors aren't giving their all against a fantasy background you're either enjoying immensely or trying to ignore, as with Michael Curtiz; nor do they have to compete with an immutable set of scenic preconceptions, as they do with Hitchcock. In Wyler's best pictures--and the Siren thinks most of them are very good indeed--the players seem wholly truthful and in tune with the setting, no matter how epic or how small.

This Sunday, for her fellow Wyler lovers, the Siren is linking to two marvelous Wyler tributes. This one by David Cairns is on the indispensable Senses of Cinema site, and this one is by Josh Becker. Both men are directors, and that can't be a coincidence.

Dodsworth (1936)

The Siren has no idea what took her so long to see Dodsworth (1936). The cinematography, by Rudolph Maté, is flawless, the sets are spectacular, the acting truthful, the script smart, William Wyler's direction ... honestly, there must be a flaw in here somewhere but it isn't coming to me at the moment. Perhaps Mary Astor's character, Edith Cortwright, a warm and beautiful widow, is a little too perfect. Otherwise, this adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's novel is a superb look at a marriage coming apart under the pressure of the wife's midlife crisis.

But the wife, in Ruth Chatterton's note-perfect performance, is shown with kindness. Fran Dodsworth's self-deception, her longing for the adventure she hasn't gotten in her long marriage to an auto tycoon, are understandable and deserve sympathy. That sympathy also testifies to the movie's greatness, because Fran is deceiving Walter Huston, who is playing surely the most lovable industrialist ever put on film. Huston had already been Dodsworth in a play version, but neither he nor the movie retain even a trace of staginess.

Sam Dodsworth's character is less easy to recognize than his wife's. In her extensive preblogging experience with business types, the Siren wishes she could tell you she met many who, after being reluctantly dragged abroad by an itchy wife, eagerly absorbed as much of the Continent's culture as possible. In fact, the Siren usually saw wealthy Americans treating Europe the same way Charles Foster Kane did--as a gigantic shopping mall. At the beginnning, Dodsworth doesn't seem to see Europe as much of anything at all, other than a means of making his wife happy. He's retired, she wants to see the world. Clearly his heart is still back in the Midwest, at the auto works he built from nothing. But early in the movie, as the Dodsworths make the transatlantic crossing, we see Sam tearing into one of the ship's dining rooms to tell his wife he can see the approach of a famous lighthouse on the English coast. He's so boyishly excited he barely notices that table mate David Niven, in Early Career Cad mode, is flirting like crazy with a willing Fran. Up they all go to the deck, and Dodsworth tries to interest his wife in the view. She says she's freezing and the damp air is ruining her hair. Dodsworth, hurt but still enthusiastic, lets his wife and her would-be paramour go below.

So from the beginning, you're shown how this trip will play out. Fran talks a good game about wanting the refinements of Europe. "Oh, you're hopeless. You haven't the mistiest notion of civilization," she snaps at her husband. Retorts Sam, "Yeah, well, maybe I don't think so much of it, though. Maybe clean hospitals, concrete highways, and no soldiers along the Canadian border come near my idea of civilization." Yet Dodsworth, not a man to putter around enthusing over cathedrals and graves, still will find much in his travels to fire his imagination. Fran will be sitting at a table in one fancy place after another, seeking reassurance from men far less worthwhile than her own husband. Your heart aches for them both--at least, at first.

Eventually you see Fran's restlessness degenerate into outright narcissism, despite her occasional better impulses, her husband's love and even a kind warning from Mary Astor, delivered when Chatterton coquettishly "admits" to being 35: "Don't." Meanwhile, Dodsworth is drawn to Astor's character, and who wouldn't be. The actress is photographed to show a classical beauty that seems to echo all the art of Europe. To Dodsworth, she comes to signify all the things another country could offer him. Astor, so memorable in shady roles, takes a potentially dull character and turns her into someone you want Dodsworth to fight for.

According to A. Scott Berg, who discusses the making of Dodsworth in his biography of its producer, Samuel Goldwyn, the depiction of Mrs. Dodsworth is due mostly to Wyler's efforts. He asked screenwriter Sidney Howard for rewrites to make the wife less selfish in the movie's early sections and to keep some sympathy for her even as things progressed. Otherwise, Wyler reasoned, the audience would despise Dodsworth for having stayed with such a harpy. Wyler fought constantly with Chatterton, who wanted to play the part as a straight-out bitch. The battles got so heated that according to David Niven, after one take too many Chatterton slapped Wyler across the face and retreated to her dressing room. Mary Astor, who seems to have been almost as insightful as Edith Cortwright, said Chatterton's character "was that of a woman is trying to hang onto her youth--which was exactly what Ruth herself was doing. It touched a nerve." No wonder the Siren found herself wincing at the harsh truth of some of Chatterton's scenes.

Despite its pedigree and glowing reviews, the movie barely earned back its costs, and then only after several revivals. ("Nobody saw it. In droves," claimed Goldwyn.) Chatterton wasn't nominated for an Oscar, though Maria Ouspenskaya was, for a micropart late in the film. All four-feet-whatever of Ouspenskaya sweeps into a hotel room to tell the deluded Fran that no, she won't be able to marry her much-younger lover. Luise Rainer is famous for winning an Oscar with one scene, but Ouspenskaya appears to have gone Rainer one better by getting a nomination for one perfectly delivered line: "Have you thought how little happiness there can be, for the old wife of a young husband?"

Goldwyn always believed the movie was a financial disappointment because "it didn't have attractive people in it." (Come again, Sam? how closely did he look at Mary Astor?) But its reputation has grown over the years. Let the prickly, hard-to-please Sinclair Lewis have the final word: "I do not see how a better motion picture could have been made from both the play and the novel."



(Quotations on the making of Dodsworth are taken from A. Scott Berg's brilliant Goldwyn.)

Turkey Trot: The Naked Jungle (1954)

Mathematicians are often huge movie buffs, did you know that? The Siren didn't, until she worked for a number of them as a secretary in the late 1980s. One professor in particular (a genius with his name on many theorems) loved to drop by and have a chat or lob a trivia question at me. He came in one day to tell me his cable company had added American Movie Classics. This was, of course, back when that was still something to celebrate. "That's great," I said, "now you have a chance to see so many old movies."

"I'll tell you what I've discovered," he said. "A lot of old movies are dreadful."

Which brings us to The Naked Jungle.

Oy. Where to start? I bought the DVD for a famous perfume scene (a minor obsession of mine) and because it had the underrated, underdiscussed (and still living) Eleanor Parker. She got an Oscar nomination for her role in Caged as an innocent corrupted by a hideous prison system, and in the classic, beloved Scaramouche she played the sultry paramour of Stewart Granger. Obviously she had splendid range, but what happened here? She seems to have confused being ladylike with ramrod posture, swishing your skirts around as much as possible and confining yourself to three facial expressions (sympathy, indignation, and startled unease, the last being used to react to both marauding ants and Charlton Heston's attempts at lovemaking).

Parker plays the mail-order bride (yeah, right) of Charlton Heston. The year is 1901, and Heston has a plantation in a vaguely Amazonian region of South America. Here he merrily mows down the rainforest and grows who knows what, whilst bringing civilization to the aboriginal inhabitants lucky enough to toil in his fields. Now, the Siren does make allowances for time period. You just have to, or you wind up watching nothing made before about 1965. But some movies are easier to allow for than others. This flick's attitude toward the natives makes Gunga Din look like Cheyenne Autumn.

Anyhow, Heston has been here making a fortune since he was 19, and what with building a big villa and taming the Naked Jungle and all, by his own account he never got around to taming any Naked Wimmin. Now, male readers, ponder this question from the Siren. You have been more than a decade in darkest South America. You scorn to make whoopee with the local women. ("They have a name for the white men who go into the villages at night," snarls Heston. He doesn't elaborate, but that must have been some name.) Finally, your lawfully wedded wife arrives, and what a dish she is, in fact, she's Eleanor Parker. She greets you in her lace-trimmed period nightie, snowy bosom heaving. At that point, you

A. Hang out the "Do Not Disturb" sign and let your newly civilized native workers take care of the farm for oh, about a month.
B. Introduce yourself politely, then proceed as above.
C. Eye her suspiciously, clench your jaw, call her "Madam" about a hundred times, interrogate her about her past, pitch a total hissy fit when you find out she's been married before, and stalk off into the night.

If you answered "C," congratulations. You're ready for that Charlton Heston film festival.

This was the part where I decided to go ahead and finish watching the thing, because obviously we had left Reality Station and things could only get funnier. I did enjoy the rest of it, though I have might have a different attitude if I hadn't bought it on sale at Amazon.

So when Heston finds out that Parker is a widow, his jaws start working more furiously than ever while he talks about the piano he had brought up the river. It's a special piano, doggone it, nobody has played it before, he was SAVING IT and he wanted his woman to be the same way. Parker puts on her indignant expression and tells him, "If you knew anything about music, you would know that the best piano is one that's been played." Having delivered the best line in the movie, she swirls those skirts around and sweeps up into the bedroom.

The next few scenes are a lot of to-ing and fro-ing betwixt Parker and Heston. Heston gets more and more hot under the collar when Parker is around, until one night he asks her what perfume she's wearing. Is it one of the ones he brought upriver for her? "It's my own," she informs him. Swirl, swirl, exit. Heston drinks some brandy, clenches (even his temples get in on the act this time), then busts open Parker's doors a la Rhett Butler. "Why don't you wear the perfume I bought you?" he yells. He grabs a bottle and dumps about half of it on Parker. IMDB informs me that this was Heston's own bit of improvisation and Parker didn't realize he was going to do it. That must be why she pulls away from his embrace in a manner far more suggestive of a woman trying to avoid someone's halitosis than one who fears she's about to be ravished.

Chuck comes to his senses and leaves. Next day he announces that Parker has to go. He plans to take her to the riverboat himself. Unfortunately, when they embark on this journey they start encountering evidence that "marabunto," or soldier ants, are on the march and headed right toward the old homestead. The local commissioner (played by a positively svelte William Conrad) tells Heston, "You're up against a monster twenty miles long and two miles wide! forty square miles of agonizing death! You can't stop it!"

Of course, what a sensible person could do is get the hell out of the way, but this is a movie, and our man Chuck abruptly shifts gears from Charlton Heston, Man of Repressed Passion, to Charlton Heston, One-Man FEMA Squad. He has to stick around, you see, for the sake of the natives. If Heston abandons them, "they'll go back to the jungle and be just as they were when I found them!" he says. Gracious, we can't have that. Why would you want to be running around a tropical paradise practising native folkways when you could be picking crops?

After this we're in standard disaster-movie mode, and the dialogue and motivations get more ridiculous, and I don't want to post spoilers but is there anyone on the planet who thinks a studio is going to let Charlton Heston get eaten by ants in the final reel? No, not even if the producers have had enough of watching him act in the dailies.

At this point in his career, Heston was supernally handsome, and the cinematography was pretty. More than anything, however, The Naked Jungle gave the Siren even more respect for the genius of William Wyler and Orson Welles. The performances they got out of Charlton Heston in The Big Country and Touch of Evil are not disappointments at all; they're miracles.

Perfume at the Movies Meets Joan and Bette

More in the Siren's continuing series about fragrant scenes from classic films.

The Women, 1939

I don't care what anyone says; Joan Crawford at her best was a treat, and this movie proves it. She plays a sales assistant at a perfume counter, back when they called them "girls." Perfume plays a huge role in this flick from the beginning. Hard as nails and ambitious as Lucifer, Joan has Norma Shearer's husband in her clutches; the poor sap went to buy Norma a bottle of perfume, and never knew what hit him. Two of Norma's so-called friends, Rosalind Russell and Phyllis Povah, visit the perfume counter to get a better look at the perfume-pushing Other Woman, Crystal (Crawford). Of course Crystal figures out what they're up to almost from the minute they arrive, and gives as good as she gets. One of the best catty lines in the movie comes as Ros Russell picks up a bottle from the counter and begins sniffing. Crystal says silkily, "Oh, I shouldn't think that suggested your personality at all. It's called 'Oomph.'" Check out the perfume Crystal is selling, "Summer Rain," and the amazing, umbrella-bedecked bottle it comes in. And some things never change; earlier in the movie it's revealed that Crystal is supposed to push Summer Rain no matter what the customer is looking for. Later on, as Crystal's fortunes rise, check out the bath oil bottles in her huge, vulgar bathroom. "Well, I guess it's back to the perfume counter for me," she says ruefully at the end. But I don't think anyone who's seen The Women thinks there's a counter in all of Manhattan that can hold back Crystal for long.

The Letter, 1940

A William Wyler masterpiece, which boasts an opening as jolting today as when the film was released (I refuse to spoil it), as well as one of Bette Davis' most subtle and brilliant performances. As Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a rubber planter in Malaysia, she is as impeccably, crisply correct as she is corrupt. And the tightly controlled Leslie doesn' wear perfume on her skin. She places her scarf over her perfume bottle and turns it over to apply the scent. You watch her walk about, trailing her scarf, and know she is trailing that scent as well. The gesture is just another small, splendid detail that bit by bit gives you a complete picture of her complex character. I'd love to know if it was in the script, or came from Davis and/or director Wyler. (Thanks to my dear friend Sissi for pointing out that well-bred 19th century ladies frequently confined their perfume to their handkerchiefs or scarves.)

Meet Me in St. Louis, 1944

If you are one of those people who ask, "Why do some gay men have a thing for Judy Garland?", your answer is right here in Vincente Minelli's peerless musical. They have a thing for her because they have taste. She was a superb singer and a gifted and versatile actress.

But I digress. In this movie, Judy's character has figured out an excuse to get Tom Drake, a.k.a The Boy Next Door, to stay behind after an evening party: She asks him to help her lower the gaslight. As they go from room to room, dimming the lights, Drake leans in close and says, "Wow, that's nice perfume." Judy flutters, "Do you like it? It's Essence of Violet. I only take it out on special occasions." Drake replies, with a nostalgic sigh, "Exactly the kind my grandmother wears." Judy's expression is priceless.

The Corn Is Green, 1945

Probably the Siren's favorite perfume scene. Bette Davis is a teacher in a poor Welsh coal-mining town, and John Dall plays her star pupil, Morgan Evans. Joan Lorring is Bessie, the trampy, no-good daughter of Davis' housekeeper. (In a funny scene, the housekeeper confesses she can't stand her daughter: "Never liked her. Even when she was born, I took one look at her and said, 'No.'") One day, when Morgan is feeling frustrated and rebellious, Bessie decides to seduce him. Her come-on line, in its entirety, spoken in broadest Cockney: "I've got some scent on my hands. Would you like to smell it?" She holds out both her hands, palms down. Morgan takes a deep whiff, and immediately (and wordlessly) goes upstairs with her. Next thing you know, Bessie is pregnant. I have no idea what she was wearing. It was probably cheap, like Bessie. But few can boast that their signature scent gets such instant results.