by Ray Hagen
After her self-imposed hiatus, Ida inked a two-picture deal with Columbia in 1939, and was promptly cast in The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt and The Lady and the Mob. These were hardly the prestigious products she had hoped for.
Her resolution was rewarded when she learned that Paramount was producing The Light That Failed (1939) starring Ronald Colman, adapted from Rudyard Kipling’s 1891 novel about a famous commercial artist obsessed with finishing an artistic masterpiece before he loses his sight. Ida ached for the flashy part of the cockney wench who becomes the painter’s unruly subject.
Director William Wellman was taken aback when “that crazy little English girl … tore into my office unannounced and demanded that I watch her play Bessie Broke in the big scene from The Light That Failed. I did, right in my office, and I played Colman, and …. she was marvelous.”
It was the breakthrough she had waited for. Meeting the challenges of the role, Ida was unrestrained, vindictive, flirtatiously grotesque and simply spellbinding. Most impressive is the scene where Colman, desperate for time to complete her portrait, tries to attain the right emotion from her, the kind that bespeaks sorrow, a “sorrow so deep, it’s—it’s laughter!” Colman tears into her, commanding her to “Laugh, Bessie, laugh!” Ida breaks down into an hysterical heap, a display Wellman later said “affected” him. Lupino was the talk of the town with this down-and-dirty display of virtuosity; was this really the same actress, they asked, who only a few years earlier sat blandly by as Bing Crosby crooned to her? “Ida Lupino’s Bessie is another of the surprises we get when a little ingenue suddenly bursts forth as a great actress,” announced The New York Times.
An overwhelmed Mark Hellinger, an associate producer over at Warner Bros., had seen The Light That Failed. He deemed her perfect for Alan Hale’s faithless wife in Raoul Walsh’s They Drive By Night (1940).
Lupino, murderously in love with George Raft, meets her competition, Ann Sheridan (left), in They Drive By Night (WB, 1940). Ida’s intense performance earned her a Warner Bros. contract.
The film was culled from two sources, A. I. Bezzerides’ novel The Long Haul and Bordertown (WB, 1935). Ida, seven years wed to boisterous trucking business owner Alan Hale, covets wildcat trucker George Raft. “I wonder what I see in you anyway,” Ida purrs after he rebuffs her kiss. “You’re crude, you’re uneducated, you never had a pair of pants with a crease in them. And, yet, I couldn’t never say no to you.”
Her unrequited passion leads to Hale’s “accidental” demise in their garage from carbon monoxide. With him out of the way, surely Raft will succumb. Ida has a marvelous closeup registering thoughts about committing the murder, by leaving her drunken husband in the running car; with nary a word, we know exactly what’s going on in her mind …. and it ain’t pretty.
Lupino’s performance after Hale’s death is a tour de force. Now haunted by the garage doors, Ida’s mounting paranoia is a wonder to behold. She is constantly on edge, desperately trying to keep Raft within her radius … but then she sees Raft kissing Ann Sheridan. Uh-oh. Lupino’s foggy, dazed look is terrific, as she realizes it was all for nothing. When Raft reveals he’ll be marrying Sheridan, Ida cracks, letting down her guard: “She hasn’t the right to ya. You’re mine and I’m hanging on to ya. I committed murder to get you. Understand? Murder!”
Ida implicates him. Nothing can top Ida’s brief scene at Raft’s trial; it’s still a classic piece of acting. Entering the courtroom nervous, twitchy, haggard, delusional and catatonic, she ignores the lawyer’s questions on the stand while she numbly rambles on about the night she killed Hale. She ends it by repeating, with rising furor, “The doors made me do it,” until, laughing and thoroughly insane, she is carried out repeating those words.
She gave a strong and, in the final moments, explosive performance, one overshadowing everything in the picture. With They Drive By Night, stated The World Telegram, “she becomes one of the screen’s foremost dramatic actresses.”
It naturally earned her a Warner Bros. contract—how could it not? The studio, however, was in for a surprise: Ida was smart. She was burned by Paramount, and that was not going to happen again. Instead of a standard seven-year contract, Ida played it safe her first time at bat: one year, freelance rights, $2,000 a week for two pictures. She had made only one picture for Warners but was pulling down more money per week than many other contractees.
Whatever problems she and the studio would have, Lupino’s intensity was completely appropriate to Warners and they gave her a range of characters few but Bette Davis received. She immediately became second in line to the throne. “They would start at the top of the list,” Alexis Smith told Lennard DeCarl, “first Davis, then Lupino, then Sheridan. If they didn’t want it, I got it. I got the dreck.” Her ultimate problem at Warners was the competition. The studio was known for its great collection of strong women, all of whom vied for the plum parts. Of course, Davis wasn’t worried, but Lupino nipped at her heels all through her stay at the studio.
With her hysteria firmly in people’s minds because of her last two films, her next was a sudden turn of the dial, but no less riveting. She played opposite Humphrey Bogart’s “Mad Dog” Roy Earle in the classic High Sierra (1941).
Raoul Walsh directed this adaptation of W.R. Burnett’s novel, of old-timer Earle, just out of an eight-year stretch in the pen, attempting one last hold-up. Everyone was intent on creating a different kind of gangster movie, not just a shoot-’em-up, but one that had, said co-writer John Huston in a memo to Hal Wallis, “the strange sense of inevitability that comes with our deeper understanding of [Burnett’s] characters and the forces that motivate them.”
Bogie is attracted to Joan Leslie, wholesome, innocent and clubfooted to boot. He pays for her operation, then wants to marry her, but she’s just an illusion, a part of the changing world around him where he doesn’t fit. His friend Henry Hull tells him, “What you need is a fast-steppin’ young filly you can keep up with.” That would be lonely, clinging Lupino, a former dime-a-dance girl, whom Arthur Kennedy and Alan Curtis, two of Bogart’s hot-headed young accomplices, fight over.
Ida gave her role a desperate gentle quality, her quiet tenderness reinforced with an inner reserve, that runs opposite to what she’s supposed to be. Leslie, Bogart believes, is sweet, untouched, naive and, the word he throws in poor Ida’s experienced face, “decent.” Yet it is Ida who, in the end, “sticks,” who really shows she loves Bogart, not oh-so-pure Leslie, who becomes engaged to an older divorced man—turning disdainful, after all Bogart’s done for the sap.
Despite censorship problems regarding the sympathetic nature of Bogart’s criminal, the picture was a big success.
“Her intelligent and forthright playing gives complete conviction to the role,” remarked one critic about Lupino in the brutal The Sea Wolf (1941). This was the most famous of (at least) ten filmed retellings of Jack London’s story. Edward G. Robinson’s Wolf Larsen, ruthless captain of the Ghost, makes Captains Bligh, Hook and Queeg all look like kindergarteners. Throughout the sea voyage, he matches wits and brawn with, respectively, writer Alexander Knox and fugitive John Garfield, while beating and belittling his crew with cruel delight.
The few quieter moments below deck of the “hell ship” are supplied by Ida, also an escaped convict, and her instant soul mate Garfield. The two actors got along beautifully off-camera as well. “He was wonderful and I loved him. He and I were like brother and sister,” she said in 1983. Their scenes have a luminous intensity, a strong contrast to the atmospheric savagery dished out by Robinson. “If you live, I live,” she whispers to Garfield. “If you die, I die. That’s the way it is with me… We crowded all our lives together in one day.”
Lupino was happy about replacing Barbara Stanwyck, who declined the part, in Out of the Fog (1941), but she let it be known that she preferred John Garfield to the already-cast Humphrey Bogart. It sparked rumors that the two didn’t get along on the High Sierra set. A memo to Jack Warner, from producer Henry Blan
ke, supports this: “Casting Garfield for the part of ‘Goff’ would, as you know, relieve us of the problem of convincing Lupino to play with Bogart.” Years later, Ida denied hard feelings for Bogie, that her main concern was working with Garfield again.
And again it was a good fit, if on a different level. Out of the Fog, based on Irwin Shaw’s play The Gentle People, first produced by the Group Theater in 1939, was one of Warners’ most downbeat, moody pictures of the period.
Garfield, he of no redeeming values, and Lupino, she of the discontented spirit and desire to break out of her bleak, boring life, smolder the screen. She’s unmindful of his protection racket which targets her own father; all she knows is that sexy Garfield is hotter than her bland boyfriend, Eddie Albert—a given, dontcha think? “[W]hen he talks I feel like I’m burning,” she tells her startled father, adding, “I get hot and cold all over, and I feel like yelling. Nothing that ever happened to me before made me feel like this.” Lupino’s acting hits all the right notes. It’s doubtful anyone could have matched her beauty, sensitivity and understatement.
“There is only one performance I ever gave I’m proud of: Ellen in Ladies in Retirement [1941],” Ida said later about this loan-out to Columbia. From Flora Robson, who played the role on Broadway, to Lupino, then only in her early twenties, was certainly a stretch. Required to play older than herself—Robson’s original 60 was changed here to 45—Ida was masterfully ominous as a housekeeper protecting her insane sisters from an asylum by committing murder. “[The role] frightened me to death,” she added, “because many studio bigwigs thought I was too young for the part.” But Ida is magnificent, registering cold-blooded determination with compassion for her sisters.
Although her contract was redrafted at Warners ($3,000, loan privileges), Ida was unhappy. Hal Wallis claimed Ida rejected the role of the unbalanced Cassie in Kings Row (1942) because of Ladies in Retirement. When she was free, and again approached for the role, Wallis said “she told me that was afraid of the part. She had played several madwomen in a row and wanted a change of pace.” Memos show the real reason: She thought the part “small and secondary,” and “she didn’t want second-billing to [Ann] Sheridan,” though the two were good friends. Nor did she appreciate the proposed assignments Captains of the Clouds and Juke Girl. She found these movies “beneath her as an artist,” firmly declining them. It ignited a battle between her and the studio that almost drove her to seek contract termination.
Peace emerged briefly when she was allowed to appear in Forever and a Day (1943), an all-star tribute to England’s wartime spirit. Two years in the making, it eventually helped many British charities. The project was dear to her since her father still resided in England.
But at Warners she was on suspension, a common recreation for the studio’s many rebels.
Ida finally made amends with Warners, agreeing to The Hard Way (1942), a story about a driven woman who pushes, without conscience, the life and career of her younger sister (Joan Leslie). It was a great part for Lupino and her ferocity was well-matched by the direction of Vincent Sherman. Problems were a-brewin’, however.
After accepting and loving the script, Ida decided it was a mess. She was in constant friction with Sherman, screaming at him: “This picture is going to stink, and I’m going to stink in it!” Despite the antagonism between star and director, Sherman was in awe of Ida’s proficiency, and certain of her excellence in the part. “She was a wonderful girl,” he told Thomas McNulty in 1999, “although we got into an argument when we first started working on The Hard Way because she thought I was making her character too hard… She was very hard-driving in the picture, and I thought she gave a marvelous performance.”
To appease Ida, Sherman altered a later scene, one showing a softer side to her coldbloodedness. Nevertheless, she was against the role.
Her mood wasn’t helped when she was hospitalized with exhaustion; even on the set, various illnesses plagued her. Warners threatened to replace her with Ann Sheridan because of all the delays. Her mental state was further seriously impaired, mid-production, when her father passed away on June 10, 1942. “She was so devoted to her father and shattered by his death,” related her friend Geraldine Fitzgerald. She returned to The Hard Way a week later emotionally drained, mad at her part, and still suffering.
Ida needn’t have worried. She would win the New York Film Critics Award for her fine performance. Oddly, no Oscar nomination would be forthcoming. Nor would it ever. The Academy never saw fit to even nominate Ida in all her years as an actress, director, producer and writer. Surely the greatest piece of injustice in the Academy’s history.
A bit of a letdown, she went over to Fox for the dreary Life Begins at 8:30 (1942).
Back at Warners, however, there were more problems, alleviated somewhat by a great part in a mediocre movie.
Filmed from late 1942 to February 1943, Devotion would linger in the Warner vaults until 1946, mostly due to co-star Olivia de Havilland’s legal problems with the studio. The movie told the overlong story of the Brontë sisters, writers Emily (Ida) and Charlotte (Olivia).
Director Curtis Bernhardt captured a mystical aura surrounding the moors—“This is my world,” confides Lupino—that evokes the classic Wuthering Heights. Ida is the most serious-minded of the sisters, with deeper feelings than the frivolous de Havilland. The picture makes a point of contrasting them: Olivia, headstrong, ambitious, flighty; Ida, introverted, romantic, moody. “Love is not the tormented thing you are making it in your book,” Olivia tells her, clearly not understanding. Both love the same man, Paul Henreid, yet he prefers Olivia.
“Lupino was good as Emily, the most talented of the sisters,” Bernhardt said in 1977. “She was quite fun to work with. She had a fine sense of humor. She always called me ‘Ducky.’ Lupino was, in any case, more accessible artistically than de Havilland during the making of the film.”
During a break in filming, she and Olivia participated in the all-star Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943). In sharp contradiction to their heavy-emoting as the Brontës, the pair joined George Tobias in the jitterbug number “The Dreamer,” wildly dressed, over-singing and overacting to the hilt.
Better suited was In Our Time (1944), again directed by Vincent Sherman, with Ida playing an English girl who marries Polish aristocrat Paul Henreid in war-threatened Warsaw in 1939. A bit talky, it was nonetheless a literate, inspiring movie with substance. “As long as a nation preserves its honor,” avows Henreid, “it will always survive.” The director wasn’t so pleased. “Although it had a number of good scenes at the beginning and received a few favorable reviews,” remarked Sherman in his autobiography, “it was not clearly focused, nor was it an ideal subject for film: from midway to the end, it was a series of arguments about the economics and political setup in Poland and was of little interest to American audiences.
“Whatever pleasure I had from the picture,” continued Sherman, “was derived from working with the actors. Ida was no longer the hard-driving, ruthless character of The Hard Way but a warm, shy, romantic, enchanting young idealist. The range of her talent was immense.”
For her next, Ida again did a complete switching of gears.
Pillow to Post (1945) was her first and last comedy at Warners, about a woman who becomes her father’s traveling saleslady. “I phoned Ida Lupino, told her the story, and suggested she might enjoy doing it,” Vincent Sherman recalled. “She, too, was ready for a change. She read it and liked it… I had never done a farce comedy before, nor had Ida, but I was confident we could do it. I had seen her antics when she was in a playful mood …”
Playful is a good word for Pillow to Post, and Ida proves here why comedy ran in her family—she’s very funny, verbally and physically (trying to sleep on two chairs, jitterbugging). The wacky topical movie was a hit. Sherman later recalled Ida telling him that she got more fan mail from Post than any other film. With its success, you’d think Warners would allow Ida to let her hair down more often. Socially, Ida was
known for her absurd humor, but Warners failed to exploit it. “She could do comedy very well,” said Sherman. “She could do anything … She was all-around a great talent.”
At home, it was rough. She and Hayward, just honorably discharged from the Marines, were divorced on May 11, 1945. Ida still loved Louis, but the war had changed him; he suffered from depression and exhaustion, and was restless from his war experiences. It took some time for Lupino to recoup from the shock of losing her husband.
Pillow to Post (WB, 1945), with William Prince, was one of Lupino’s most popular movies and her only comedy showcase.
When she finally did get back to work, it was in a movie that remains a special favorite with her fans: The Man I Love (1947), quintessential Lupino. It was first envisioned as the life of tragic torch singer Helen Morgan (to star Ann Sheridan), but with time it was decided to go in another direction, calling for Catherine Turney to adapt Maritta Wolff’s novel Night Shift. Ida plays Petey Brown, a nightclub singer involved with club owner Robert Alda and tormented piano player Bruce Bennett. While the action slips and slides on occasional high-quality soap, Ida’s emotionally fragile yet strong performance (“I’ll land on my feet—I always do”) was one of her most telling, and a big hit for Warners. Her songs, “The Man I Love” and “Why Was I Born?,” were beautifully dubbed by Peg LaCentra, with Ida lip-synching with tremendous feeling.
Escape Me Never (1947) was next released, after sitting almost two years on the shelf. The flimsy plot had struggling composer Errol Flynn torn between waif Lupino and Eleanor Parker, fiancée of his brother (Gig Young). Author Doug McClelland later reported: “Ida Lupino is the cynosure, and she runs an unusually demanding gamut: from food-thief in schoolgirl drag to cafe entertainer, jilted lover to bereaved mother. That she is both convincing and appealing is a testament to the considerable ability she possessed and which Warners, glutted by Hollywood’s most formidable stable of female stars, never adequately exploited.”