by Ray Hagen
The contract with MGM was high-profile for the young actress, but she was basically low-profile on-screen. It was back to tiny parts, albeit in major movies; her roles as salesladies, train passengers, nightclub patrons and script girls wasted the potential Marie exuded. She seemed to indicate in these movies that there was something more waiting to be told, something smoldering just below the surface, but MGM had no idea how to bring out that quality.
It was left to the independent company Enterprise to give Marie her breakout performance, her first featured part. John Garfield, Bob Roberts and Abraham Polonsky had seen a test she had done of Jean Cocteau’s one-person play The Human Voice, which Marie’s friend Otto Preminger had directed for her. She was dropped by MGM, but cast in the now well-regarded Force of Evil (1948).
It was unappreciated at the time, perhaps because of its “autopsy on capitalism,” as director Polonsky (who was later blacklisted) called the original source material, Ira Wolfert’s novel Tucker’s People. Garfield is a mob lawyer involved with a corrupt numbers racket. Marie plays mob boss Roy Roberts’ sexy wife, trying to seduce Garfield. The unforgettable Windsor was a sharp contrast to the bland female lead, Beatrice Pearson.
Due to financial struggles imposed by the failure of their other major 1948 release Arch of Triumph, Enterprise was forced to seek aid from MGM. In turn MGM, who distributed the film, cut ten minutes from the final print and sent the finished product out as a second feature. Enterprise would suffer, but Marie’s edgy talents had at last been on display and she was now ready for larger roles. She finally was given a role to sink her teeth into, and from then on would generally attack each part with the same ferocity. Unfortunately, since her work was mostly seen in lower-case productions, A features largely eluded her.
After Garfield and the powerful Force of Evil, did Marie deserve Outpost in Morocco (1949)? There was something a tad obscene about George Raft starring as a dashing Legionnaire, with every female, including Windsor’s Princess Cara, daughter of the evil Amir, falling madly—deeply—incomprehensibly—in love with him. Marie’s glacial, exotic beauty (minus accent), her regal bearing and fiery temper elevated the silly, banal story.
“Bill Elliott saw the test I’d made as well as the George Raft film,” Marie recounted later, explaining how she was cast in Republic’s Hellfire (1949), “and when he learned I was a horsewoman, he fought the studio to use me instead of one of their contract players. He later taught me how to twirl guns, and I did a lot of stunt work in this Western that normally an actress simply would not do.”
Marie considered the film one of her three top favorites (alongside The Narrow Margin and The Killing). “Hellfire had a particularly wonderful script and a fabulous part for a woman, namely me. I got to play a woman disguised as a man in the first part of the film. Then my character turned out to be extremely feminine. On top of that, I really enjoyed a chance to use my ability as a horsewoman,” an ability honed while growing up in Utah.
“Take a good look, Lou—while you’ve still got a look left,” Marie growls to the man she’s about to out-draw. This is how her character Doll Brown is introduced, and, naturally, everyone shudders at her mere name. Everyone except Bill Elliott, a gambler-turned-preacher.
While the brothers of the man she killed aim to kill her, Marie is looking for her long-lost sister and Elliott is after her $5,000 reward to build a church. Along the way, Marie pistol-whips Elliott, plays poker, knocks back two straight whiskeys, rolls her own cigarette and sings two songs (“Shoo, Fly, Don’t Bother Me” and “Bringing in the Sheaves,” dubbed by Virginia Rees).
Marie is about to assist William Elliott (center) in Hellfire (Republic, 1949) by gunning down Marshall Forrest Tucker. The ruthless part was one of Marie’s favorites.
Her final scene, finding faith while trying to save Forrest Tucker’s life, is one of the finest she ever played. Holding the wounded Tucker’s bullet-hole with a tight compress, and unarmed herself, she reads from a Bible as the two brothers come closer with guns drawn. Her arms full of lead, but still praying, the seriously wounded, barely conscious Marie is finally saved by Elliott. The intensity of this scene (played mostly in closeup) has impressed many through the years.
In a perfect world, Hellfire would have made Marie a major star, but this was Republic. Its lack of success with audiences never deterred Marie, who mentioned Hellfire in just about every interview she gave. “I dearly loved that role,” she stated, with good reason.
She would later play opposite Bill Elliott again in The Showdown (1950). Marie is the tavern owner and cattle investor who Elliott may or may not be able to trust. Figures.
From over-the-top to second fiddle—to Vera Ralston, yet—Marie showed up next in The Fighting Kentuckian (1949), doing what she did best: acting the innocent but double-crossing everyone in sight. When we first see Marie she’s all sweetness, strumming a guitar and singing “Let Me Down, O Hangman” (dubbed by Virginia Rees). She speaks so delicately, so demurely to star John Wayne, you know something’s going to happen. The greedy, callous Windsor gets hers at the end when Grant Withers catches her picking the lock to his safe. Wayne finds her dead body lying half in the safe, her cold, dead hand open wide as gold coins spill into it.
Fox next gave her the title role in Dakota Lil (1950) about a Treasury agent (George Montgomery) on the trail of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang (led by Rod Cameron). Marie is a “counterfeiter, expert forger, skilled engraver and plate printer,” not to mention saloon singer (her songs “Matamoros” and the fabulous “Ecstasy” were voice-doubled by Anita Ellis); unaware that George is an agent, she helps get the goods on Cameron. Of course, there’s a mutual attraction between her and the gorgeous Montgomery. “What’s a smart girl like you doing in a broken-down cantina like this?” is his pickup line.
Though soft-spoken, Marie is no weepy Western maiden. Finagling with Cameron over her cut of some stolen loot she plans to put signatures on (as part of her and George’s plan), he offers her a quarter of the $100,000 because “you’re so beautiful.” Marie, giving him a steely look, cracks, “You’re so repulsive, I’ll take 50.”
“What’s a smart girl like you doing in a broken-down cantina like this?,” sexy federal man George Montgomery asks Marie in Dakota Lil (TCF, 1950).
The major studios viewed the unconventional Marie only as a B-movie babe—great in Westerns and crime melodramas, where her commanding presence gave the low-budgeter class. “Playing heavies is fun,” she admitted in 1991, “and the parts usually have meatier dialogue to chew on.” But, naturally, she craved diversity. Insisting that she “wanted to be Greer Garson” and “play things like Mrs. Miniver,” she knew that was never a possibility, because even when she was “the good girl” there was that interesting element of defiance in her makeup. “My height has always handicapped me. And my ‘look’ with my prominent eyes. I look more like the madam of a brothel than I do the girl next door!” she laughed. The studio system was breaking down and Windsor had no studio to prepare the proper big-budgeted vehicles for her. Instead, her stock was in inexpensive productions, some of dubious merit.
There’s little to brag about during the early ’50s. Hurricane Island (1951) at least had some camp value, with Windsor creditably and terrifically cast as a treacherous lady pirate. Marie called her supporting role of Don Taylor’s bigoted sister-in-law in Japanese War Bride (1952) “the bitchiest dame I’ve ever played,” which is saying plenty. Windsor had less than ten minutes in the classic The Sniper (1952), as the first of five victims of the disturbed, woman-hating Arthur Franz, but she’s extremely effective.
Her next film, no mere triviality, contained perhaps her best performance. It would solidify Windsor’s reputation with film fans.
The Narrow Margin (1952) was meant as just a little picture at RKO. Filmed in 13 days in 1950, at a budget of around $230,000, it came to the attention of Howard Hughes, who was running RKO at the time. He adored it, running it continually in his private screening room. The d
irector, Richard Fleischer, who was nervous about the movie’s downbeat ending, was sent for by Hughes personally to discuss the picture. “Hughes was so impressed with this little film that he wasn’t going to bother about fiddling around with the end of it,” Fleischer wrote later. “What he was contemplating doing was remaking it in its entirety—make an A film out of it, with stars. Instead of Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor playing the leads, it would be Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell. [It would now] cost $1 million. Instead of being the tightly wrought gem of a film noir we all believed it to be, it would now become—well, something else.”
The classic The Narrow Margin (RKO, 1952) pitted Charles McGraw against a ferocious Marie Windsor.
Hughes eventually lost interest because, says Marie, “he was involved more deeply in other business matters and had little interest in any film.” His initial enthusiasm held up its release for a good 18 months and The Narrow Margin was delivered to theaters without much fuss. It nonetheless became a sleeper, whose classic status is well-deserved today.
The actress thought The Narrow Margin “would thrust me into big stardom. But it took several years for the word-of-mouth to prove it was a great little picture.” Director Fleischer later raved to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry of the “brilliance” of Marie’s performance, continuing, “It was a great part for any actress to play, but it fitted Marie perfectly and she was able to give it the bite and the high-tension performance it required. I was fortunate to have such a talented actress in the picture.”
Her outwardly nasty character, seemingly a gangster’s widow, rocks the screen, as she goes toe-to-toe with virile detective Charles McGraw. Marie is specified as “a dish, 60-cent special. Cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.” Marie is more than capable of standing up to the rugged detective. He doesn’t know she’s a decoy, therefore he resents her, finding her cheap and sordid—exactly the point. McGraw and Windsor, their friction touched with electricity, turned in their most exciting screen portrayals in The Narrow Margin.
From the riveting The Narrow Margin, she became one of the Outlaw Women (1952). Marie is the leader (Iron Mae) of a group of lethal ladies taking over a town, with the ad campaign promising: “Meet the Babes Who Put the Bad in the Bad Men!” Shot in New Mexico, The Tall Texan (1953), refers not to Marie, but to her leading man Lloyd Bridges. It had the unlikely scenario of Bridges reforming bad girl Windsor. In his dreams.
Marie landed a supporting part as John Wayne’s ex-wife in Trouble Along the Way (1953), but this excursion to the big studios ended when she was cast right back at Republic for her next, City That Never Sleeps (1953). Shot in Chicago, it cast Marie as an ex-waitress married to lawyer Edward Arnold, regretting her indiscretion with shady William Talman.
She played temperamental actresses in two major screen biographies: So This is Love (1953), the story of songstress Grace Moore, and The Eddie Cantor Story (1953). These small parts served only as bookends to one of Marie’s most famous movies: Cat Women of the Moon (1953).
Windsor called Cat Women of the Moon “one of the worst pictures I was ever in.” She told Tom Weaver in 1996 that she knew instantly that things would not bode well for her or her fellow actors “the minute I walked on the set and saw that we were traveling to the Moon seated in desk chairs with wheels on the bottom! We were strapped into those chairs and off we went, into outer space! And I thought, ‘Gee, can’t they figure out that these chairs would be rolling and floating around?’ It was so silly!” Marie is the navigator of a crew on a rocket landing on the Moon. Their scientific expedition is made even more troublesome by giant spiders (with visible strings) and the appearance of a race of low-rent “Cat Women.”
The deadly females, who “have no use for men,” have been mentally bending an unaware Windsor to their will. Their motive is to seize control of the ship and take over Earth, with Marie in tow. Marie tries to fight their strong mental control, her desire to help the women (“You are one of us”) clashing with her desire for the supposedly macho Victor Jory (“You’re smart, you have courage and you’re all woman,” he growls). Marie’s best acting moments are the ones where she lapses between good and evil, grappling with her conflicting feelings—a classic case of an actress rising above her material. She would have made Mme. Ouspenskaya proud, even in this trash, with her “inner energy.” Surely she also deserves points for making her inconceivable romantic triangle with Sonny Tufts and Jory plausible.
On a personal note, Marie met realtor Jack Hupp, son of silent screen actor Earle Rodney, in August of 1954, on a blind date arranged by actor William Bakewell. Four months later, on November 30, they were married. The union produced a son, Richard, born in 1963; Hupp had a son, Chris, from his previous marriage. They would remain happily married until Marie’s death 46 years later.
Funnier than its reputation suggests, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), the team’s last for Universal, contained a fabulous part for Marie. She plays it straight and wicked as Madame Rontru, oozing pure evil—every inch the Egyptian villainess. Seeking the mummy Klaris and the sacred Medallion of Ra, she isn’t fazed one bit by the curse placed on it: “There is no curse that a gun or a knife can’t cure.” Flanked by two henchmen, she lets nothing—not even a mummy on the loose—stop her from her goal. Going mano a mano with the monster, Windsor first empties her gun into it and, when that fails, she beats the hell out of it with a torch and finally tosses a stick of dynamite his way. All in a day’s work. “Remember,” one of her followers foolishly warns her, “he’s dangerous.” Meaning every word, Marie snarls, “So am I.”
Roger Corman helmed Swamp Women (1956), a potent piece of camp co-starring Beverly Garland and Jil Jarmyn. Together they’re “The Nardo Gang,” felons who break out of prison to reclaim a diamond stash hidden in the swamp marshes.
Filmed after Swamp Women but released before, The Killing (1956), based on Lionel White’s novel Clean Break, is one of Marie’s most notable movies and director Stanley Kubrick’s first major work. Her part as Elisha Cook, Jr.’s, sultry, spiteful wife earned her Look magazine’s Best Supporting Actress Award in 1956 (“my happiest moment as an actress”), an honor that should have extended to the Academy.
“That’s my Sherry,” Marie remembers Kubrick saying after he saw her in The Narrow Margin, even turning down Ida Lupino and, thankfully, Zsa Zsa Gabor to get her. And he was right. Marie is flawlessly cast as Cook’s seductive, treacherous, two-timing (with Vince Edwards) spouse who impairs a $2,000,000 payroll heist arranged by Sterling Hayden and his gang. She gave a portrayal that exploded through the screen, scorching the celluloid. Hayden sizes her up, calling her a “little tramp,” branding her as someone who’d “sell out your own mother for a piece of fudge.”
It was a part that in lesser hands (Gabor) could have sunk into conventionality. Marie explained in 1999 her approach: “I never believed that Sherry meant to be so cruel, but she felt that life just hadn’t given her a fair shake, and she was determined that it would … so I tried to approach her from that point of view.” An impressed Kubrick later tried to get her for a role in his Lolita (1962), shot in England; Marie was unable to obtain a work permit, losing the role.
With no promotion (due to Kubrick’s dispute with UA), The Killing slipped into theaters, eventually developing a strong following, especially with noir enthusiasts. Again, Windsor had turned in a star-making performance in a film of high quality, but it changed nothing. The movies offered to her continued to be of lesser caliber, with Marie eclipsing her material. Not an easy task when your 1957 titles are The Parson and the Outlaw, The Unholy Wife and The Girl in Black Stockings.
Another of Marie’s 1957 releases, The Story of Mankind bears notice, not because of its excellence, but for its reputation as one of Hollywood’s most notorious all-star bombs. Screenwriter Charles Bennett, known for writing some of Hitchcock’s finest, was caught up adapting Hendrik Van Loon’s best-selling 1921 volume with producer-director Irwin Allen. Bennett, bristling at th
e memory, complained in 1993 that he “didn’t realize quite how dreadful it was going to be. I didn’t realize when I was starting off that it was really going to be just a collection of snippets from old pictures and things like that. It was dreadful, I hated the picture. But I’m a writer, I wrote it, I was being paid quite handsomely, so that was it.”
The all-star dud The Story of Mankind (WB, 1957) featured Dennis Hopper and Windsor’s two-minute bit as Napoleon and Josephine.
Marie thought the movie was a good idea—at first. “But it’s the kind of idea that demands top-notch quality, with better writing and production values than our film got. In some ways, it almost seemed like a glorified high school movie with a great cast.” Some of the actors were able to rise above the inept dialogue and situations (Ronald Colman, Vincent Price, Hedy Lamarr), while many more did not (Peter Lorre, Virginia Mayo as a giggling Cleopatra, the Marx Brothers). Marie—nineteenth-billed above the title—belongs in the former category. Acting as Josephine to Dennis Hopper’s Napoleon (don’t laugh—it works), the two actors turned their two-and-a-half-minute spot into a powerful, restrained vignette, worthy of a better movie.
Jack Warner requested that she be tested as Vera Charles for Auntie Mame (1958), with Rosalind Russell; the chic part would have been ideal. Marie was disappointed when Coral Browne was cast.