And then, as I said earlier, as suddenly as his career had begun, it went into decline. He left Paramount and partnered with Howard Hughes to make The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, a mostly witless disaster that required three years to reach the screen and didn’t get a proper release until 1950, in a re-edited version. Sturges was at the time a comparatively young man (forty-eight when Diddlebock was released), and he still had a few films to make, of which Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and Les Carnets du Major Thompson (also known as The French, They Are a Funny Race) (1955) are the best, having from time to time some of his old cheekiness.
But from 1946 until his death, in 1959, times were hard for Sturges. One anecdote seems to sum up his story in those years. The director Richard Brooks was having lunch one day in Paris (where Sturges passed much of his time in his later years), and he saw the latter through the restaurant window. They acknowledged one another, and it became clear to Brooks that his colleague was in need of a meal. Which he provided. That’s the way it was with him in those years. The sudden success and the equally sudden failure are almost without precedent in Hollywood history—quite a number of good directors go on working past their best years—and one searches for the reason without reaching firm conclusions.
Perhaps his range was more limited than he understood it to be. Since his films were unique—nothing quite like them—it’s possible that he just ran out of steam sooner than he’d expected. His was a tight little world, dependent on a relationship with the larger world that was in perfect comic adjustment for a few years and then suddenly was not. Everything—the restaurant, the instinctive if fractious relationship with the studio—just went south.
Yet he hung in there. He was a gallant man. He didn’t feel sorry for himself. One night at the Algonquin Hotel, in New York, he lay down with a touch of what he thought was indigestion and died before the night was out, not exactly forgotten but yet robbed of the acclaim that would accrete around him beginning a decade or so later. Would he have fashioned a full-scale comeback had he lived out a full life? I simply don’t know.
His best film was probably The Lady Eve, the trimmest of them, the one with the fewest errors of execution. But all of his major works—there were only seven of them, between 1940 and 1944—have their felicities. The mystery that abides is the sudden disappearance of most of his gift after Conquering Hero. He had a short run, but as the years wear on, the strength of his best comedies does not weaken or grow frenzied.
By the time Sturges was running out of steam, screwball comedy was winding down as well. It was the war that mostly did it in, I suppose. Under its impress, we lost our taste for intricate romantic tangles. We settled for Bob Hope and his ilk—strings of gags (good, bad and indifferent) that were okay but were hardly high wit. He tended to play cowards, and the image I retain from his career is from Caught in the Draft (1941), wherein he repeatedly jumps off a piano in an attempt to flatten his feet to 4-F status. You can, I think, see what I mean.
There was, however, one certifiably great comedy to round out this period: His Girl Friday (1940), with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, under Hawks’s direction in a remake of The Front Page, with a matchlessly befuddled Ralph Bellamy as the hopelessly square guy she somehow thinks she loves in preference to Grant. At times—dare I say it?—I think it is my favorite comedy. It’s so mean-spirited, so breathlessly paced, so brilliantly written (by Charles Lederer, working off the Hecht-MacArthur play). I’ve seen it a bunch of times, and still it remains full of surprises for me. It is a masterpiece, but because it’s a comedy, it is mostly dismissed as “a nice little picture,” as if comedy were easy to do. Do not be deceived. And don’t you dare miss Billy Gilbert in one of the great, if brief, comic turns of all time.
16
Getting Serious
Since this book is primarily about pleasure, it follows (for me) that comedy has some sort of pride of place in its reflections on movie history. But that, obviously, places a serious limitation on its scope, not to mention on its definition of pleasure. So I need to play a little catch-up. I’ll begin with Bette Davis.
It is 1989. The phone rings one day. “Mr. Schickel?” a secretarial voice inquires.
“Speaking,” I reply.
“Miss Davis is calling.”
I don’t know any Miss Davises, but I’m willing to play along.
There’s a brief pause and then an unmistakable voice, somewhat cracked by age. It is her very self.
I had recently written a little appreciation of her, which she had read and liked. She was calling to thank me for it.
She wondered if we had ever met. I said we had. There was an afternoon in 1960, at the summer home of Robert Rossen, the movie director—she was visiting nearby and breezed over (they had known each other at Warner Bros. in the old days), full of energy and good cheer. It was probably the first time I had ever been in the presence of both a director and a star, and, putting it mildly, I was bedazzled, though trying not to show it, of course. A few years later, I did an interview with her for a television show I was working on. Naturally, she had no reason to recall either occasion—she’d had, after all, a lifetime of such forgettable encounters.
I had, in fact, come at her career in a rather backward fashion. I was aware of her as a presence in my early moviegoing years. I surely saw her in pictures like Now, Voyager; In This Our Life; Watch on the Rhine. And, of course, Jezebel (1938), which I actually prefer to Gone with the Wind—it’s so much more hysterical, so much more intense in performance. Such energy, such attack. There were other female stars I liked for one reason or another, but there was something about her I could not define that drew me to her.
“Fasten your seat belts,” “What a dump”—that sort of thing sealed my deal with her. And let’s not forget The Old Maid, The Star or Mr. Skeffington. They were, relatively speaking, latecomers in her career, but their energy was boundless. You couldn’t (anyway, I couldn’t) turn away from them. And that says nothing about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
She faltered in the 1950s. She was really quite young—only forty-two when she made All About Eve—yet already beginning the slide toward the grotesque, which preoccupied her in her later years. She had never been a looker, and instinct instructed one to turn away from the spectacle she sometimes presented. But she fascinated even in decline. It was a great career for a while, and then something of a shambles. And, come to think of it, really sort of a masculine one—tenacious, giving no quarter and asking none. At the end, her best work was on television. It was what was on offer, and she did it with a full and still hungry heart. You can’t ask for more. I imagine she was dreaming of a comeback. Possibly on her deathbed.
Anyway, here she was on the phone, her voice pretty much cracked by booze and cigarettes, but somehow gallant, overpowering in its way. She was still a star, bad pictures and all. Then she said a great thing: “We ought to have a date.”
I don’t know how I responded—probably with “Absolutely” or some such banality. And then she was gone as quickly as she had come. We never had that date. She died that autumn, at age eighty-one.
Bogart is an entirely different matter. He was a success of sorts on the stage, made some inconsequential movies in the early thirties, then retreated to Broadway, where he found something like stardom as the gangster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. It’s a dreadful movie. But thanks largely to Leslie Howard, he got to repeat his stage role on-screen and, as a result, received a Warner contract. From 1936 until 1941 he worked steadily at the studio, but to little avail. He was nominally a star, but he did not do much of significance—the one exception being Black Legion (1937), a very tough and absorbing story about a sour factory worker who becomes involved with a Ku Klux Klan–like organization, which to this day has not received its due.
People think The Maltese Falcon (1941) was his breakthrough film, and it is the first faithful adaptation of the famous Dashiell Hammett novel. But, aside from its delightful supporting cast (Sydney Greenst
reet, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor), John Huston’s first film seems to me not very good. It is cramped and static. Actually, it was another 1941 film, High Sierra, that was Bogart’s true annunciation. Released before Falcon, co-starring Ida Lupino, it is about a paroled gangster “rushing toward his doom,” as Henry Hull puts it, in the territory of the title—under Raoul Walsh’s expertly paced direction. Taken together with Falcon, it granted Bogart, after five wilderness years, authentic stardom.
Which was sealed forever in 1942 with Casablanca, about which far too much has been written. Of it I think simply this: It has everything. It is jam-packed with incident and paced with relentless fervor, including weltschmerz and wisecracks. And absurdity. Its success derives from the fact that it omits nothing. Lots of people have noted that it is full of nonsense. But in some sense, that’s its glory. You could say, perhaps, that it’s the perfect bad movie. But, of course, perfection of any sort is rarely attained in the movies. That’s why we remain hopelessly in thrall to them.
There was much more to come from Bogart, which we will arrive at in due course: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, Beat the Devil, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But this much we can confidently say: He had, in the forties and fifties, as great a run of pictures as anyone ever had. And even, at last, some happiness in a life that had previously not been notable for that quality.
Which brings me to my favorite movie star of the time—Errol Flynn.
Say what?
Hear me out.
Offscreen, a trumpet is sounding “Boots and Saddles.” On-screen, George Armstrong Custer is bidding farewell to his wife, Elizabeth. This, the central scene of They Died with Their Boots On (1941), is doomy with portent. Ostensibly, he is about to ride forth on what seems to be a fairly routine scouting mission to, of course, the Little Bighorn. They could as easily have parted with something like “See you in a couple of weeks.” But Flynn as Custer is edgy. And so is Olivia de Havilland as his tremulous wife. This final farewell is beautifully played in a very understaged way. They wish to make nothing of it—there has been a lifetime of farewells, after all. But at a certain point something must be said, and Flynn does so with a perfect line: “Walking through life with you, ma’am, has been a very gracious thing.” It’s one of the best romantic lines in the history of the movies, I think. And on it he exits.
She swoons. Frankly, I swoon. For me, the final battle, well staged by Raoul Walsh, comes as an anticlimax after this.
This is a lovely and romantic film of only dubious historical veracity—as if, in context, anyone gives a hoot about that. In it, Flynn was everything a romantic leading man was supposed to be—graceful, gallant, humorous, athletic, with the lightest possible hand with the ladies. As he was in The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Gentleman Jim, Objective, Burma! and a little-seen but lovely wartime vehicle called Uncertain Glory (1944), an intricate story of underground life in Europe, in which, quite possibly, he did his best acting.
His director, as he so often was in these days, was Walsh, whom Flynn habitually called “Uncle.” Raoul thought him to be a wonderful, instinctive actor, a complete natural. There was, of course, much trouble in this life—drink, women, a notorious statutory rape case, a career’s waxing and waning, and an early death at a mere fifty—but with some of his best work coming in his final years in character roles. By then, “in like Flynn” was a national joke. But the acting was not. His last role, in Cuban Rebel Girls, with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend playing opposite, was, yes, a bad joke. But if you balanced this career’s length against its accomplishments, there was much to be said for it, not least the grace and ease of a man who was never caught acting.
Forced to choose my favorite Flynn picture, I guess I’d have to pick The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), because it’s just so playful and action-packed. It follows most worthily in the tradition established by the Douglas Fairbanks silent film and seems to me—all nostalgia aside—every bit its equal in charm. It’s not at all harmed by the fact that Flynn and his co-star, de Havilland, were in love during the film’s making. Claude Rains was a superb villain, and the rest of the supporting cast was fine, too. Michael Curtiz directed. It is great pure entertainment.
Which brings me to Greta Garbo, to whom I always seem to come belatedly. As a kid, I’m not certain I saw her at all. Her specialty—doomed romance—was not something that held much appeal for little boys. She was more a vague presence to me than a living one in those days. Naturally, I had heard of her—who had not? But she was a mystery that I assumed would be revealed to me someday. Actually, it remained a matter of considerable indifference to me.
I’m pretty sure I first encountered her in the lugubrious Anna Christie (1930)—that stuff about not being stingy with the whiskey. These were not exactly ideal circumstances for our introduction. God, it’s a stiff. Or to put it in a slightly more high-toned way, it lacks, shall we say, a certain elegance?
Mildly puzzled, I did not see another Garbo movie until I was an adult. It turned out to be, thank God, Ninotchka (1939), which I think is the only great movie she ever made—no gloom and doom here—though a case can be made for Camille, Queen Christina and, yes, the supremely goofy Mata Hari.
Ninotchka is a marvel. Directed by Lubitsch and written by (among others) Billy Wilder, it contains this marvelous passage: “Comrades! People of the world. The revolution is on the march. Bombs will fall. Civilizations will crumble. But not yet, please. Wait. What’s the hurry? Give us our moment.”
Who could resist? It is such a perfectly judged film. I suspect that its perfection played a role in her subsequent withdrawal—what else did she have to do? There was only one more picture, Two-Faced Woman, which is not as bad as it is made out to be, but is hardly a great work. There was also a lot of teasing about other projects that never came to pass. She could afford to be idle—she would leave an estate of some $32 million—and didn’t have a damned thing to spend her wealth on. So she wandered about the midtown streets—people were always catching glimpses of her—saw a certain circle of friends (she was not a recluse) and gave no evidence of being unhappy or even particularly lonesome.
It was at this point that I briefly entered her life. At the time I was keeping company with a lovely woman who was friendly with the nutritionist Gayelord Hauser, with whom Garbo was in the habit of staying for a month or so every year. He groused about her—not the easiest of houseguests, we gathered. But everyone’s a star fucker. He called one day and invited us to join him for an evening with “Miss Brown” and a few others. Needless to say, we did not—could not—refuse.
There have been many learned studies of Garbo’s refusals and withdrawals. Therefore, I’m going to make a deliberately simple one. I think she was fundamentally a very shy person, who by some lucky-unlucky chance—it had a lot to do with her great beauty—found herself in a profession not entirely suited to her nature. She did the best she could with that circumstance, but, at some fundamental level, I don’t think she was ever entirely comfortable—not for long anyway—with being an actress, let alone a star. She was lucky that she made enough money to live her life in ease and pleasantness, teasing people with the possibility of a return to the screen, though I don’t believe she ever meant to do so.
On the evening in question, at ease among friends, she turned out to be pleasant, quite talkative, a full participant in the evening’s conversation—always as “Miss Brown,” of course. You would not have known—though of course you did—that she was anything but a lightly lined and handsome woman. She might have been the owner of a boutique or some such enterprise. At some point I found myself engaged in talk I couldn’t entirely follow about finance, and my attention wandered a bit—to her, inevitably. She caught my glance, smiled and winked at me. I winked back. For a second I was Armand or Vronsky, a whole generation of males caught in that all-knowing glance—our otherness, our waywardness, our peculiar devotion to plot and ploys at the expense of the
infrangible moment exposed, accepted, indulged. She had the gift for imparting this gift. It saddens me that she made it difficult for the future to find it. Yet I imagine her not especially caring about that.
Her career on-screen seems to me, in retrospect, not very distinguished. For a star of her sometime magnitude, there are not many movies that we would today seek out—too many of them are soppy, rather doomy romances, directed by Clarence Brown, who apparently got along well with her but obviously did not press her any more than the studio did. It was essentially a lazy enterprise. George Cukor, who directed her in Camille, once surprised me by remarking that she might have been slightly stupid. I think that’s probably not the case. I think she had a pleasant gig and saw no reason to press her luck with vaulting ambition. She was valuable to MGM, because her pictures did well abroad, until World War II interrupted that run.
So she idled her life away. She simply had very little ambition, as the rest of us understand the term. But she was, in the end, quite likable. Imagine that—after all the kerfuffle that had for so long surrounded her! I’d have been happy to see her again. I never did.
It seems to me from the foregoing that I come off as some sort of junior genius, full of firm and more or less advanced opinions on movies at a very early age. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am distilling here ideas and opinions that are the result of spending far too much of my life thinking about this stuff instead of reading the great books or whatever. In fact, at the time, I was just a doofus like everyone else of my age, liking just about everything that moved and spoke from the screen. I had no taste whatsoever.
One of the theaters I attended most regularly as a kid was the Times, about ten blocks from my Wisconsin home. Oddly, it had rear-screen projection. That’s to say the projector was behind the screen—no beam flashing over our heads from the back of the auditorium. Seething with restlessness (no sensible adult would attend the Friday night show or the Sunday matinee), we knew the double feature (plus a newsreel, cartoon and “prevues”) was about to begin when the projectionist appeared at the top of the left-hand aisle, newspaper folded under his arm, and strolled to the front of the theater to start the show. Such aplomb! We talked about that. Imagine reading the paper as marvels unfolded, unattended, on the screen before him. How cool was that? Except, of course, the word “cool” was not in our lexicon at the time.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 11