If all three sisters were to pair off with their respective husbands, Moore seemed to be the odd sister out. The only possible pairing was the provincial Moore and the worldly Niven. Strangely, this worked: Niven plays a rancher with cattle and chickens, and Moore plays a girl who grew up on a chicken farm, giving them at least poultry in common. Three sisters, three husbands, only one of whom, Niven, is a bona fide millionaire.
Three Blind Mice did not mark the end of the gold diggers movie; two years later, the theme resurfaced in the Fox musical, Moon over Miami (1940), and again in 1946, in Three Little Girls in Blue. With the advent of CinemaScope, Fox remade it again, this time with Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe as the trio in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). But the theme goes back even earlier, to Anita Loos’s novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), in which Lorelei Lee and her sidekick do not need a third party to achieve their goal.
Loretta gave a less satisfying performance in Three Blind Mice than she did in Ladies in Love, which at least proved that attempting to ensnare a rich husband (which may occasion temporary euphoria) usually ends in disillusionment. Three Blind Mice insisted that the three sisters, unlike Chekhov’s, found their mates, however circuitously. Loretta was more effective in a fairy tale that went sour than in one that was cloyingly sweet.
Less than a year after Judy’s birth, Loretta was a mother again—on screen. She looked unusually radiant, perhaps because the adoption scenario was finished, and in a few months Judy would be ensconced in a San Francisco orphanage. Loretta no longer had to visit the house in Venice on the sly. Gladys could return to decorating the homes of the famous, and Loretta to the only profession she knew. It was picture-hopping time, and Loretta made four in 1936, five in 1937, four in 1938, and three in 1939, her last year at Fox. For Loretta, a mother’s place was before the camera.
Private Number was released in early June 1936, a month before Judy’s removal to St. Elizabeth’s. Insiders must have exchanged smiles, or smirks, when Patsy Kelly described Robert Taylor, Loretta’s leading man in the film, as being “as handsome as Gable.” Loretta laughed knowingly, but innocently, and replied: “I’ll say so.” It was not exactly an apt comparison. The young Taylor, like the young Power, had a masculine beauty that complemented Loretta’s shimmering femininity. Gable was the opposite; he was all high testosterone and devilish eyes that could seduce without exerting the slightest effort.
By 1936, audiences had become accustomed to the class distinction film—either rich boy/poor girl, or vice versa—a plot template common to both serious drama and screwball comedy. Private Number was a woman’s film, with Loretta triumphing over falsehoods and perjured testimony that would have felled an ordinary mortal, which her character was not. She was Ellen, a maid in an affluent household, ruled by a demonically creepy butler (Basil Rathbone). When he sees Ellen, he is taken with her beauty, suggesting that he can help her “advance,” which she does without having to lose her virtue. The son (Taylor) is also smitten with her, so much so that class barriers dissolve and they secretly marry. But other barriers arise. Private Number would not be a woman’s film without Ellen undergoing a series of trials that would have broken the spirits of an ordinary mortal. The rebuffed butler dredges up her past, including a prison stint. When Ellen becomes pregnant, her in-laws threaten to have the marriage annulled. The courtroom sequence is a free-for-all, with false testimony, histrionics, and the climactic arrival of Taylor, who vindicates his wife and embraces fatherhood.
The one scene Loretta has with her newborn is done with uncommon tenderness. Judy was about three months old when Private Number started production. Loretta transferred the affection that she could not lavish on Judy to the infant in the film. In that one scene, Loretta displays the kind of maternalism that transcends mere acting. Or was the unfeigned love that she lavished on the infant in the basinet her last act of motherhood before she consigned Judy to St. Elizabeth’s?
Loretta’s return to Fox did not result in better roles. But there were no great roles for any actress at the studio. Zanuck was only interested in promoting the careers of those whose names would guarantee an audience: namely Shirley Temple, Sonja Henie, and perhaps the up and coming Tyrone Power. Temple and Henie had gifts that had little to do with acting, at which neither excelled. Temple became an industry, with coloring books, cutouts, and even a non-alcoholic cocktail named after her. She was also an extraordinary child star, whose deficiencies as an actress became evident when she moved into her teens. There was a sad ordinariness about her work in her last films (e.g., Adventure in Baltimore, The Story of Seabiscuit, and A Kiss For Corliss), which revealed a young woman no different from the generic brand that had been banished to B movie limbo. But there had never been a skater in film like Henie, whose bubbly personality and spectacular feats on the ice (a sound stage at Fox was converted into a rink just for her) ensured her popularity for a decade, after which she began appearing in icecapades, lavishly staged with Broadway-worthy choreography. Temple and Henie were flavor-of-the month stars, with careers that lasted sixteen and twelve years, respectively. Temple’s could easily have ended in 1942, ten years after she made her screen debut, since her roles from 1944 to 1949 could have been played by others. Similarly, Henie could have left Hollywood after Iceland (1942), rather than following the now forgotten Countess of Monte Cristo (1948). Loretta’s career, on the other hand, spanned more than three decades. She might have consoled herself with the realization that, for the time being, Zanuck was not turning out Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated films. Between 1936 and 1939, the studio could only boast of two Oscars, both in the supporting category: Alice Brady for In Old Chicago and Walter Brennan for Kentucky (both 1938). None of Loretta’s films were even Oscar material.
But Loretta was useful to Zanuck. When he decided to make Ramona (1936), Fox’s first full-length Technicolor feature, he knew he had no other actress for the title role. If anyone could photograph well in color, it was Loretta. The director was Fox’s specialist in Americana, Henry King, ideally suited to re-create 1870s Southern California. The studio publicists concocted a story that must have given every wannabe hope. On the basis of “exhaustive tests … made of practically every feminine star and some hundred-unknowns,” Loretta was chosen to play the convent-educated heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1886 novel, whose strongest appeal was to young women. The “exhaustive tests” bit was pure hype. Zanuck already had his Ramona.
Since Loretta was cast as the daughter of an interracial union (white mother, Indian father), she was given an exotic look, with burnished cheekbones tinged with red, and long black hair, parted in the middle and cascading down her shoulders in folds. The wig and makeup were in keeping with the character, who, once she learned about her origins, considered herself an Indian. Jackson never describes Ramona in detail, writing only that her protagonist had a “sunny face” and a “joyous voice” and extended a friendly greeting to everyone. The nuns at her convent school referred to her as the “blessed child.” Screenwriter Lamar Trotti did not have a problem with the racial aspects of the plot; he merely followed Jackson’s lead and had Ramona become romantically involved with another Indian, Alessandro (Don Ameche). Although by contemporary standards Ameche looked like a racial stereotype, with a feather sticking out of his headband, he was the film’s sole revelation, creating a genuinely moving—and ultimately tragic—figure. Ameche divested himself of his sometimes-oily smugness and connected empathetically with his character, as did Loretta with hers.
King was in his element, reveling in slow tracking shots and the opportunity to embellish what he probably thought was a hokey melodrama by supplying local color and detail, including sheep-shearing and a fiesta, in which Loretta danced so authentically that some moviegoers might have wondered what she would have been like in a musical, a genre that she never attempted. Melodramatic as Ramona is, there are scenes that generate real tension, especially when the newly married Ramona and Alessandro discover that the w
hites whom they had befriended and fed have returned to practice their own version of manifest destiny by taking over their property, the property of mere Indians. Another near tragedy occurs when their newborn child becomes gravely ill. Alessandro locates a doctor, who is too busy to travel and can only give him the medicine. One of the whites, to whom the couple was so generous, shoots Alessandro for commandeering his horse after his own became lame.
These scenes elevate Ramona from the level of storybook romance to tragedy, in which Indians suffer at the hands of rapacious whites. The film ends with a shot of Ramona after Alessandro’s funeral, greeted by Felipe (Kent Taylor), who was always in love with her. Ramona sighs ecstatically, “Don Felipe.” Fade out, The End. Ramona discreetly skirted the implications of another interracial union—this time between a white man (Felipe) and a woman of mixed blood. The novel, however, does not end ambiguously. Ramona and Felipe relocate in Mexico, where she and her daughter, also named Ramona, can live without prejudice. We read that the couple had a large family, “but the most beautiful of them all and … the most beloved by both father and mother, was the eldest one, the one who bore the mother’s name … Ramona, daughter of Alessandro the Indian.” If the film version had included Jackson’s epilogue, Zanuck would have been hailed (and in some circles, denounced) as a champion of civil rights. In the post World War II era, Zanuck would tackle such controversial themes as anti-Semitism and racism. But to quote Cole Porter, 1938 Hollywood was “the wrong time” and “the wrong place.”
One would think from the movies of the 1930s that heiresses merited front-page headlines, however frivolous their actions. In It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert can dive off her father’s yacht and embark on a series of escapades that capture the attention of the nation during one of the worst years of the Great Depression. It is as if It Happened One Night, classic that it is, were taking place in a world antipodal to the real one—a world where wealthy runaways and scoop-hungry reporters dispelled the grim present and offered the public a Neverland where all that matters is that boy gets girl, regardless of class distinctions and compatibility. If they embrace at the fadeout or, as in It Happened One Night, when the blanket barrier between their beds falls to the floor, the audience exits, believing that happiness is right around the corner.
When Love Is News was released in March 1937, the Spanish Civil War was in its second year, the Rhineland had been remilitarized, and the bloody Detroit steelworkers’ strike that left ten dead and more than ninety wounded was over. But what did it matter if a brash reporter (Tyrone Power) was writing unflattering pieces about a fabulously rich young woman (Loretta), who retaliates by informing the press that they are engaged? All audiences wanted to know is how two people who hate each other could possibly fall out of enmity and into love. With Loretta and Power in the leads, the film could hardly have ended with the two going their separate ways.
Love Is News is purportedly about the newspaper world. The staccato dialogue and newsroom ambience invite comparisons with the prototype, The Front Page (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone, who put his stars (Adolphe Menjou as the editor, and Pat O’Brien as his star reporter) through their paces, so that the scenes had the rhythm of a professional typist, hitting the keys at 120 words per minute. Love Is News is not in the same league as The Front Page—either the play by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht or Milestone’s film. Three years later, it was eclipsed by the definitive newspaper film, Howard Hawks’s radical makeover of The Front Page, His Girl Friday (1940). His Girl Friday featured Cary Grant as the editor, playing the role with the kind of serpentine charm that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, and Rosalind Russell as the reporter, who did not mind taking a bite of the apple and typed away as if she had printers’ ink in her veins.
Tay Garnett was a perfectly competent director, best remembered for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). Love Is News is lesser Garnett. His problem was not with Power and Loretta, who knew that the more improbable the plot, the more convincing they had to be. And they were convincing, in addition to looking as if they were made for each other. But the early scenes in the newsroom, the fiefdom of the managing editor (Don Ameche), could have taken place in some corporation. There is no ebb and flow of language, no dialogue delivered with the propulsive rhythm of a drill.
What made It Happened One Night a classic and Love is News just another flick is not just running time: seventy-two minutes (Love) versus 106 (Night). Even if Love Is News ran close to two hours, monotony would have set in; the plot would have either stalled or chugged along until the writers recharged the narrative. The beauty of It Happened One Night is that, in addition to being screwball (and romantic) comedy, it is also a road movie, with the characters learning enough about each other to constitute a courtship, even though they assume they are just traveling east. In Love Is News, one must assume that the couple will find whatever they have in common off screen; all Loretta and Power had to do was convince the audience that they would. If Loretta, then twenty-three, was having more mature crushes on her leading men, she could not have done better than Power. Zanuck had declared them a team. The press and the public concurred. And if Power was unavailable, there was Ameche.
Because she wore clothes so elegantly, Loretta was cast as an heiress again in Café Metropole (1937), a frothy romance that appeared two months after Love Is News and that might have had more buoyancy if it had been directed by Ernst Lubitsch instead of Edward H. Griffith. Screenwriter Jacques Deval devised a pretzel-like plot with enough twists to hold an audience’s attention and a denouement involving a phony check. The café owner (Adolphe Menjou) is amoral, but as played by Menjou, who gives the most satisfying performance in the film, he deceives with such silken charm that any attempt to expose him would be a violation of good taste. When a Princeton-educated playboy (Tyrone Power) cannot pay his gambling debts, Menjou has him impersonate a Russian prince and woo a millionaire’s daughter (Loretta). Despite his inconsistent accent, Loretta is so taken with Power (as she was in real life) that she goes along with the deception. Who could resist Power, who never looked so good as he did in the 1930s?
But if Cinderellas have their midnight, so do bogus princes. Loretta even resorts to having her father falsely arrested to keep Power out of prison for passing a bad check. And since the two of them complement each other—looking as if they had been sprinkled with Peter Pan’s fairy dust—neither prison nor parental opposition will stand in their way. Power’s accent is supposed to be “on and off,” and with just a quizzical look, Loretta lets the audience know that she is not deceived. She had also fallen in love with the imposter, gazing at him as if she were moonstruck and flirting her way into his affections. Loretta was now more adept at comedy of manners; at least she had dialogue that was sufficiently literate to pass for wit, delivering the lines as if they were lyrics set to the music of her voice. Loretta would appear in other romantic comedies, but few that allowed her to treat the dialogue like bonbons—delicious but unsubstantial.
Zanuck did not want to spend much money on Café Metropole. He only cared about 1937 releases that would yield a profit: the Shirley Temple movies Heidi and Wee Willie Winkie; the Seventh Heaven remake with James Stewart and Simone Simon; and the Dick Powell–Alice Faye musical, On the Avenue, with a score by Irving Berlin. He pared down the budget; insisted that Café Metropole be made in thirty days; demanded that at least twelve pages (he preferred fifteen) be cut from the script; and vetoed the tracking shot that would open the film, showing patrons entering the café. Just use a dissolve to move from the exterior to the interior; it’s cheaper.
Loretta’s weakest film with Don Ameche was Love Under Fire (1937), supposedly set during the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that Hollywood avoided until World War II erupted in 1939, the same year the Spanish Civil War ended; or, as some would say, the year the dress rehearsal in Spain for World War II did. By 1939, it was clear that the Spanish Civil War was the prologue to a global tragedy. But as far as Hollywood was c
oncerned, World War II provided such a wealth of screen material that the prologue could be detached from the tragedy and, if not performed separately—as it was in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)—become part of a character’s past (e.g., Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai, John Garfield in The Fallen Sparrow, Ray Milland in Arise, My Love). But even For Whom the Bell Tolls seemed like a World War II movie, in which the Spanish partisans, mostly Communists, were part of an anti-fascist resistance—which they were, in a sense.
Hollywood was uneasy about the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) not because the United States was neutral during the conflict, but because of the identities of the two battling factions and their allies. There were the Loyalists, who were fighting to maintain Spain as the duly elected republic the popular vote mandated, and there were Franco’s Nationalists, who wanted a Catholic Spain under the control of the Church and the military, as it had been in the past. The Catholic Church naturally supported the Nationalists, and radicals (socialists, communists, and anomalous left-wingers) passed the plate for the Loyalists, staging fund-raisers and benefits for the cause. The war produced its own idealists. Unlike the First World War, it was not a war to end wars, but one to prevent the one that a prescient minority sensed would occur within a few years and might be averted by the extirpation of fascism. The American Left’s finest hour came when 3,100 Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington battalions of the Fourteenth International Brigade. At long last the Left had a cause—to many, a noble cause. But the cause was perverted once outside forces intervened. Fascist Italy, sensing an ally in Franco, supported the Nationalist cause even if it meant bombing Spanish cities like Madrid and Guernica. Since the battalions were dominated by socialists and communists, the Soviet Union posed as their ally, while secretly subverting the noble gesture with the goal of turning what would have been a socialist utopia into communism’s newest convert—with Spain as the first communist country in Western Europe.
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