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Archive for the ‘Beulah Bondi’ Category

Vivacious Lady

25 Jan

Vivacious Lady – directed by George Stevens. Comedy. 90 minutes Black And White 1938.

★★★★★

Charlie Chaplin said A Place In The Sun was the best American movie he had ever seen.

What was it that made George Stevens’ films so mesmerizing, so engrossing?

Those closeups of Elizabeth Taylor over the shoulder of Montgomery Clift? Yes, but you saw not just the beautiful eyes of a beautiful seventeen year old girl, you also saw she was in love.

You see the same in closeups of Joan Fontaine and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in Gunga Din.

And you see the same thing here in Jimmy Stewart looking at Ginger Rogers for the first time in Vivacious Lady. Jimmy Stewart told us that he lost his virginity to Ginger Rogers. She would have been 27 and he 30 at the time the film was made. And is that what we’re seeing in his agog eyes? Gratitude? First love? Surrender? It looks so real and dear.

It may just be that Jimmy Stewart was a marvelous actor. For certainly the love-scenes are delicious between them – funny, apt, sincere, clumsy. You just don’t want them to end.

George Stevens directed great comic love scenes. Tender and true. Or did he? When you look at The More The Merrier and you come upon the seduction scene on the stoop, if your heart isn’t filled with the humor of those passes and spurns, you must go back again to be born. How did Stevens do it? Was it luck?

I don’t know what George Stevens had for actors. As a film–maker of comedy before The War he is unrivalled in his visual grasp – he made no comedies after The War because he was the first to see Dachau and film it and the sight of is changed him permanently. His embrace of the actor is like no other, before or after The War. But before the war we have his trove of Americana comedy. Vivacious Lady is Stevens’ gift to us of ourselves.

Charles Coburn was an actor any director would thrill to have. (He won an Oscar later for The More The Merrier.) Coburn plays the heavy father of Stewart. He gives full value and a balance learned from playing many Shakespearean heavy fathers, which require comic high-horse just short of meanness. Beulah Bondi is lovely as his put-upon but shrewd wife. Ginger Rogers is as always willing to play the fool and give us an upside-down game when needed. And it’s great to see Jimmy Stewart deliver a full-on dressing down when the time comes. When someone like that gets angry, watch out!

Like the routine at the end of Woman Of The Year, the Vivacious Lady closing comes too long and too late. But never mind. Just enjoy yourself. When you’ve seen it once, watch how he films it. When you’ve seen it twice, watch how he lights it. When you’ve seen it thrice, watch how he details it. When you’ve seen it never before … just watch.

 
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Posted in Beulah Bondi, Charles Coburn: Screen God: Acting God, Directed by George Stevens, Frank Pangborn, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, Hattie McDaniel, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Carson, Jimmy Stewart: Screen God: Acting God, ROMANTIC COMEDY, SCREWBALL COMEDY

 

It’s A Wonderful Life

06 Dec

It’s A Wonderful Life – Directed by Frank Capra. Comedy/Drama. A home-town man teeters suicidally rather than bankrupting himself and his fellow townsfolk. 130 minutes Black and White 1946.

* * * * *

Clint Eastwood remarked how violent James Stewart was in the Anthony Mann Westerns he made in his late middle age. But they are nothing to compare with the rudeness, insolence, insult, and threat he delivers in this supposedly down-home performance of a would-be suicide learning about the life he has lived before it is too late. The insanity with which he throttles the foolish Thomas Mitchell is terrifying. He is violently mean to his children (as indeed one must be at Christmas to have a really meaningful Yule.) But the picture as a Christmas Classic probably looms as large as it does for the same reason that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol does – because of the Scrooginess of Stewart, as George Bailey, followed by the ghastly death-threat visions before he mends his ways. Jimmy Stewart is remarkable in the role, and except for the final scene of the sanctimonious, Deus ex-macchina rescue by the townsfolk of Bedford Falls, where there is something wrong with his singing and his smile, we have a great performance by a master of his craft. It is said that the film was not successful in its day, but I’m not so sure. I saw it when it came out, and I remember it vividly. And both it and Stewart and Capra were nominated for Oscars that year. Or perhaps there is not something wrong with that final smile. Perhaps what I see behind it is a hangover of his own nasty brush with the afterlife. Stewart had been away at war, one of the first big stars to enlist, and he bravely piloted more bombing missions over Europe than was good for any mortal man. Everyone was changed by The War, and what changed most in Hollywood was the virtual inability of its male stars to play comedy any more. Tyrone Power had been marvelous in light comedy; so had Henry Fonda; so had Stewart; George Stevens never directed another one, and screwball comedy never really returned. They came back from The War changed men. Solutions now weren’t so easy as they once were in Capra’s great, good-hearted comedies of the 30s. Capra never made a convincing comedy after World War II, and his career petered out. Here however he is in the last chapter of his topmost form. Every scene is beautifully written, every scene is perfectly begun, played, ended, and edited. Like Normal Rockwell’s paintings, what is illustrated here – and It’s A Wonderful Life is essentially a genre painting and an illustration – is the value of the truth of American community, which is that we must get along with people quite different from ourselves in personal style, race, and national derivation, and that to do so is to survive by the only means possible for survival: love. Love is what needs to survive. And love is what survives us. To make the illustration clear Capra does exactly what Rockwell does: he makes his humans almost caricatures. Like Rockwell, Capra’s characters live in gawky motion, and their gesture is strategized in the direction of endearing folly. All this is still true of America and Americans. Forgetting love’s survival through cooperation and public service and remembering it again is our national drama. This is what makes It’s A Wonderful Life the one film of Capra’s that will not date. To force the illustration, Capra has cast the story perfectly: first with Lionel Barrymore, the perennial Scrooge of radio in those days, as the meanie Mr. Potts, and he eats the role alive. Then with Ward Bond as the cop, Beulah Bondi as the mom, Donna Reed as the feisty wife, Gloria Graham as the town gal of questionable morals, Henry Travers as The Angel Clarence, Frank Faylen as the cabbie, Sheldon Leonard as the bartender, and a huge heterogeneous cast of townsfolk. It’s A Wonderful Life is a wonderful movie.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Beulah Bondi, Directed by Frank Capra, Donna Reed, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Frank Faylen, Gloria Graham, Henry Travers, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jimmy Stewart: ACTING GOD, Lionel Barrymore, Middle Class Comedy, MIDDLE-CLASS DRAMA, MUST SEE, PERSONAL DRAMA, Sheldon Leonard, Thomas Mitchell

 

The Furies

05 Sep

The Furies – Directed by Anthony Mann. Western Melodrama. An aging cattle baron and his baroness daughter clash over their mates, their land, and some squatters. 109 minutes Black and White 1950.

* * * *

Barbara Stanwyck is 43 when she makes this, and she is too old. True, she was a great star, and the best of all the two-dimensional female film actors. She refused Technicolor because her hair was gray, so she does look blond, her face admittedly is unlined, healthy, unchanged, her figure is lithe and trim, her stride is strong, and she looks great on a horse. But everyone who saw this when it came out knew that she was 43, because everyone had grown up with her. There was something older about her anyhow, even when she started in film aged 20 in 1927. The picture is a turgid melodrama, and it is ingenuous to claim it to be anything more. It is not epic, it is not noir, it is not The Eumenides or Greek tragedy. The execution of the film by the director is unremarkable because nothing in it can escape the necessities of turgid melodrama, which means an impenetrable thickness of plot on all levels that must be obeyed. The writing is occasionally witty, but the direction of the performances is questionable. Walter Huston overplays and indeed garbles and miscalculates the role of the rapscallion, domineering, and impractical cattle baron. By “overplays” I mean, when everyone in a story calls you a rogue, the best thing for an actor to do is not to “play The Rogue” but to play the opposite. Even if it was ever supposed to, the tension between Huston and Stanwyck never adds up to an Electra complex, because they both enjoy one another so much in their dash, ego, similarities, and common respect. They have too much sense of humor about one another to be neurotic and too many honest, horn-butting clashes to be unhealthy. Anyhow, while Stanwyck is a two-dimensional actor and therefore is incapable of over-acting, likewise there can be nothing beneath the performance. When Judith Anderson, with her lizard voice, comes in it is not as a sexual rival to Stanwyck but as a rival for her management of the ranch, and when Wendell Corey comes in as Stanwyck’s boyfriend, it is not as a sexual rival to Huston, but simply as a claimant to part of his property. Jannine Basinger in her book on Mann claims that Corey is like Huston and Anderson is like Stanwyck, and there’s something to be said for that, but not enough. The story and its execution is just old Stetson. Gilbert Roland is lovely as a blood brother to Stanwyck (and in love with her), Blanche Yurka is delicious in the Blanche Yurka role of Roland’s bruja mother, and Beulah Bondi commands the screen for our reassurance in both scenes in which she appears. Henry Bumstead deserves great credit for the adobe ranch mansion he made for the set. Otherwise the filming and direction are ordinary. Supposed to be New Mexico, it does not look like New Mexico. Rather like The Old Germany, The Furies is The Old Hollywood.  Its story is unconventional, the treatment of it conventional. It had to be: Stanwyck was starring. Yet, who could have played this part besides Stanwyck? No one. All the younger stars were too goody-goody. Hollywood fell partly because a failure of taste in developing strong-willed female stars to-be. In 1930 there was Crawford, Davis, and Stanwyck. In 1950 there were no young tough ladies on the horizon at all.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Barbara Stanwyck: THE QUEEN, Beulah Bondi, Blanche Yurka, Directed by Anthony Mann, Gilbert Roland, Judith Anderson, Psychological Western, TURGID MELODRAMA, Wallace Ford, Walter Huston, Wendell Corey

 

The Reign Of Terror [The Black Book]

31 Aug

The Reign Of Terror  [AKA The Black Book] – Directed By Anthony Mann. Costume Thriller. A resistance member infiltrates Robespierre’s inner circle with a mind to save France. 88 minutes Black and White 1949.

* * * *

Should be called The Reign Of Error. I saw it when it came out, the bottom half of a bill that played Wednesday only, and I thought it was a lousy movie. I thought Robert Cummings a consummate silly and completely miscast as a swashbuckling hero. His big worried eyes – no. What got me in ’49 was Arlene Dahl, and she does so still, 21 years old and astounding. She had a beauty spot and she was a beauty spot. Anthony Mann, for once, gives the female a strong leading role, at times more proactive and more in charge than the males, and Arlene Dahl meets the acting challenge like the movie queen she is. (In profile, her face has, like Garbo, a recessed brow. Check it out; see what it does for her face.) Certain of Mann’s crew such as Charles McGraw and Arnold Moss turn up here and do darn fine work. The story lacks focus, or rather it has the wrong focus, or rather it has a mixed focus. Are we focusing on Freedom, on France, on deposing Robespierre, or on his little black book? The black book looks like a McGuffin with too much screen time. But we have Beulah Bondi to rivet us to any scene she’s in, and Richard Basehart, another Mann actor, as Maximilien Robespierre, and he always looked crazy, so why not? He is never out of his pasty white wig.  The picture lacks Mann’s big final chase scene down a narrow passage, and that wouldn’t have worked anyhow because the costumes are so capacious. Actually Robert Cummings now does not look as silly as he seemed then and plays his scenes with considerable interest and skill. The whole piece is Costume Pulp, but John Alton who filmed it makes every scene striking with camera angles that skew the point of view, just for the sake of it, and you feel Alton having a better time with the material than anyone else. Though Alton filmed it, it is not noir. At the heart of it, I guess it is still a lousy movie. I wonder what I expected in 1949. I know. A swashbuckling costume French Revolution picture filmed by anyone but the confining John Alton. That is to say, an Action Adventure quite the opposite, with the big open spaces of an Errol Flynn show. But to do that, you also actually had to have Errol Flynn.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ACTION ADVENTURE, Arlene Dahl: MOVIE QUEEN, Arnold Moss, Beulah Bondi, Charles McGraw, Directed by Anthony Mann, HISTORICAL DRAMA, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MASTER CINEMA PHOTOGRAPHER: John Alton, PERIOD 18th Century, Richard Basehart, Robert Cummings, ROMANTIC DRAMA, TERRORIST DRAMA, WARTIME ROMANCE

 
 
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