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Archive for the ‘Donald Meek’ Category

The Magic Bullet Of Dr. Ehrlich

18 Mar

The Magic Bullet of Dr. Ehrlich – directed by William Dieterle. Biopic. A German/Jewish doctor revolutionizes hematology and immunology. 103 minutes Black and White 1940.
★★★★★
Why I adore to watch Edward G. Robinson I simply do not know. Richard Burton said of him that if the most beautiful man in world and Edward G. Robinson were on the same stage together, no one would look at the beautiful man. He is my favorite actor. And he was one of the superstars of his era and his studio, Warners, along with a couple of other odd-looking blokes, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.

Robinson’s presence and authority, his ability to focus deeply, his ability to instantly switch course, his waking eyes which wake you up, his distinctive voice. Yes, all of that. But perhaps it is the simplicity and directness and immediacy of everything that he does. There is also his courageous heart, his kindness, his humor, his ability to take-it-in.

I don’t know. There is just something about him.

You would have thought he would be, like Charles Coburn, a hugely popular principal supporting actor. But no. He plays the lead always. The story is always about him. It is never about Coburn.

This is one of those biopics the era specialized in and that informed us, if not educated us, about Madame Curie (Greer Garson), Sister Kenny (Rosalind Russell), Gentleman Jim Corbett (Errol Flynn) et al. Dieterle directed some of them, and directs this one well.

The story of this remarkable laboratory scientist – who advanced microbe-dyeing so that a specific disease, such as tuberculosis, could actually be diagnosed by an ordinary physician; who pioneered the vaccine for diphtheria, who discovered the first specific for syphilis – is fairly accurate, and at all points riveting.

What makes it so is the photography of James Wong Howe. Every angle, every scene, every movement by the actors is held in narrative coherence and importance by his camera. He makes the picture exciting and he, in fact, tells its story. And he never intrudes.

Max Steiner did the score. The film was co-written by John Huston and boasts a list of supporting players so deep no modern film could equal it: Otto Kruger who is quite touching as Ehrlich’s best friend, Donald Crisp, Sig Ruman, Donald Meek, Henry O’Neill, Harry Davenport, Louis Calhern. Maria Ouspenskaya, a really bad actress from the Moscow Art Theatre, performs her usual portentous teeny grand dame, and Ruth Gordon doesn’t seem to know what to do as the housewife and mother of Ehrlich’s children. But, if you really want to know what great acting is in all its magnitude take in the great German Shakespearean Albert Bassermann in the role of an early unbeliever in Ehrlich.

Anyhow, I found all three acts of this picture thrilling. For me it didn’t date, because I am of that date. If this picture were made today, it couldn’t be half as good. Like Steinbeck, it was of its time, and has not lost its value for all that.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Albert Bassermann, BIOPIC, DIRECTED BY WIlliam Dieterle, Donald Crisp, Donald Meek, Edward G. Robinson, FILMED BY MASTER PHOTOGRAPHER James Wong Howe, GENRE, Harry Davenport, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Louis Calhern, Maria Ouspenskaya, Ruth Gordon, Sig Ruman

 

The Thin Man Goes Home

18 Jan

The Thin Man Goes Home – directed by Richard Thorpe. Who-Dun-It. The city sophisticates in a small town offer murder and detection to it. 100 minutes. Black and White 1945.
★★★★★
This series was not really murder mysteries. but pleasing charades in which the audience colluded – which is why they were so enormously popular. The murders are inconsequential. But the poise of Myrna Loy carries everything forward. Or you might say that the terror-tone of the pictures was really determined by Asta, the faithful trick dog of William Powell. Or it might be set by Powell’s cavalier suits.

Or it might be that we are always reminded that we are watching a movie. Which is really what we came to the Bijou to do. We are in on the joke of Nick and Nora Charles. Flippancy was the comedy of the age.

Anyhow, we the audience certainly feel we are part of a marriage which is sexy and affectionate. And we also feel, although she rags him something fierce, that the wife really supports the husband’s work to a degree that she becomes really part of it. But everyone keeps his temper, until the wrap-up, when the dastardly killer is unwrapped in a series of explanations impossible and not even desirable to grasp. And we are all part of that too.

As we are part of the banter between Loy and Powell, here written by Dwight Taylor (son of the great Laurette Taylor), so we always feel part of the party. Yes, these two are New York Sophisticates; and we are not; yes, they drink more than regulation allows, and we do not (although not here; here, only cider), but we go along with their ride as to the manner born. MGM let’s one peek into a world that never existed. That is the MGM style in its heyday, which this is.

And MGM’s huge stable of fine actors is corralled into this piece to give it depth of talent if not of profundity. Harry Davenport, Edward Brophy, Lucile Watson. Minor Watson, Anne Revere, Leon Ames, Gloria DeHaven, Lloyd Corrigan, Donald MacBride, and that tiny mushroom of bashfulness, Donald (O rightly named) Meek. I look upon him with wonder. Year after year, in film after film, he played exactly the same part. Fumbling, uncertain, apologetic, timid. With his appealing Jiminy Cricket face, he performed perfectly, an actor whose skill we enjoy but do not explore. A cartoon. I wonder what his life was like. He could not possibly have been the thing he portrayed. But what? He died the following year, but not before having made three more films.

Along with the movie, on the extras, is an MGM cartoon. I only remember Warner Brothers Cartoons at that time, but here is a brilliant one (the Warners manner, true), so good it has the imaginative power of a nightmare, if a nightmare could be very very funny. It is The Type For Cartoons. Don’t miss it..

It affords a pleasing chaser to our visit with the Charles, in this their penultimate of seven excursions in the form.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Anne Revere, Donald MacBride, Donald Meek, Edward Brophy, FAMILY FILM, Gloria DeHaven, Harry Davenport, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Leon Ames, Lloyd Corrigan, Lucile Watson, Myrna Loy, WHO-DUN-IT, William Powell

 

Keeper Of The Flame

10 May

Keeper Of The Flame – directed by George Cukor. WW II Melodrama. A gigantic American hero dies and a foreign correspondent tries to uncover the truth about him through questioning his wife.

★★★

To say George Cukor was a so-so director is not to stretch the bounds of praise. He had no sense of narrative proportion. He so loved the beauty and truth of actresses that he lumbered his films with scenes lengthened to glamorize them. For he loved women. What he did not love was men and women. He had no sense of the sexual energy between them, and you will find that most of his films are not about mating. This one certainly is not. So, as a follow-up of Woman Of The Year, by a director who certainly loved men and women, George Stevens, it is a baffling folly. However, in glamorizing Katharine Hepburn it is a triumph – one she carries admirably. With her carved visage, slim figure, and large hands, she is a goddess, not in the sense of a deity but in the sense of something carved out of stone. Indeed she enters the film draped by Adrian, in white like sculpture. It is one of the great opening scenes for an actress ever shot. And that is because the great William Daniels is filming it, lighting it, and choosing the floor-up angle to exalt it. The creator of Garbo in silents and sound, he is a photographer who could make every movie he shot look like a concerto. You’re not consciously aware of it, but each scene in the picture becomes alive and important because he is filming it to make it look like a Greek Tragedy. Which Greek Tragedy? The one in which, as E.B. Browning once said, Cassandra smells the slaughter in the bathroom. It is pointless to expatiate now how this picture could be improved (only to warn the viewer parenthetically that the idea of a fascist threat inside America during WW II was hooey). What one can say is that Hepburn plays all her scenes quietly, her cheeks held still, her sometimes grating volatility left outside the door. She exudes a convincing, mysterious and necessary calm. Excellent is what she is. And for that we can credit Cukor. Spencer Tracy plays the world-famous reporter, her part in Woman Of The Year, and again he is up against Hepburn’s devotion to a cause greater than anything that could lie between them. As in Woman Of The Year with Dan Tobin, she is almost under the control of her assistant Richard Whorf. Both men are played as fruits, which confuses their treachery with their sexual orientation, a combination which is truthful to neither. Are we supposed to hate fruits because they are treacherous or hate traitors because they are fruits? You see the absurdity of the matter. A strong supporting cast is put to abuse; Frank Craven as the doctor, Stephen McNally as the investigative journalist, Margaret Wycherly as the balmy mother of the great man, Howard Da Silva as the doorkeeper whom he saved and who hates him, Percy Kilbride as the smug yokel, Forrest Tucker as the great big jock, Donald Meek as the meek little hotel manager, and Audrey Christie as the newspaper dame whose sexual sallies tell us Tracy is not interested in women of any kind at all. During production, Hepburn and Donald Ogden Stewart the adapter fought badly over this story’s treatment and she won. Too bad. She fancied herself as a writer, but if you read her autobiography, you can see she was not one at all. As with Summertime and other ventures, her interference in the area of story are almost always wrong. It comes out of her desire to control, also known as, wanting to make things better, but in her case it springs from a fear at no place evident in this fine performance, which ends with one of the longest monologs ever to be given to the temptation of an actress to venture out upon. As she emerges from the shadows to do it, Tracy retreats into them. And William Daniels, quite right, has his way.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Audrey Christie, DIRECTED BY George Cukor, Donald Meek, DRAMA, Forrest Tucker, Frank Craven, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Howard Da SIlva, Katharine Hepburn, Margaret Wycherly, MELODRAMA, MURDER MYSTERY, Percy Kilbride, PERSONAL DRAMA, POLITICAL DRAMA, Stephen McNally, TURGID MELODRAMA

 

China Seas

10 Feb

China Seas — directed by Tay Garnett. Low Adventure On The High Seas. A ship captain endures pirates, monsoon, and the forward attentions of two desirable dames. 87 minutes Black and White 1935.

★★★★

Drama at every turn, so, why are you complaining – ain’t you gettin’ your money’s worth? Yes, you are, but it’s a crazy film. Clark Gable is before us, aged 34 and at the peak of his masculinity. There’s a lot to say about Gable as an actor, for he loved his craft, was absolutely in earnest about being good at it. Technically he is the perfect film star, with the most beautiful head of hair, shape of head, face, eyes, mouth, nose, and photogenicality. He has a voice unmatched for male ardor. He is absolutely sure of his sexuality, which is really the foundation of his appeal, and which means not only that he can go after what he wants, but that he can decline what he does not want, both without shame. And what he does not want in this story is the neediness of the dame he has been screwing, played by Jean Harlow. How different a sex idol she was than Monroe, who has all the seduction of pliability, soft as perfume, whereas Harlow is rapacious and hard. The peroxide hair of Marilyn made her look soft, that of Harlow tough. Interesting huh? The difficulty with the material lies in these two stars’ acting. Gable had a lot more talent and technique than Harlow, but he barks and barks, and Harlow is cacophonous. She is so monotonously raucous in her playing that the character looks insane, and you never think that Gable would put up with her for a minutes, much less possibly end up with her. They needed a suggestion of more variety from the director. Rosalind Russell, such a tonic as an actress, plays the English lady Gable really loves, a gal friend from his better days. Aboard this ship of fools is Robert Benchley as a droll drunk, C. Aubrey Smith, that firm but kindly hatchet, as a bemused ship owner, Lewis Stone as a deposed captain, Edward Brophy playing out that great Somerset Maugham story about the necklace opposite Akim Tamiroff, he of The Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavsky, along with Donald Meek, Hattie McDaniel delicious as the greedy maid, and, last but never least, Wallace Beery as the loveable heavy. Harlow’s and Russell’s dresses are by Adrian and are masterpieces of the costumers’ art. Dwell upon them. The story is by one of the most gifted screenwriters of the day, Jules Furthman. The filming of the typhoon at sea is worth the show – but all of it is worth the show. If only to just watch Gable, and see how good an actor he is, a factor almost impossible to scope past his personal presence, confidence, and beauty.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Aim Tamiroff: ACTING GOD, Aubrey Smith, Clark Gable: SCREEN GOD, Donald Meek, Edward Brophy, Hattie McDaniel, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jean Harlow, Lewis Stone, MAGNIFICENT FEAT DRAMA, MELODRAMA, Rosalind Russell: SCREEN GODDESS and ACTING GODDESS, Wallace Beery, WRITTEN BY Jules Furthman

 
 
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