PRINCE POPPYCOCK

For what it is worth, and as she re-reads her own contributions the Siren must truthfully answer “not much,” the Siren is on Twitter, until such time as she decides not to be on Twitter anymore. Right here: http:/twitter.com/selfstyldsiren. No second “e” in “selfstyldsiren.” The Siren’s rightful title was usurped by someone, hence at least part of her Bad Twitter Attitude.

And a while back the Siren received some very kind words from City Island director Raymond de Felitta, whom she is happy to call a friend, over at Salon.

We veer away now from self-promotion to what the Siren has been reading and watching around the Web, mostly a little out of date, but this is the Siren, so out of date is a way of life.

Further to our Bonjour Tristesse discussion, the Siren has been remiss in not thanking Vertigo's Psyche for putting up this link to part of an interview Jean Seberg did with Mike Wallace just before the movie's release. Her youth and beauty and the unconscious foreshadowing will send your heart careening into your ribcage.

So you think the Siren is mysterious, do you? Well, she isn't, she's just paranoid, which isn't really the same thing. You want mysterious, go with That Little Round-Headed Boy. We all know he's actually Larry Aydlette, but he comes and goes like the Shadow, leaving no archives, just fond memories of how his intelligence and wit lit up a subject like Burt Reynolds or, in this instance, the criminally underappreciated George Roy Hill. Start here and work your way through. You will not, repeat not be sorry.

The best analysis of the sublime Sullivan’s Travels you could ever hope to read, at David Cairns’ place. Read the comments too.

David Ehrenstein earns the envy of film lovers everywhere by interviewing the too-fabulous-for-words Anna Karina, right here in the LA Weekly.

Glenn Kenny on The Shanghai Gesture, at the Auteurs. She said it at Glenn’s place, the Siren will say it again here—god how I love this crazy-ass movie.

At Allure, Goldwyn’s Folly, the ill-starred Anna Sten, with an addendum here, as always with rare pictures from Operator_99’s vast collection.

Vadim Rizov gives You Can’t Take It With You the fisheye at the Indie Eye, and boy did that movie have it coming.

Raquelle at Out of the Past, true to the film her blog is named after, has been blogging like crazy about lesser-known corners in the career of Robert Mitchum: beautiful screen caps from Ryan’s Daughter (and a meditation on CGI), Mitchum’s son James in Thunder Road, and not one but two posts on Mitchum’s Calypso album (she’s a glutton for punishment, is Raquelle).

At L’Eclisse, a fun post on a topic the Siren loves: classic comfort movies.

At Carole & Co., How the Cold War Aided Film Preservation.

The Siren's latest Youtube obsession: The Tired Old Queen at the Movies. Steve Hayes is a familiar face to the Siren—we knew each other a while back, when he was doing a hilarious one-man show that included such gems as a dead-on imitation of Susan Hayward’s Brooklyn-Meets-Dublin accent mashup in the unforgettable Untamed. Now Steve is doing for Youtube what he used to do for cabaret, and I'm working my way through them. Favorite so far: the Queen's exegesis of Lana Turner's driving in The Bad and the Beautiful.

Finally, the Siren hasn’t mentioned this before, but she has a sister, and her sister has a blog. The Velveteen Hamster has nothing to do with movies; that obsessive gene passed mostly to the Siren. My sister’s blog has mostly to do with raising three boys—my nephews. Two have a serious medical condition, and the third is autistic. Please excuse the familial pride, and Rebecca, please excuse my language—but goddamn it, this is a beautiful post.

The Siren has no particular reason for posting this anecdote, other than the way it consistently cracks her up. It concerns Samuel Goldwyn, whose fate it was to figure prominently in many anecdotes that simply never happened. His occasionally fractured English was irresistible to Hollywood wags, and eventually publicity folks just started making stuff up. This story, however, is from A. Scott Berg's excellent biography of the mogul.

Sexual liberation in the sixties turned the motion picture screen into an orgiastic playground, and most of Hollywood's latest product turned Goldwyn off. His private screening of Blow-Up in 1966 was going just fine until the scene in which David Hemmings cavorts with a couple of young girls. "Oh God," Goldwyn cried out, calling a stop to the screening; "this is a goddamned dirty picture!" Not long after that, Goldwyn complained to Billy Wilder that he had seen an even more disgusting disply--Hello, Dolly! Wilder was puzzled--not only because he could not imagine anything scurrilous in that harmless musical but also because Darryl Zanuck had not released it yet. Goldwyn insisted he knew what he saw, and it was one of the filthiest pictures he had ever seen. Wilder asked him to recite the plot. "Sam," he interrupted upon hearing about the drug-taking and sex lives of three aspiring actresses, "I think you're referring to Valley of the Dolls." "That's just what I said," Goldwyn insisted. "Valley of the Hello Dollies."

...or helped to invent it, anyway. This one is for the Siren's beauty blogger pals at Bois de Jasmin, Beauty Addict, Koneko's (Mostly) Beauty Diary, MonkeyPosh and Now Smell This, but most especially Cavewoman and Annie of Blogdorf Goodman.




The year is 1925, and Astor is filming Don Q, Son of Zorro with Douglas Fairbanks Sr.

Perc and Ern Westmore were handling makeup and hairdressing on Don Q: As I remember, it was the first time these departments had been created. Greasepaint came in a stick--somewhat like a big lipstick. Stein's Pink #2, I remember, was what I used. And it was pink, whitish pink. It was applied in streaks all over the face, then smoothed until it filled every pore. With a towel wrapped turbanlike around the head, you leaned over and using a powder puff loaded with a pinkish powder slapped it all over until the grease had absorbed it. [Sounds sexy, yes? -C.] Really very similar to the method clowns use. Eyebrows disappeared, eyelashes were coated, lips covered. Then it was brushed off nice and smooth.

Lipstick was a dark red. Reds went black on film, but if the tone was too light one's mouth would look white. The men used a lighter lipstick and less base makeup. There was eyebrow shadow, brown, and mascara, black, and then something that was called "cosmetique," a black cake of guck that was melted over a spirit lamp and then applied to the ends of the eyelashes with a match or a toothpick. This was "beading": It accomplished what false eyelashes do today.

As technical improvements made the film faster, the makeup began to look even more masklike and white on the scren. It was no good using darker tones of pink because they tended to "go black" if you moved into a shadow.

One day in the makeup room Perc Westmore and I played around with mixing the Stein's Pink with a just a touch of the brown eyeshadow. We melted it together, and stirred it up and put it on, and there was an ivory cast to the color that had never been used. On the screen it was miraculous. Bones began to show, skin looked natural and the tiny muscles of facial expression that had blanked out before were more evident. It was the beginning of panchromatic makeup. I wish I had held a patent on it!

The above is from Mary Astor's memoirs of her career, A Life on Film, which the Siren has been happily re-reading this week. What a good book it is, full of details other stars leave out. She gives you the nitty-gritty of casting, costumes, what the lighting was like and how it changed, the drudgery of on-set life, the weirdness of seeing yourself on screen and the split most stars make between their real selves and the "product." Astor even emphasized that split by writing her autobiography in two stages--the first, My Story, going into her many personal travails but pretty much leaving the movies untouched, and the second, A Life on Film, covering her professional experiences.

She was quite beautiful, with ethereal looks that never read as blatantly sexual on film, although she was a convincing (and hilarious) nymphomaniac in The Palm Beach Story. As with many actresses before and since, looks were deceiving. Of the two heroines of Red Dust there seems little question that it was Astor, not Jean Harlow, who was steaming up the sheets when the cameras stopped rolling.

That became clear during Astor's custody battle for her daughter, which occurred during the making of Dodsworth, the Siren's favorite Astor performance. Her ex-husband got hold of her diary and introduced it into evidence. Astor found her red-hot affair with George S. Kaufman splashed over the newspapers. If you believe Kenneth Anger the diary was practically pornographic; if you believe Mary the diary was mostly romantic doodlings, no more steamy than a Book-of-the-Month club selection. In any event, the diary was eventually destroyed by the court so we'll never know for sure. Samuel Goldwyn, who was producing Dodsworth, was asked at the time if he would use the morals clause in her contract to fire Astor. To his everlasting credit, he thought about it and said, "A mother fighting for her child? This is good!" Astor stayed in the picture.

Without question her role for the ages was the scheming Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. Astor says that to get the breathless quality she wanted when Brigid was about to spin another pathological whopper, she would hyperventilate before takes. The result was that with lines such as "I--I don't know what you mean," Astor's throbbing contralto voice gave lying a uniquely sexual quality. You relish hearing it as much as Bogart does, until he finally kisses her, no doubt to see if there's another way to get her to hyperventilate. Later film noir femmes would try similar tricks, but Astor provided the template.



She was pressed into a film career by her parents, who energetically sponged off her for years until Astor went to court to pull the plug. Perhaps the fact that she didn't choose her own career is part of why Astor often underrates herself in A Life on Film, dismissing something like Beau Brummel, which the Siren thought quite fine. She brought discipline and high standards to her work at all times, but acting evidently never engaged her full intelligence.

She turned to writing novels in later years, and the Siren actually read one of them. As a teenager in Alabama the Siren was the sometime babysitter for a toddler with a quadruple-barreled polysyllabic Southern name that everbody shortened to P.D. His parents were movie buffs and on their shelves were, as the Siren remembers, an early version of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film, some David Shipman and a few books of stills. After P.D. was coaxed into bed the Siren would curl up with the books, and one night she discovered A Place Called Saturday. The book, published in 1968, concerns a married woman who is raped, conceives a child and decides to keep and raise it anyway. The Siren doesn't remember much about the quality or the plot of the book, although she did read it all the way through, but she does remember that it opens with a very squirm-inducing scene of the wife in the aftermath of the rape. The book was the last one Astor wrote, and she died in 1987, aged 81, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House.

The first picture shows Mary Astor in the 1920s, the next as she appeared in Don Q. Her hair was auburn and naturally curly, and A Life on Film describes how novelist Elinor Glyn came up with a way to make it look "Spanish" on film. At a dinner party, Glyn pulled Mary over and proceeded to slick her hair back, piece by piece, with the butter from the dining room table. This was before hair gel as well as panchromatic makeup. Astor assures us that they found something less off-putting to use under the blazing hot lights of the time.

The middle picture shows Astor in the 1930s, and the bottom one is from The Maltese Falcon. While looking up Astor the Siren came across this vituperative essay about how she's the worst thing in The Maltese Falcon. Poppycock, says the Siren. But, to echo one of the Siren's favorite blogs, what do you think--allure?

And there she is, bending gracefully over us all and doing a splendid job of boosting the Siren's traffic (thanks, Mr. Wolcott!)--voilà, Vera Zorina, pictured above in her Waternymph costume from The Goldwyn Follies. Another final-round question for Silver Screen Trivial Pursuit (congratulations, Jonathan). One of Samuel Goldwyn's found-and-losts, like the gorgeous, luckless Anna Sten. Until recently the Siren knew Vera primarily as George Balanchine's second wife and the woman whom Ingrid Bergman replaced in For Whom the Bell Tolls. But the Fox channel ran one of the ballerina's few starring vehicles, a fluffy thing called I Was an Adventuress. And you know what? Zorina wasn't half bad, even when she wasn't dancing.

She had a refreshingly strong profile and a figure that was sheer perfection--toned beyond belief, more buxom and far less sylph-like than later Balanchine stars like Tanaquil Le Clercq or Suzanne Farrell. (However, upon comparison with the above still, the Siren thinks Zorina was padded quite a bit for Adventuress, a pretty common practice at the time.) Her acting is somewhere around the level of Hedy Lamarr on a really good day--definitely not great, but watchable. She has warmth and presence.

I Was an Adventuress was directed by Gregory Ratoff (hey kids, we all forgot him for Great Comic Character Actors and we shouldn't have). According to IMDB the movie was a remake of an Edwige Feuillère vehicle, J'étais une aventurière, and that's all the site says about the original, except that it was banned in Finland. (Your guess is as good as the Siren's.) Anyway, in the Hollywood version Zorina is the accomplice and lure for two crooks, played with gusto by Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre. Stroheim and Lorre have excellent chemistry, more so than the romantic leads. The two con artists give the same sub rosa sense of a bickering couple that you get from the Sidney Greenstreet/Lorre outings, as the Stroheim character tries to rein in Lorre's kleptomania and Lorre swears he'll learn to restrain himself, then lifts another watch.

Zorina poses as a countess in order to set up the trio's high-born marks, and her dancing is worked in too, somehow--she's one of those prima-ballerina-fake-countess-grifters that were littering Europe at the time. Would it surprise you to learn that she falls in love with one millionaire she's supposed to be conning? that the couple marry, and one big scene of domestic bliss finds her doing a perfect arabesque in the bedroom? (That was kind of unexpected, actually.) How about that von Stroheim and Lorre are determined to return Zorina to her crooked ways?

Well, I'll tell you what would surprise you--the ballet sequence at the end. The Siren was not expecting to see Zorina's dance partner arrive in full armor, and as he stomped onstage in this Renaissance Faire getup the Siren murmured "Oh, dear." But she should have banked more on George Balanchine's genius, because not only does the dance still work, it is also quite dark and startingly sexual, a different take on the tragic close of Swan Lake. There's a marvelous moment when Zorina bends away from her partner, the move shot straight-on so that she seems to peel away from him like the petal of a flower.

So the movie is ridiculous, but at the same time very enjoyable, with Zorina looking lovely, Lorre approaching the prime years of his Hollywood period and the Balanchine ballet to savor at the end. You can't look at the film and think the brevity of Zorina's career was as terrible a loss as Frances Farmer or Dorothy Comingore, but the Siren did think it was a pity the ballerina's star didn't survive long enough to see her forge a real career in musicals. She could certainly act as well as Cyd Charisse, and her dancing was magical.

A little background here on Zorina. One of the most poignant parts of A. Scott Berg's Goldwyn biography comes when he describes the producer's one-sided crush on Zorina, which played out as The Goldwyn Follies was filming in 1938. The ballerina was just 20 years old and, unlikely as it seems when you read about Goldwyn's behavior, she appears genuinely not to have perceived his feelings for her. Zorina had fallen in love with Balanchine, and was consumed with him both personally and professionally.

Goldwyn, meanwhile, threw everything he had into making her debut as memorable as possible, including hiring Vernon Duke to write the music for the Waternymph ballet. He watched Zorina's screen tests over and over, lavished advice and favors on her, snuck over to Balanchine's closed studio to glimpse her rehearsing. Lillian Hellman, on the lot to try and shake some sense into the Follies script, observed one day that Goldwyn always departed the studio minutes after Zorina did. She alerted colleagues and word spread. With malicious enjoyment, the others in the building started a betting pool based on how many minutes would pass between Zorina's exit and Goldwyn's. After a few weeks of this an enterprising writer followed Goldwyn and discovered that the producer's cab was tailing Zorina all the way to her house. Goldwyn would watch Zorina disappear inside, then order the taxi back to his office.

Like everyone else in Hollywood apart from Zorina, Goldwyn's wife Frances had got wind of her husband's behavior, but she became convinced it was an actual affair. One night she telephoned George Cukor, and her old friend arrived to find Frances descending the stairs, every item she owned packed and ready to go. Cukor ordered her back in the house and that, apparently, was that. After the Follies Zorina never made another movie for Goldwyn, although he loaned her to other studios and allowed her to work in theater. For decades Zorina took this as a comment on her talent; Berg writes that "something so far removed from her dancing as the preservation of a marriage had never even occurred to her."

But it wasn't just Goldwyn's withdrawal that doomed Zorina's career. What finished her chances for real stardom was being sacked from For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1943. Zorina actually spent three weeks on set with Gary Cooper, only to have Paramount abruptly change its mind and replace her with Ingrid Bergman. Bergman had lobbied frantically for the part and was Hemingway's choice as well. The co-author of Bergman's autobiography, Alan Burgess, says Paramount hired Zorina in the first place largely to save money, on the theory that once upon a time nobody had heard of Vivien Leigh, either. TCM's notes also cite an old rumor that Zorina, whose marriage to Balanchine turned out to be unhappy, was having an affair with somebody important.

Burgess says that when the first rushes came back, the studio told the press that "light was apparently draining off Vera's face when she was photographed from above." The Siren has no idea what that means and poor Zorina didn't, either. Ingrid Bergman had her own theory:

The real trouble was that Vera was a ballerina. Yet she had to run around those mountains like a little wild animal. And Vera was afraid of damaging her legs.

They were to her why my face was to me. If an onrushing train came against me, I would protect my face. Vera would protect her legs. So when they saw the first rushes of the film taken in the mountains this came through quite clearly; and they decided that Vera was unsuitable. They took her off For Whom the Bell Tolls, and gave her another picture.

(The Siren returns from hibernation to join in Goatdog's William Wyler Blogathon. Please follow the links at his place for more on the great, yet curiously underappreciated Wyler.)

She was difficult in the same way that I was difficult. She wanted the best.
--William Wyler at the American Film Institute tribute to Bette Davis


It was 1931. Bette Davis was 23 and still new on the Universal lot, scrambling for parts like the other starlets. William Wyler was 29, "not a very good director" by his own admission and struggling to prove he deserved his break despite the (justified) perception that he owed his job to being Carl Laemmle's relative. Davis was auditioning for a part in A House Divided and had hurriedly put on the only size 8 dress she could find. The dress was quite low-cut and when Davis walked by Wyler remarked in a voice that carried to every corner of the crowded soundstage, "What do you think of these dames who show their tits and think they can get jobs?" The humiliated actress didn't get the role, which went instead to future flameout Helen Chandler.

So when Wyler, now contracted to Samuel Goldwyn and on his first loan-out to Warner Brothers, showed up to film Jezebel, Davis reminded him of his taunt--and the irony, now plain, that he had made the remark about an actress more willing than any in Hollywood to subordinate sex appeal to the character's demands. Wyler searched his memory for the incident and drew a nice tidy blank, but apologized to Davis and said he had been having a hard time in those days.

As filming began Davis must have known about Wyler's reputation for repeating takes until the actor was a nervous wreck. Henry Fonda was warned by Humphrey Bogart, who'd made Dead End with Wyler the year before, "Jesus, don't touch it. Don't go in there." But Wyler also had a string of excellent movies under his belt, having guided fine performances from a hopeless alcoholic (John Barrymore in Counsellor at Law), an actress in the twilight of her career (Ruth Chatterton in Dodsworth) and even an actress whose chief qualifications at the time were dazzling beauty and a bed shared with a prominent producer (Merle Oberon in These Three). Davis knew her own self-discipline and fine talent, and she made her bet on Wyler.

Besides, the attraction between actress and director was already evident.

Although Jezebel is often described as a sop to appease Davis after she didn't get Scarlett O'Hara, the Siren's research indicates this isn't the case. The play (produced in 1933, three years before Margaret Mitchell's novel was published) was purchased for Bette Davis by Warner Brothers in 1937, while David O. Selznick was still actively searching for a Scarlett and no decision had been made as to casting. Selznick saw Jezebel , no doubt accurately, as the Warners' way of cashing in on the anticipation surrounding Gone with the Wind and was furious. So in fact, according to GWTW historian William Pratt, Jezebel (which was released in March 1938, eight months before Selznick ever met Vivien Leigh) was the factor that put a period to any chance Davis had at the part. Davis herself always denied the "consolation prize" idea, but in her sunset years she loved to intimate she had come close to Scarlett. Alas, that isn't true either--she was never very high in the running. As early as 1937, when Selznick was working out distribution deals, he rejected an offer from Warner Brothers that was contingent on casting Errol Flynn and Bette Davis and told friends that he would cast Katharine Hepburn as Scarlett before he would consider Davis.

Despite its being forever linked with GWTW, Jezebel is its own animal, a movie just as concerned with the fate of a strong-willed woman in a rigid society but, in certain ways, more harshly realistic about the ways society revenges itself. As a girl the Siren much preferred Scarlett to Jezebel's Julie Marsden. She hated the way Julie is humiliated, not merely in the excruciating ball sequence, but also in the way she is coldly rejected in favor of the vacuous Margaret Lindsay (a perfectly cast actress whom Davis couldn't stand in real life). Ashley makes his sexual attraction to Scarlett quite clear, but once Henry Fonda rejects Julie it as though he never loved her at all. But later in life the Siren came to see that Jezebel, while it cannot compare with GWTW's vast historical canvas, indelible characters and peerless production values, is really the more biting social commentary.

That may seem impossible, given that Wyler's pictures generally affirm rather than challenge social convention, helping to explain their appeal to Oscar voters as well as the films' rejection by those who prefer "termite art." You can read the movie as a straightforward women's tale of the comeuppance of a first-rate scheming bitch, and no doubt that is the tale Wyler and Davis thought they were filming. The movie approves of her treatment, audiences then approved of it and audiences today usually do as well. Witness the reviews that refer to the character as "Jezebel," instead of her name, and speak of her "deserved" humiliation at the Olympus Ball. But director and actress, through their careful attention to Julie's character, create something more complicated. Together Wyler and Davis show us an intelligent and headstrong woman who can exert her will only in petty, useless acts of rebellion, and then show Julie stripped of her autonomy, first in part and then completely.

True to its stage roots the movie has three acts, well-summarized by Nick Davis as The Dress, The Duel and The Disease. Julie Marsden is engaged to Preston Dillard (Fonda) and happily stamping her size-five riding boots all over him. She loves Pres but, with few other outlets for her restless energy, she amuses herself by constantly testing his love. Infuriated by his refusal to leave a board meeting to attend a ballgown fitting with her, Julie rejects her regulation white dress in favor of a vivid red one that is being prepared for the town's most notorious courtesan. (As the town in question is New Orleans, we must be talking about one hell of a whore.) This is a beautifully set-up scene, Julie on a dais and surrounded on three sides by mirrors, Aunt Belle (Faye Bainter, showing why Stinky Lulu has anointed Wyler the Patron Saint of Best Supporting Actresses) and the dressmaker forming a Greek chorus of warning and disapproval. (The Siren pauses to ask why, in the 1930s, dresses symbolizing wanton behavior always had some sort of swaying fringe to them. Was it hearkening back to the more sexually liberated 20s?) At first Pres refuses to take his scarlet-clad woman to the ball, then, stung by Julie's suggestion that he is afraid to defend her, he escorts her and sees to it that she is humiliated.

According to Davis, Jezebel's script gave the Olympus Ball short shrift and the production manager allotted a half-day to shoot it. Wyler took five days and turned it into the best scene in the film. It is, in effect, a drawn-out death scene, in which you watch the death of Fonda's love for Davis, the death of the old, confident Julie who is certain of her man's love, and the death of Julie's place in society. It is beautifully filmed but wrenching to watch, as they join a full dance floor only to have the other couples leave it, until gradually they are the only ones dancing. The formation is as old as time--the woman in the center, those condemning her forming an unbreakable circle, and the man Julie loves dragging her into the middle to extend her agonies just that much longer. As brilliant as the camerawork is, the Siren finds the scene just about unbearable. Not until MASH, as Sally Kellerman hit the ground in a vain attempt to cover herself, would the Siren encounter a scene that showed such soul-deep humiliation of a woman.

Pres leaves for the north and Julie shuts herself away on her plantation, Halcyon, only emerging to ride her thoroughbred horse in a manner that risks breaking her neck each time. Comes word that Pres has returned. Julie, seeing her chance at last, dons the white dress she had rejected one year before and greets Pres, sure of her welcome. "I'm kneelin' to ya, Pres," she croons, sinking to the floor in an unmistakable evocation of a bridal dress being removed on a wedding night. And the Siren always wants to scream, "Get up! get up! don't DO that!" It is a moment almost as lacerating as the ball, because the audience knows what Julie as yet does not--Pres has come back with a Yankee bride. Before Pres can tell her, in comes Amy (Lindsay), Aunt Belle in tow. And here you can see Wyler's hand, because the Davis of Of Human Bondage or Dangerous might have flung her emotions all over the set. Instead, she keeps her eyes focused on Fonda and speaks two words without great emphasis, yet they snap out like her riding crop: "Your wife?" And then you see her denial turn to coiled, deliberate fury, directed at Amy with the politeness Southern women always muster best for those whom they truly hate.

Julie, desperate to win back Pres, begins to manipulate her old beau Buck (an unusually animated George Brent) into provoking Amy at every turn. Pres's brother, Ted, staying at the plantation for plot reasons that remain murky to the Siren, gets more and more hot under the collar until finally he challenges Buck to a duel, which Buck does not survive. Despite the fact that a belatedly remorseful Julie tried to stop the duel, she is blamed by everyone, including the loving Aunt Belle, who delivers the title line in unforgettable fashion: "I'm thinkin' of a woman called Jezebel, who did evil in the sight of God." Act two is over.

Before everyone can leave Halcyon in the same manner Julie once cleared out the Olympus Ball, Act Three is upon us--yellow fever results in quarantine. Julie responds in classic Southern-hostess fashion, telling the guests who now hate her guts, "Ladies and gentlemen, my home is yours, as always." Just in case we didn't realize that yellow fever was serious business in antebellum New Orleans, we get a series of intertitles screaming, "YELLOW JACK!" Ah, how the Siren loves intertitles. Pres hears of his brother's duel and for once it is the nominal hero who swoons dead away. But of course, the leading man can't just faint like a sissy so we learn Pres has come down with the dreaded yellow fever. Julie, suddenly (and, to the Siren, suspiciously) fired with noble purpose, persuades Amy to let her go with Pres to the island where yellow fever victims are being warehoused. The movie ends with Julie cradling Pres's head in her lap, as a simple wagon takes them down to the wharf and an uncertain fate. The swelling music and noble expressions want us to think Julie is choosing almost certain death as a means of snatching at a chance for redemption. The Siren has always hoped Julie really thought she could nurse Pres through the illness, and was in fact maneuvering for yet another chance to hold her man.

So, let's talk about "90-take Willie" and how he directed his actors. The standard image of Wyler is of a director shooting take after take, and when the frustrated actor shrieks "what do you want from me?" he responds with something along the lines of "I want you to do it better." But the image of a rather inarticulate, ESL director doesn't quite jibe. From an early point Wyler chose his own subjects and his own writers, and he always chose adult stories, frequently from well-known literary sources, and scripts by the best writers in Hollywood. That doesn't really suggest a man incapable of telling an actor precisely what he wanted. Wyler reportedly believed that repeating a scene broke down an actor's defenses and unlocked new approaches, but that doesn't mean he never had meaningful discourse with his actors. This fine tribute, by director Josh Becker, repeats a story about Henry Fonda enduring 40 takes of a scene on Jezebel. But Fonda himself recalled it somewhat differently, in an interview in Mike Steen's Hollywood Speaks:

I guess it's rather well known that there are actors who didn't like Wyler, just like there are actors who didn't like Ford or Fritz Lang, etc., because Wyler was known to want to shoot a lot of takes. You know, fifty takes and that kind of thing...I had a very good experience. Wyler and I got along famously. We're still friends. He never took fifty takes, though he might have taken thirty! But it was never without a reason. I've worked with John Stahl [on Immortal Sergeant] who was a director who would take it over and over again without telling you why. It was as though he was saying "If they're going to give me actors like this, what are you going to do?" You know? But with Wyler, every time he did it again he gave you something to think about. He'd say, "This time in the middle the scene react to a mosquito bite." These inventions would just come to him. He was rehearsing with film really! And that wasn't bad because I like rehearsals. So it was a good experience with Wyler, and I liked it very much.

Not content with his career as a political prognosticator and analyst, Mark Steyn makes occasional forays into film criticism. The death of Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted screenwriter of the 1950s, reminded Steyn of an old grievance, and led to his reprinting a 2003 Atlantic Monthly defense of Elia Kazan. "The arts have little time for anti-communists," declares Steyn.

The mechanism by which Elia Kazan became a pitiable victim of Hollywood liberalism puzzles the Siren no end. Here is a list of the films Kazan managed to complete after testifying before HUAC.

The Last Tycoon (1976)
The Visitors (1972)
The Arrangement (1969)
America, America (1963)
Splendor in the Grass (1961)
Wild River (1960)
A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Baby Doll (1956)
East of Eden (1955)
On the Waterfront (1954)

Here is an abridged list of awards that Kazan was either nominated for or won subsequent to his HUAC testimony.

Academy Awards
1964 Nominated, Best Director, for America, America (1963); Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, for America, America (1963)
1956 Nominated, Best Director, East of Eden (1955)
1955 Won, Best Director, for On the Waterfront (1954)

Berlin International Film Festival
1996 Honorary Golden Berlin Bear
1960 Nominated, Golden Berlin Bear, for Wild River (1960)

Cannes Film Festival
1972 Nominated, Golden Palm, for The Visitors (1972)
1955 Won, Best Dramatic Film, East of Eden (1955); Nominated, Golden Palm, for East of Eden (1955)


Directors Guild of America, USA
1987 Lifetime Achievement Award
1983 DGA Honorary Life Member Award
1964 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for America, America (1963)
1962 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for Splendor in the Grass (1961) 1958 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for A Face in the Crowd (1957)
1956 Nominated, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for East of Eden (1955)
1955 Won, DGA Award Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures, for On the Waterfront (1954)

Golden Globes, USA
1964 Won, Golden Globe Best Motion Picture Director, for America, America (1963)
1957 Won, Golden Globe Best Motion Picture Director, for Baby Doll (1956)
1955 Won, Golden Globe Best Director, for On the Waterfront (1954)

National Board of Review, USA
1996 Won, Special Citation for lifetime achievement in direction.

Venice Film Festival
1955 Won, OCIC Award, for On the Waterfront (1954)
1954 Won, Italian Film Critics Award, for On the Waterfront (1954); Silver Lion, for On the Waterfront (1954); Nominated, Golden Lion, for On the Waterfront (1954)

Writers Guild of America, USA
1964 Nominated, WGA Award (Screen) Best Written American Drama, for America, America (1963)

What an odd parallel universe is inhabited by Mr. Steyn and those like him, one where Kazan's accomplishments are considered incomplete because Hollywood failed to grant him a 10-minute standing ovation, and didn't get rid of those pesky protesters outside the theater. The honorary Oscar was voted unanimously. The Siren watched the Oscar ceremony and saw Kazan accept his award. The television cameras showed her at least half in the auditorium were on their feet and applauding. She heard no boos. But the presence of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro onstage, Warren Beatty on his feet applauding, that means nothing to Steyn if Ed Harris and Nick Nolte and some other weenie libs are sitting quietly in their seats.

For Mr. Steyn and the professional indignation specialists over at Libertas, it will never be enough that Kazan went on to have a distinguished, artistically fulfilling and lucrative career after his testimony. He must be loved, not despite, but because of his having named names.

Well, to quote something Samuel Goldwyn probably never said, include me out. The Siren loves Kazan's films. As a man? Let us hear Irene Mayer Selznick on that matter. She produced A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. At the time Kazan was called before the committee she was his close friend, and they were working to produce a play that later flopped. She thought her left-leaning Hollywood friends were exaggerating the danger; Kazan in turn told her to read I.F. Stone and the Daily Compass, showing her a picture of a camp allegedly being readied for dissidents. He told Selznick that he would never testify, that he was prepared to work in Europe if necessary.

That was brave talk, and I admired him for it. To those in comparable trouble, some bigshots included, he gave advice and strength. ...

One evening during our brief run I was approached in a restaurant by Gadge's movie agent, who told me that Gadge was a hero and I would be proud of him; all I had to do was pick up the bulldog edition of the Times.

I read the paper with total disbelief. My head reeled. The unimaginable was there in print: Gadge had done an about-face politically. He had caved in and named names. He also had bought a quarter-page for an ad, defending what he had done and exhorting others to follow his lead. ...

However much he had wanted to stick to his principles, he simply didn't. He let down those who believed in him. I was the least of his victims, I only lost some illusions.

I made no effort to get in touch. From then on, when we met, [Kazan's wife] Molly cut me dead. Gadge was tentative. For years his action estranged him from a lot of people he cared about, and I include myself among them. Some never forgave him. He was, on the whole, the man who was least forgiven, because he had been the epitome of courage and strength. After Molly died, he and I drifted back together and we're friends today--I think.

Nor is the fact that Hollywood’s belief in its own heroism derives from a moment of colossal Hollywood cowardice any obstacle. The blacklist “victims” weren’t blacklisted by the government but by the studios–Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney–the same folks who run Hollywood today.