It is a recurrent irony of certain film artists' lives that upon their death, no matter what other accomplishments may have been theirs, if they won an Oscar the headline will read "Academy Award Winner Dies." It hurts the Siren to see this headline for Jennifer Jones, because The Song of Bernadette is not a film she ever took to her heart (to put it mildly). Consciously or subconsciously, the movie undermines the whole notion of religious fulfillment because it makes Bernadette's life seem so awful. The Sirens adds, though, that the movie has its admirers; for an eloquent appreciation of Bernadette, please see Marilyn Ferdinand here.
The movie uppermost in the Siren's thoughts isn't that hagiography, but rather Portrait of Jennie, in which Jones' superb talent for creating odd and bewitching women reached its apogee. William Dieterle's ghost story was the perfect vehicle for Jones, whose spiritual quality always had a note of restless passion. When you meet her she is attired in her best fur-trimmed coat and muff, appearing among the ice skaters at Central Park as though she sprang complete from one of the glittering snow banks. Jones was a great child impersonator, as she had shown in Bernadette despite that movie's flaws, and yet there is something womanly in the way she makes eye contact with Joseph Cotten. Not sensuality yet, but its promise. It is a strange film, sweepingly romantic in that way that has vanished from American movies, the scenes moving through different tones as Jennie herself moves in and out of worlds. The Siren wasn't surprised to hear, from Dan Callahan, that Luis Bunuel loved Portrait of Jennie. What might Bunuel have done with a chance to direct its star?
An eeriness clings to Jones and every attempt to discuss her. You reach for the same adjectives: febrile, intense, jittery, instinctual. When she arrived in Hollywood she was married to the gifted but self-destructive Robert Walker, with whom she had two sons. In addition to having a bad drinking problem, it was Walker's profound misfortune to have David O. Selznick fall in love with his wife. The question that overhangs Jennifer Jones is whether Selznick's love was ultimately her misfortune, too. He is generally supposed to have slowly smothered her talent, rendering her less natural and more stilted the longer she remained under his influence. (Miriam Bale alludes to this in her excellent piece that accompanied last year's Jennifer Jones retrospective at Lincoln Center. Also, please check out Miriam's detailed response under M.B. in comments, in which she explains her view that it was not the liaison, but rather marriage to Selznick that seemed to douse some of Jones' light.)
This theory isn't so tidy, however. It's true that several of her best movies, including the Lubitsch masterpiece Cluny Brown and Michael Powell's Gone to Earth (which the Siren, alas, has yet to see) were made outside of Selznick's meddling. Cluny Brown shows a flair for comedy that Jones never got a chance to exploit, unless you count Beat the Devil, which the Siren doesn't find very funny. Cluny, we are told repeatedly, doesn't know her place, but of course she does. Her place is with Charles Boyer's Adam Belinski, the intellectual who alone appreciates her. "You must never become a victim of my circumstances, and, if you should ever seem romantic to me, don't hesitate. Just kick me," Cluny tells her true love (who responds, "Yes, let's kick each other"). The Siren is convinced that no one but Jennifer Jones could have brought the right combination of physical enthusiasm and ardent innocence to an explanation of how to solve blocked-up pipes: "I would bang, bang, bang, all night long."
But Jones is good or excellent in other movies where Selznick either produced or hovered a great deal at the margins. There's Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, of course, a valiant attempt to show carnality unmarked by civilization, with some intermittently good scenes from the actress. Jones is a better creature of the body in King Vidor's Ruby Gentry. But there is also her young girl in Since You Went Away, an underrated portrait of innocence yearning to grow up. The overall film is heavy-handed, it is true, but Jones isn't, and the Siren loves both her bright eagerness at the dance in the massive hangar, and the farewell scene at the train. She did a fine job with Madame Bovary's dual nature in Minnelli's film, especially in the ballroom scene, where Emma's sexual and class longings become too much for the room, or indeed the film, to contain. And the Siren is fond of Jones in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, even if few others are. This invalid Elizabeth still has a simmering physicality and some common sense; compare Jones' realization of the incestuous nature of her father's interest with the prim horror displayed by Norma Shearer, and see if you don't take the Siren's point. And although it is Laurence Olivier's movie, the Siren admires Jones in Carrie, where she makes the title character more interesting than she was in Dreiser's novel. Olivier admired Jones as well, later in life comparing her to Meryl Streep.
There certainly are films, however, where Selznick's influence can't be described as anything other than unfortunate--certain ludicrous passages in Duel in the Sun; the overcooked, overtinkered A Farewell to Arms; or the producer's butchering of de Sica's Terminal Station, complete with the most shudder-inducing re-titling ever, Indiscretion of an American Wife.
But if Selznick's obsession with Jones was in some ways detrimental to her career (and her mental stability) it didn't do much for Selznick, either, who did better work when still married to the shrewd and decidedly earthbound Irene Mayer. In Irene's autobiography, she tells a revealing story about the aftermath of the Selznicks' breakup. Jones pretended to be Dorothy Paley to get Irene on the phone, then waited outside a theatre for hours to confront the ex-wife. Irene had her driver take them on circle after circle of Central Park as Jones became hysterical, saying David didn't want her, he wanted Irene and his life was ruined unless he could have her back. Jones also tried to throw herself out of the car. "She talked as if I were responsible," Selznick said.
Selznick's relationship with Jones is a particulary sad story of Hollywood folie à deux, and Walker's horrible death and the eventual suicide of Selznick's daughter with Jones turns it to tragedy. Jennifer Jones is rather like Marion Davies, in that we will always wonder what her career would have been like without Svengali. And we will never have a completely satisfying answer to whether Selznick's influence was imposed from without, or whether Jones was drawing it to herself. That ambiguity turns up in all of Jones' screen roles--is she being manipulated, or is she using her "weakness," whether social, mental or sexual, to manipulate?
It is comforting to note that Jones went on, after her own fight against mental illness and all that trauma during and after her years of stardom, to forge some apparent stability and contentment. Sometime around the late 70s-early 80s my father was at the front desk of a hotel (the St. Regis?) when he heard a voice at his elbow that sounded familiar, asking the clerk for something. He turned to see Jennifer Jones, still clearly recognizable after all those years. As Dad gaped the clerk asked her name (ah, how fame fades) and she said, "Mrs. Norton Simon."
A Star Is Born, played for a clueless clerk and an astonished audience of one.
"You know how it is. You hate your dentist while he's pulling your teeth. But the next day you're playing golf with him again."
--Billy Wilder, explaining why he was considering working again with Marilyn Monroe after she gave him hell during Some Like It Hot
The Siren pours herself a single-malt Scotch and settles in for Goatdog's Movies About Movies Blogathon. Now this is a great topic, one that has inspired great work from director after director. And here's the thing: these movies are always such fun. When it comes to narcissistic self-contemplation, nobody does it better than Hollywood. As Jack Carson said in Mildred Pierce, "There's something about the sound of my own voice that fascinates me."
The Bad and the Beautiful may be an obvious choice, but damn the Siren loves this movie. Melodrama? Hell yes, this is full-throated, unapologetic melodrama, a movie about Hollywood and its sins that dares to use all sorts of Hollywood cliches to tell the story. Good Hollywood navel-gazing always has a roman a clef aspect and Vincente Minnelli's movie is no exception. The game of "guess who THIS is" is quite fun and all but basically irrelevant, and Minnelli signals that in part by keeping the connections so flippin' obvious. Lana Turner's father-obsessed starlet stands in for Diana Barrymore, the Southern writer (Dick Powell) who hates Hollywood and wants to go home is an obvious take on Faulkner, the director (Barry Sullivan) plays Jacques Tourneur to Shields' Val Lewton on a movie called "Attack of the Cat Man"--I mean, with that last you wonder why they even changed the names. Aside from the Lewton echo the Shields character rings a bell, or more like a cathedral, for David O. Selznick, what with producing a large epic with a big death scene, even if it's set in Russia and not Georgia, and then moving on to Dick Powell's sexy Southern epic, The Proud Land (Faulkner would have thrown up, but never mind). So in 1952 you would have guessed who everyone is right away (and if you're a nerd like the Siren you still do) and then you can concentrate on each segment after that, the same way Hitchcock stuck his cameo in the first part of a movie so people wouldn't spend all their time looking for him instead of getting caught up in the story.
We all have our irrational cinema loves, and for some reason the Siren is obsessed with multi-story anthology films, which as an old Lewis Carroll fan she calls portmanteau movies. This is just about the slickest example ever made, three interlocking stories all centered on Kirk Douglas as Jonathan Shields. The structure is a thing of beauty, with a neat framing device and one story leading into another, each with its own distinct tone and all leading to the same conclusion. Green, raw talent is discovered by Shields, shoved and/or dragged into a career-making success while simultaneously boosting the producer's relentless ambition, and then that now-flourishing talent is nastily betrayed.
One of the standard cinema-studies takes on Minnelli is to emphasize the role that transformation plays in his movies. Here we have a threefold transformation theme, three important characters utterly changed by the same catalyst, Jonathan Shields. And the betrayals, presumably as in the original theater-centered story "Tribute to a Bad Man" by George Bradshaw, become worse as the movie progresses and Shields' power grows.
He starts with the simple decision to take the director's latest picture away from him and give it to an established name. Shields follows up by seducing nervous, insecure actress Georgia (Turner) into giving a great performance, then sleeping with someone else on the night of the premiere. Georgia's acting debut had found her playing a scene of tearful repentance over some Russian uniform's deathbed scene. (The varying costumes and scenery prompted producer John Houseman to ask "What kind of a picture are they trying to make anyway?" Minnelli said "Frankly, I think only Kirk Douglas knew.") In his memoirs, Minnelli described how he got to do a variation on the celebrated boom shot in Citizen Kane, the one that pulls us up from Kane's mistress on the opera-house stage to a stagehand in the flies, holding his nose. Minnelli switched it around by having the technicians pay rapt attention, but it's still a bit hard to think the Shields picture is anything but high-toned kitsch.
The shot also plays up a continuing contrast between the low end of the business and the glamourous high end, moving from gleaming Lana to the slightly grubby technicians. There's another marvelous bit earlier, when Shields and the director are stuck making a B picture and the down-market props man is trying to sell them on the rattiest cat costumes you ever saw. Sullivan and Douglas stare in disbelief as the man twitches the fake fur this way and that and chomps on a cigar that is no doubt enhancing whatever odors already cling to the items. It's their determination not to use the costumes that has Shields hitting on the inspired idea never to show the "cat people." The whole sequence does a lovely job of showing the creativity that could go into the B features, despite the tendency to view them as a purgatory to be shed as soon as possible.
In the second section the grit comes also from Elaine Stewart, absolutely superb as starlet-on-the-make Lila, providing the low-end contrast to Lana's pedigreed (if nervous and alcoholic) star-on-the-rise. Oh how the Siren loves Stewart slinking down the staircase on the night of the big premiere, shattering Georgia's romantic ideas about Shields with a nasal hiss: "Picture's finished, Georgia. You're business. I'm company...I forgot to tell you, Georgia. I saw the picture. Thought you were swell."If the Siren has a problem with The Bad and the Beautiful it's the way the grimy side of the business disappears entirely by the final sequence. That's the one about Dick Powell's writer, married to a fluttery belle who destroys his concentration and is dead certain to cheat on him sooner or later. Gloria Grahame, who won an Oscar, irritates some people but the Siren finds her a pretty accurate take on a certain type of phony Southern charm, a grasping harpy concealed by more sugar frosting than a 10-tier wedding cake. Her accent is overdone but even that works for the character, as such women often emphasize the accent because they've spent years hearing besotted men tell them how cute it is. Shields recognizes that the wife is a millstone and sets her up for an affair with Latin sex symbol Gilbert Roland (wonderful in one of his late-career character parts). She runs away with her loverboy and they're killed in a plane accident, capping the producer's worst-yet act of manipulation.
"Send the commie bastard to me. I'll hire him."
--John Ford's habitual remark when hearing of a blacklisted talent
When the Siren told Mr. C about this latest blogathon he made a moue and she demanded to know why, loving the genre as she does. "It's like the Oscars," he said shortly. Pressed to explain, he said, "It's all about how great they are, isn't it? A lot of self-congratulation. I mean, you love movies so of course you love movies about movies." Told which movie the Siren had picked he did say, "Oh, that was a good one." But the Siren must admit that her better half has a point. Ultimately, The Bad and the Beautiful shows how a desire for excellence often finds creative people working with those they detest on a personal level, but that's hardly something that only those in Hollywood find themselves doing. What Minnelli's film, and even much harsher movies about movies, emphasize is that at least these people are producing things that give great pleasure, perhaps even attain the status of art. Ultimately, this genre isn't skewering, it's apologetics.
The ending of The Bad and the Beautiful has the three characters that Shields used and abused gathered in producer Walter Pidgeon's office to hear Shields, on the telephone from Paris, make one more pitch. They are about to get up and walk away--the wounds are too deep, it seems. But wait, here's Turner outside in the waiting room, lifting the receiver to listen on the extension, and Powell and Sullivan joining her. It's an "open" ending, but the Siren always thought it was quite obvious they were going to make another Shields picture. The whole theme is the primacy of talent, that it overrides even the worst betrayals. "It was a harsh and cynical story, yet strangely romantic," said Minnelli, one that illuminated "the philosophy of 'get me a talented son-of-a-bitch.'" In 1952, as the Ford quote above reminds us, the idea that the hierarchy of talent is the overriding factor was indeed strangely romantic. But the Siren still finds it irresistible.
I was less than 10 years old but I can still remember my father's expression when one morning he told me he was going to watch Brigadoon. "Who's in it?" I asked. "Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse." "Cyd Charisse? Who's he?"
With great emphasis: "SHE."
"A lady named Cyd?"
"YES, honey."
"So she was pretty?"
If all goes well with childrearing there aren't many moments where a parent says to himself "what the hell have I produced here?" but this was one for my father, I have no doubt. His face was beyond pained as he said, "All right. We'll watch this movie and then you tell me."
For many fans of Cyd Charisse, Brigadoon probably ranks somewhere between Meet Me in Las Vegas and that bit in The Harvey Girls where she sings (via dubbing) about being from Providence, Rhode Island. But as a child I thought it was swell and I still do. Why does everybody single out Brigadoon for being shot on the back lot? Does Seven Brides for Seven Brothers look like it was shot in Oregon? Does Easter Parade scream "sidewalks of New York" to you? Brigadoon is a fantasy, for crying out loud. Of course it doesn't look like Scotland. That is because Scotland has no magical disappearing 18th-century villages. In the Siren's view, Vincente Minnelli struggling with Cinemascope, which he disliked, had more to do with some of the movie's awkwardness than the obvious sets.
But there is still a lot to love. Minnelli lit the interiors to resemble Flemish paintings. The scene in the crowded Manhattan bar is brilliant. Van Johnson proved he could really act, and the Lerner and Loewe score is fabulously beautiful.
Most of all, "The Heather on the Hill" is sublime, with that sexual longing that's in all Charisse's dancing, married to a spiritual feeling in keeping with the film's mysticism.
So the Siren has a special place in her heart for Brigadoon for a number of reasons, but the greatest of these is undoubtedly that the movie was the first time she saw Cyd Charisse, the matchless dancer who died yesterday at age 86.
I think the next time I saw Charisse was in Singin' in the Rain. I like to think this was probably my father's introduction to her, as he was in the Army around this time, and could easily have been in an audience reacting exactly the way David Shipman describes here:
If you were in an air-force cinema, circa 1952, you'll never forget the sound which greeted the appearance of Cyd Charisse halfway through the climactic ballet in Singin' in the Rain. The audience to a man greeted the sinuous leggy beauty with a loud and prolonged 'Ooooaah!' As she slithered round an understandably bewildered Gene Kelly, there was uproar in the cinema. Cyd Charisse didn't do more than dance in Singin' in the Rain and people remember her in it.
It was a star-making turn such as few performers ever get. Up to that time the beautiful Texan had been getting herself married, having a son, getting divorced, then getting married to singer Tony Martin in 1948 and having another son. (One early role the Siren would like to see: Cyd's brief turn as Galina Ulanova in the notorious Mission to Moscow.) There were movies along the way as Hollywood gave her dancing numbers in generally inferior musicals and tried to find use for her in straight roles. She never comfortably adapted to non-musical parts, despite a pretty good late-career performance in the underrated Two Weeks in Another Town.
It was her run of musicals at MGM in the 1950s that guaranteed her immortality, including Singin' in the Rain and another masterpiece that followed it, The Band Wagon. Fred Astaire called "The Girl Hunt Ballet" his favorite dance. Charisse, who had been in a couple of noirs without making much of an impression, took a Mickey Spillane spoof and danced a femme fatale for the ages: "She was bad...she was dangerous. I wouldn't trust any further than I can throw her. But she was my kind of woman."
As in The Band Wagon, Charisse's greatest moments usually cast her as a woman whose jazzed-up dancing is seen as slumming somehow. In that sense she was perfectly of the 1950s, her sensuality boiling along under the surface as she gives her frequently wooden line readings. Then the music starts, she begins to dance and all hell breaks loose. You realize that here is the real Cyd, a dose of sex so strong that at some point in the dance her partner, even a great like Astaire or Kelly, seems bowled over by it.
So in The Band Wagon, she's a ballerina with a bad attitude about musicals, until she and Astaire go "Dancing in the Dark." In Meet Me in Las Vegas, she's a ballerina again, horrified by her contract to perform in Vegas, giving a nice-but-no-more bit from Swan Lake--and then all but igniting the film stock with "Frankie and Johnny."
She gave her best all-around performance in It's Always Fair Weather as a woman who harbors a brain under the bombshell exterior, sporting some dangerously feminist ideas in a cab scene with Gene Kelly, then raising the gym roof with a chorus of punch-drunk boxers in "Baby, You Knock Me Out." Her final musical at MGM had her taking the old Garbo role as a defrosted Soviet in the Ninotchka remake, Silk Stockings, discovering the power of her own beauty in a number partnered only by some lingerie and the items of the title. Her last great dancing part, in Nicholas Ray's Party Girl, brought the two-sided Cyd to some sort of apotheosis, as she tries to set Robert Taylor straight while performing two dances that would turn any good man bad.
For years now the Siren had occasionally searched around for current pictures of Charisse, and she always looked radiantly happy and beautiful. It was a great life, but it's still a sad day for us. The Siren leaves the final word to Astaire: "That Cyd! When you've danced with her, you stay danced with."