Hollywood Madonna (22 page)

Boliet goes before the his party’s executive committee, and in a scene that would have garnered applause in some quarters, denounces communism for its insistence on unswerving loyalty to Marxism and its subordination of the individual to the collective. Marianna, who has also become disgusted at the way Duval extends his index finger, whips out a pistol and shoots him in the finger. Now that she and Boilet are fugitives, they have no other choice but to emigrate to America, where they plan to settle in—of all places—Maine, where Boilet hopes to be a lobster fisherman! Whether they have money or passports is irrelevant; a fairy tale cannot be subjected to logical analysis. All audiences wanted was for Boliet to leave the party and Marianna to leave her husband so the two could settle in the land of the free and home of the brave.

If Douglas looked exasperated and, at times, lost, it was because the script placed Loretta in the driver’s seat, with Douglas behind her. He did not undergo the gradual conversion to capitalism that Garbo experienced so convincingly in
Ninotchka
. Although director Alexander Hall was not Ernst Lubitsch, the fault lay more with the script than with either Douglas or Hall. Paul Boliet was a cardboard character, whose only purpose was to illustrate the folly of communism and make audiences feel grateful that they were living in a country where the unit of currency was not the ruble.

Loretta discovered dance when she was a teenager. Dancing became one of her passions; she even studied dance with Marge Champion’s father, Ernest Belcher. But to play a circus performer, whom an impresario (Conrad Veidt) transforms into a world-famous ballerina in Columbia’s
The Men in Her Life
(1941), Loretta had to learn the rudiments of ballet. Although a stand-in was used for the long shots, audiences expected
some proof that the versatile Loretta could stand en pointe, as she did in several scenes—and quite convincingly. It was difficult for a woman in her late twenties to master such technique, but Loretta, ever the perfectionist, did. She also looked like a ballerina.

The screenplay was another matter; it was a generic starmaker scenario, in which a successful actor/director/producer/agent turns an unknown into an icon. In
The Red Shoes
(1948), the impresario (Anton Walbrook) fails to convince his prima ballerina (Moira Shearer) to forgo marriage to a composer and remain his protégée. In
The Men in Her Life
, the ballerina (Loretta) marries the impresario, who expects her to give up her career. When he suddenly dies, the ballerina can either continue dancing or remarry. Career or remarriage? Remarriage, with a daughter and the resumption of career, perhaps? But this outcome would not set well with audiences. Instead, the ballerina remarries and returns to the world of dance. Once she realizes that her performing days are over, she decides to live vicariously through her daughter by preparing her for a career of her own.

The Men in Her Life
opened at Radio City Music Hall, then known as “The Showcase of the Nation,” on 11 December 1941, four days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—when a ballerina’s love life was not uppermost in audiences’ minds. The
New York Times
critic, Bosley Crowther, panned
The Men in Her Life
, even implying that Loretta was not much of an actress. It was a mean-spirited review, but at least Music Hall audiences, seeking refuge from the bleak headlines, could settle into their seats, watch a movie about selflessness, and get a stage show as a bonus. As for Loretta’s performance: How many actresses could stand on point, look like a prima ballerina, marry a domineering male, remarry after his death, temporarily abandon her daughter, and then monitor the girl’s career? Even Bette Davis never ran such a gamut at Warner Bros. But Columbia was not Warner’s, and Harry Cohn was grateful that his film made it to the Music Hall.

The best of Loretta’s Columbia films of the 1940s was
Bedtime Story
(1941), her third with Alexander Hall. Loretta had now adjusted to Hall’s approach to domestic comedy, which required an airiness that kept the action afloat, gradually bringing it down to earth for the denouement. The idea was to convince viewers that they were being served a soufflé that may have sagged a bit, but had not collapsed.
Bedtime Story
ranks as one of the unheralded films about remarriage, which owes a great deal to
The Awful Truth
(1937) and
His Girl Friday
(1940). Loretta and Fredric March play a married actress and playwright—like Alfred Lunt and Lynn
Fontanne—who, in true Hollywood tradition, have never had a flop. Still, after seven years of eight performances a week, Loretta yearns to retire to a farm in Connecticut. March agrees, but continues writing a play that will give her the greatest role of her career. Loretta, however, is so determined to retire that she divorces March, who goes on writing his masterpiece, while she becomes the wife of a banker (Allyn Joslyn).

Robert Flournoy’s clever script adds a new complication to the traditional comedy of remarriage plot: the wife’s second marriage turns out to be legally questionable. There are other plot divagations, all of which are beautifully integrated, including a credit card receipt from a California motel (then called an auto court) that invalidates the wife’s required residency in Reno, the nation’s divorce capital. But, as expected, Loretta returns to March and appears in his play, which is a hit as well as a personal triumph for her. Loretta was surprisingly convincing as a Broadway star. She had never performed on stage, although she was not averse to doing live radio drama, like
Lux Radio Theatre
, where she was a regular. She was also at ease on the lecture circuit. Apparently, the theatre held little interest for her. Yet she understood the way a stage diva moved and spoke, perhaps because she assumed that stars from all media behaved similarly. For
Bedtime Story
, she had the walk, grace, and technique to execute a flawless cross from one side of the stage to the other and then swivel around. She knew enough about stage acting to re-create it. Perhaps Hall, a former stage director, helped her; more likely, Loretta just tapped into those hidden resources that actors possess and found the stage diva within the movie star—the only difference being that, in the theatre, an actor has to master the entire script, while in the movies, learning several pages a day is standard.

Despite top billing, Fredric March fared less well. March was a fine dramatic actor, but without much of a flair for comedy. The script required the playwright to woo his wife back to the stage, and when she remarries, to cause as much mayhem as he can to return her to both the theatre and himself. Thus, March behaves no differently than the ex-husbands in
The Awful Truth
and
His Girl Friday
, who resort to whatever means they can to bring their ex-wives to their senses. March has nothing to do but orchestrate the chaos; he does not have to participate in it. Loretta, however, has to delve into her character’s unconscious, as Rosalind Russell did in
His Girl Friday
, in which Hildy Johnson (Russell) has no desire to wed her dullard fiancé (Ralph Bellamy) and settle down in Albany, hoping instead that her ex (Cary Grant) will deliver her from the boredom awaiting her. Similarly, Loretta secretly hopes March will
rescue her. He does, and one assumes Broadway will be the better for it.

Loretta’s next picture to fulfill her Columbia commitment was her least memorable:
A Night to Remember
(1943), not to be confused with the harrowing 1958 British film of the same name about the sinking of the Titanic. This was not a memorable occasion for any of the cast, which included some of Hollywood’s finest character actors: Jeff Donnell, Sidney Toler (minus his Charlie Chan makeup), Gale Sondergaard, Lee Patrick, and Blanche Yurka. It was a species of screwball mystery, inspired by
The Thin Man
series, in which amateur sleuths solve murders, as they do in
The Gracie Allen Murder Case
and
It’s a Wonderful World
(both 1939).
The Thin Man
(1934) is really faux screwball. Pure screwball does not center on a married couple, but rather a man and a woman who come from totally different backgrounds (e.g.,
It Happened One Night
,
Easy Living
,
Nothing Sacred
,
Bringing Up Baby
)
.
Loretta could do romantic comedy with screwball overtones, but playing the “dizzy dame” was not in her repertoire. She was not the sort who could release her madcap self, probably because, unlike Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, and Katharine Hepburn, she did not have one. Nor did her costar, Brian Aherne. Aherne’s best Columbia films were the two he did with Rosalind Russell,
My Sister Eileen
(1942) and
What a Woman!
(1943), where his urbanity complemented Russell’s cool sophistication.

In
A Night to Remember
, Loretta, the wife of a mystery writer (Aherne), rents the basement apartment of a Greenwich Village brownstone, hoping that he will give up thrillers in favor of romantic fiction. She could not have a picked a worse address.
A Night to Remember
is a variation of the old, dark house movie—with an emphasis on “dark.” The film looks as if each frame had been dipped in stygian waters. It was not so much film noir as noir film. There were times when the screen grew so dark that it was impossible to see what was going on, or who was doing what to whom. No one in the brownstone is what he or she seems; even Jeff Donnell is not her usual perky self, because, as we discover, she is being blackmailed by someone who knows she fled the scene of a notorious penthouse murder. Practically everyone in the building is the victim of the same blackmailer. Eventually Aherne does what the police cannot, unmasking the blackmailer—with little help from Loretta who is swooning when she isn’t screaming. This is the kind of film in which doors lock mysteriously, rooms are suddenly plunged into darkness, a horseshoe disappears from the garden and ends up in the living room, a roving turtle is mistaken for a monster, and a body falls out of
a closet. With different leads (e.g., Jean Arthur and Ray Milland), more subtle direction, and better low-key lighting instead of inky darkness,
A Night to Remember
might have been a respectable addition to a sub-genre: screwball mystery, which was far from overcrowded. Bosley Crowther’s skimpy two-paragraph review in the
New York Times
(1 January 1943) summed it all up: “a hairbrained [sic] excursion with a couple of frightened stars” and “a thoroughly adequate” company, trapped in a “tedious and involved plot,” resulting in “a succession of looming shadows, conversations and mediocre gags.”

Perhaps
A Night to Remember
was Harry Cohn’s
revenge on Loretta
for inflating the cost of her
Bedtime Story
wardrobe. Loretta found a gown at a department store that she preferred to the one Irene had designed for her. It cost $155, but the price rose to $400 after the fastidious Loretta requested extensive alterations. Knowing that Irene would have charged anywhere between $600 and $800 for the same gown, she submitted a bill for $700. Harry retaliated by giving March top billing. Loretta was not one to take defeat lightly; when Cohn ordered a new outfit for her, Loretta had the wardrobe department change it so radically that it ended up costing the studio considerably more than $700. Eventually, Loretta and Cohn reconciled after she sought forgiveness. But she did not return to Columbia until her movie career was drawing to a close. She gave the studio one more film,
Paula
(1952), and left the screen the following year.

The Men in Her Life
had no sooner opened than Loretta was ready for another film: Universal’s
The Lady from Cheyenne
, which started production the first week of January 1941. As a freelancer, Loretta could honor her five-picture commitment to Columbia and still check into another studio for a movie or two.
The Lady from Cheyenne
was the first of a two-picture arrangement with Universal. She was intrigued by the idea of doing a western, a genre she had never attempted. Trekking off to the Mojave Desert for exteriors appealed to her sense of adventure. It would not be like
The Call of the Wild
shoot—there was no Gable, and she was now a married woman. Loretta welcomed the challenge. If she could play a homeless waif, a stage diva, a hearing-impaired wife, and a ballerina—among other types—she could also play a schoolmarm in the Wild West.

The
Daily Committee Meeting
reports reveal a relatively uneventful, six-week shoot that
came in under budget
: $535,000, as opposed to the estimated $622,000. The title was a misnomer; Annie (Loretta) hailed from Philadelphia and headed west with her inheritance, planning to
educate settlers’ children. Loretta played Annie like a crusading optimist, believing that no hurdle was insurmountable, and that reason would prevail over partisanship and chauvinism. She was not prepared for a robber baron (Edward Arnold), determined to acquire her water rights. When Annie refuses, he dispatches his goon squad to burn down the schoolhouse. Annie still does not give up, despite initial opposition from Arnold’s stooge lawyer (Robert Preston). She stops at nothing, even pitting Republicans against Democrats to get a suffrage bill passed in the state legislature.

The Lady from Cheyenne
, set in the late eighteen sixties, is accurate in its depiction of suffrage. Women were given the right to vote in 1869, but not in national elections. That did not come to pass until 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. For the time being, women had to be content with voting in local elections, which was all the film claimed. Still, for Annie and her cohorts it was a triumph. What prevented
The Lady from Cheyenne
from becoming a milestone in feminist cinema is the ending, intended to satisfy women who were too insecure to assert their independence, and men who wanted women kept in their place. Preston’s attempts to bring Arnold to justice—which was only delivered with the formation of an all-female jury after the men refused to sit in judgment on one of their own—should have spelled the end of their relationship. Since Preston was Loretta’s leading man, the script had her doing an about face in the fade out and promising to be his forever, darning his socks, making his meals, and bearing his kids. Greater love than this hath no woman, sacrificing her selfhood for her husband—something Loretta Young never did.