The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (15 page)

She did not make films until 1930:
Un Chien Qui Rapporte
(Jean Choux). It was a few years before Carné and Sacha Guitry promoted her to leading parts: very good in
Pension Mimosas
(35, Jacques Feyder);
Faisons un Rêve
(36, Guitry);
Les Perles de la Couronne
(37, Guitry);
Désiré
(38, Guitry);
Hôtel du Nord
(38, Carné);
Fric-Frac
(39, Claude Autant-Lara);
Madame Sans-Gêne
(41, Roger Richebé); and
Les Visiteurs du Soir
(42, Carné).

During the Second World War, she had a love affair with a Luftwaffe officer, and thus she was jailed as a collaborator when
Les Enfants du Paradis
opened—life competing with Jacques Prévert’s taste for irony.

She was in Carné’s uncompleted
La Fleur de l’Age
in 1947, and she had triumphs on the stage in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Huis-Clos
. But she made fewer films:
L’Amour Madame
(52, Gilles Grangier);
Le Grand Jeu
(53, Robert Siodmak);
Huis-Clos
(54, Jacqueline Audry); with Gabin again in
L’Air de Paris
(54, Carné); and
La Gamberge
(62, Norbert Carbonnaux).

In 1966, she was stricken with blindness—cruel fate for those very wary eyes. But in 1971, she wrote a book of memoirs,
La Défense
, and lived to be ninety-four.

George Arliss
(1868–1946), b. London, England
The two most unlikely stars of the early thirties—and both of them won Oscars—were George Arliss and Marie Dressler. (Imagine them together!) Maybe he was the odder: an old-fashioned British character actor who was sixty-one when he released the first of a series of Hollywood hits. It was
Disraeli
(1929), a role he had played on stage across America for five years. (This was the part for which he won the third Oscar for an actor—the award was for
The Green Goddess
, too.) Other impersonations of famous historical characters were to follow:
Alexander Hamilton
(1931),
Voltaire
(1933), Wellington in
The Iron Duke
(1934),
Cardinal Richelieu
(1935). There’s no point naming the directors of these movies, because everything about them centers on Arliss, and he was in control of every aspect of their filming—that’s clear from his second autobiography,
My Ten Years in the Studio
, which is short on detail but long on good-natured atmosphere. Bette Davis confirms his authority in her own autobiography: not only did Arliss personally choose her for his film
The Man Who Played God
(1932)—at the close of their interview he says, “ ‘The part is yours. Go to the casting office right away’—but Mr. Arliss personally augmented my direction, supervised my makeup and wardrobe, and showed me every conceivable consideration. It may have been a Warner Bros. Film, but Mr. Arliss (as he was always called) was in charge.’ ”

You can tell his Disraeli from his Voltaire because the former has a spit curl on his forehead and the latter wears a mobcap, and it’s in the scrupulous deployment of makeup and costume that Arliss shines. Not that he stints as an actor—he gives it all he’s got, and though that’s often far too much, it’s honest work; he believes in these creations, and he has great charm if you don’t mind its calculated quality. Actually, what you’re seeing here is the last traces of English stage acting from the turn of the century—Arliss grew up the hard way in the British theatre, in rep companies for many years before cracking the West End and going on to stardom, a story that’s charmingly told in volume 1 of his memoirs,
Up the Years from Bloomsbury
. He came to America early in the century in a company led by Mrs. Patrick Campbell and stayed on—neither the first nor the last English actor to make a bigger career in America. During the twenties, he starred in half a dozen silent films, several of which were based on his stage successes and which he then remade in sound: a
Disraeli
in 1921;
The Man Who Played God
in 1922; and his huge hit by William Archer,
The Green Goddess
, in 1923. The sound version, released in 1930 but actually filmed before the sound version of
Disraeli
, has him in dark skin, jeweled turban, and sinister smile as a crafty rajah—it’s so stage-ridden you want to shout out “Curtain!” at key scene-ending lines.

The historical films alternate with jovial-old-man comedies (the best of them
Old English
in 1930), in which Arliss is all-knowing and twinkling with benevolence, usually toward a young couple in romantic difficulties. (Disraeli, Voltaire, and Richelieu also find time to play Cupid to young romance.) Well, you couldn’t really have the supremely unsexy elderly Arliss in love stories, though there’s an aborted marriage to Bette Davis in
The Man Who Played God
. He’s a concert pianist deafened by a bomb explosion, she’s a noble young thing who pretends to love him, but he discovers (by reading her lips through binoculars, of course) that she’s sacrificing herself, and he frees her. In fact, Arliss’s greatest contribution to the movies may have been his championing of Davis at a crucial moment in her young and failing career—he also demanded her presence in
The Working Man
(1932). The young, appealing Davis slashes through these minor, stagy movies like a glittering creature from an alien planet; the screen shimmers with real movie allure whenever she turns up.

In 1934, Darryl Zanuck brought Arliss to the new Twentieth Century for his best film,
The House of Rothschild
. This is a real
movie
, with energy and sweep, that happens to star Arliss (in a double role), not just a filmed vehicle; it’s got an intelligent script by Nunnally Johnson, with Alfred Werker directing, and a strong supporting cast—Loretta Young and Robert Young as the obligatory young lovers, Helen Westley as the Rothschild matriarch, C. Aubrey Smith as Wellington, and an extraordinary Boris Karloff as the anti-Semitic Prussian Count Ledrantz. Probably the film most ardently sympathetic to Jews to come out of Hollywood in the thirties,
The House of Rothschild
was made by Gentiles—Arliss, Zanuck, Johnson.

The other Zanuck production featuring Arliss,
Cardinal Richelieu
(35, Rowland V. Lee), is another big historical drama, with the star in perfect Richelieu drag. These two movies show the studio launched on its path to epics like
The Rains Came
, while Warners went on to develop its own kind of inspirational biopics, like
The Story of Louis Pasteur
and
Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet
. But then Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were echt Warners actors; Arliss represented English Class in a manner highly unsymptomatic of this grittiest of studios.

The Arliss phenomenon—and it was real—had about six good years, then petered out back in England with
Doctor Syn
(Roy William Neill) in 1937. By then he had been acting for more than fifty years and had had enough.

Gillian Armstrong
, b. Melbourne, Australia, 1950
1973:
Gretel
(d);
One Hundred a Day
(s);
Satdee Night
(s). 1975:
Smokes and Lillies
(s). 1976:
The Singer and the Dancer
. 1979:
My Brilliant Career
. 1980:
A Busy Kind of Bloke
(s);
Fourteen’s Good, Eighteen’s Better
(s). 1982:
Starstruck
. 1984:
Mrs. Soffel
. 1987:
High Tide
. 1988:
Bingo, Bridesmaids and Braces
(s). 1991:
Fires Within
. 1992:
The Last Days of Chez Nous
. 1994:
Little Women
. 1997:
Oscar and Lucinda
. 2001:
Charlotte Gray
. 2005:
Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst
(d). 2008:
Death Defying Acts
.

This is one of the more entertaining careers around today, lit up by a series of documentary shorts on Australian girls growing up that is derived from Michael Apted’s pictures about Britain. Armstrong has lived through being regarded as “Australian” and a woman; as someone especially intrigued by period and modern stories, comedy or drama. In truth, she has all those sides to her, and more. She has shown steady development, and it may be that she only needs the right conjunction of star and material to become recognized as a major director. In fact, she’s already done one major film—
Mrs. Soffel
—one of those mercies in the grim eighties that went largely unnoticed by audiences. It’s a great, strange love story, and the best work by Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson.

Actors invariably do well for Armstrong—Judy Davis (despite her scorn for
My Brilliant Career
), Lisa Harrow, Winona Ryder, and Cate Blanchett. Her
Little Women
seemed like the work of a feminist who had “settled down,” but
Charlotte Gray
proved a big disappointment: despite valiant work by Blanchett and Michael Gambon, it never made me feel the violent shifts said to be occurring in its heroine.

Edward Arnold
(Günther Edward Arnold Schneider) (1890–1956), b. New York
Around the age of forty-five, Edward Arnold became one of the most intriguing of supporting actors. He was large and seemingly good-natured. But a few films took him to a more sinister point, as a domineering boss figure, very rich, very powerful, very corrupt—just see how he moves in
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(39, Frank Capra) or
Meet John Doe
(41, Capra). That is a man who expects to be obeyed, and who has the arrogance that reckons it deserves power. He had charm and authority, and even as more simply jovial characters Arnold was a man to watch: for example, Louis XIII in
Cardinal Richelieu
(35, Rowland V. Lee); the policeman going after Peter Lorre in
Crime and Punishment
(35, Josef von Sternberg);
Diamond Jim
(35, Edward Sutherland); excellent and touching as the timber tycoon in
Come and Get It
(36, Howard Hawks and William Wyler); the millionaire in
Easy Living
(37, Mitchell Leisen);
Idiot’s Delight
(39, Clarence Brown); as Diamond Jim Brady again to Alice Faye’s
Lillian Russell
(40, Irving Cummings); and Daniel Webster in
The Devil and Daniel Webster
(41, William Dieterle).

It sounds unlikely, but Arnold had been a cowboy star in the years 1915–19. He turned to theatre and only really took up movies again in the early thirties:
Okay America
(32, Tay Garnett);
Rasputin and the Empress
(32, Richard Boleslavsky);
The Barbarian
(33, Sam Wood);
I’m No Angel
(33, Wesley Ruggles);
Jennie Gerhardt
(33, Marion Gering);
Roman Scandals
(33, Frank Tuttle);
The White Sister
(33, Victor Fleming);
Biography of a Bachelor Girl
(34, Edward Griffith);
The President Vanishes
(34, William Wellman);
Sadie McKee
(34, Brown);
Thirty Day Princess
(34, Gering);
The Glass Key
(35, Tuttle);
Remember Last Night?
(35, James Whale); as the detective in
Meet Nero Wolfe
(36, Herbert Biberman);
Sutter’s Gold
(36, James Cruze);
John Meade’s Woman
(37, Richard Wallace);
The Toast of New York
(37, Rowland V. Lee);
The Crowd Roars
(38, Richard Thorpe);
You Can’t Take It With You
(38, Capra);
Let Freedom Ring
(39, Jack Conway);
Man About Town
(39, Mark Sandrich);
The Earl of Chicago
(40, Richard Thorpe); and
Johnny Apollo
(40, Henry Hathaway).

By, say, 1946, Walter Brennan had won the supporting actor Oscar three times, while Claude Rains had had four nominations. I cherish both of them—but Arnold had earned nothing. And, sadly, from the early forties onward he went into hardworking decline—he ran out of good parts, and suffered badly from being based at MGM:
Design for Scandal
(41, Norman Taurog);
Johnny Eager
(41, Mervyn Le Roy); with Bob Hope in
Nothing But the Truth
(41, Elliott Nugent);
The Penalty
(41, Harold S. Bucquet);
Unholy Partners
(41, Le Roy); as a blind detective in
Eyes in the Night
(42, Fred Zinnemann) and
The Hidden Eye
(45, Richard Whorf);
The Youngest Profession
(43, Edward Buzzell);
Jamie
(44, Michael Curtiz);
Kismet
(44, Dieterle);
Mrs. Parkington
(44, Garnett);
Weekend at the Waldorf
(45, Robert Z. Leonard);
My Brother Talks to Horses
(46, Buzzell);
Ziegfeld Follies
(46, Vincente Minnelli);
Dear Ruth
(47, William D. Russell);
The Hucksters
(47, Jack Conway); and
Big City
(48, Taurog).

These are the years of film noir, when surely Arnold could have served as authoritative villains. But he was misplaced, and the list is horribly short of interest:
Command Decision
(48, Wood);
Three Daring Daughters
(48, Fred M. Wilcox);
John Loves Mary
(49, David Butler);
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
(49, Busby Berkeley);
Annie Get Your Gun
(50, George Sidney);
Dear Wife
(50, Richard Haydn);
Belles on Their Toes
(52, Henry Levin);
City That Never Sleeps
(53, John H. Auer); with Martin and Lewis in
Living It Up
(54, Taurog);
The Ambassador’s Daughter
(56, Norman Krasna); and
Miami Expose
(56, Fred F. Sears).