The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (180 page)

Harlan did not begin directing until 1935, and it is clear that he was only favored by Goebbels because so many more incisive talents had departed. But
Jud Süss
is not really typical of his rather cloying, period-bedecked emotional heaviness. Most of his films are sentimental pieces or history films, strenuously trying to make an allegorical justification of the war. It is revealing that Germany reached backwards for support, whereas America cheerfully reconstructed the war and turned it into fiction.
Verwehte Spuren
was the original of
So Long at the Fair
, more sympathetic to Paris of 1868 than the later English version;
Die Reise nach Tilsit
was a remake of Murnau’s
Sunrise
starring Harlan’s third wife, the Swedish actress Kristina Soderbaum;
Der Grosse Konig
was a study of Frederick the Great;
Kolberg
was an elaborate vindication of German unification in the nineteenth century; but
Immensee
and
Opfergang
were ponderous, pastoral romances, as pledged to Soderbaum as Paul Czinner’s movies were to Elizabeth Bergner; and
Die Goldene Stadt
was made in Prague extolling the improved qualities of Agfacolor.

After the war, Harlan was tried for his work on
Jud Süss
but acquitted—this in 1950 when some American artists were also suffering at the hands of inquisitors. He went back to work, still intent on romances and loyal to the matured Soderbaum.

Before directing, he had been an actor, first on stage, then in films:
Eins plus Eins Gleich Drei
(27, Felix Basch);
Das Mädchen mit den Fünf Nullen
(27, Kurt Bernhardt);
Der Meister von Nurnberg
(27, Ludwig Berger);
Somnambul
(29, Adolf Trotz);
Torck
(31, Gustav Ucicky);
Gefahren der Liebe
(31, Eugen Thiele);
Die Unsichtbare Front
(32, Richard Eichberg);
Fluchtlinge
(33, Ucicky);
Polizeiakte 909
(34, Robert Wiene);
Das Mädchen Johanna
(35, Ucicky); and
Stradivari
(35, Geza von Bolvary).

Jean Harlow
(Harlean Carpenter) (1911–37), b. Kansas City, Missouri
David Stenn’s invaluable life and death of Jean Harlow—can it be the last word on her short, chaotic career?—makes it clear that the child Harlean born in 1911 was already the daughter of “Jean Harlow”—Jean Harlow Carpenter, the star’s mother, guide, chief audience, and effective jailer, who was looking for fulfillment and extension. She was the ensuring factor in her daughter’s lurid glory.

It is still shocking to realize that the famous Harlow was only twenty-six when she died, for in few of her films does she look less than that age. Not only was her screen persona worldly, salty, and undisguisedly pleased with her own sexuality; her looks seemed bruised by experience and by a forty-year-old’s hard-earned knowledge. There was never the shine of youth or innocence. She had a young woman’s body—for a moment—yet she offered it to the camera maternally, or like a seasoned whore. Her neglect of underwear seemed aggressive just because her breasts and the oceanic roll of her hips were so mature. The movie voyeur prefers an edge of youth that does not grasp how much is showing. That dissembling innocence was not Harlow’s way. She was too candid. She winked, she liked her nipples to pout, as if to say, “Get a load of this.” And the sheer load always fed into Harlow’s nature as an actress—her comedy.

In that glorious moment from
Dinner at Eight
where Harlow and Marie Dressler are talking—

H
ARLOW:
Do you know that the guy said that machinery is going to take the place of
every profession
.

D
RESSLER:
Oh, my dear, that’s something
you
need never worry about—

Harlow is not just a glowing white sexpot. She is hardly less billowy and effulgent than Dressler—the voluptuous body, the clouds of hair, the apple cheeks, and the sheer ballooning
fun
of Harlow. She is as plump as one of Boucher’s young women—and expanding before our eyes.

Yet she seldom looked well: her eyes gazed sadly from dark surrounds; her hair seemed to have been treated by a blowtorch or by poisonous alchemy—the platinum blonde was a great tag, but if you looked at the face you had to think of toxic associations; and Harlow’s skin, from early on, seemed puffy and not quite fresh. When her death came, from acute nephritis, her body was terribly bloated from wastes she could not get rid of. She stank when she breathed—it is the ugliest end for a goddess, and it leaves her seeming like an eighty-year-old.

At the age of sixteen she eloped with a millionaire and after a quick divorce she began to work as an extra in films, including
The Love Parade
(29, Ernst Lubitsch) and
City Lights
(31, Charles Chaplin). She worked for Hal Roach in a few Laurel and Hardy pictures and then played her first substantial part at Paramount in Edward Sutherland’s
The Saturday Night Kid
(29). But her real fame owed itself to the choice of Howard Hughes, who picked her out to replace Greta Nissen in
Hell’s Angels
(1930). It may not have pleased Hughes, but Harlow’s wisecracking sexual adventuress rather eclipsed the aerial dynamics. An arbitrary master of his own inventions, Hughes loaned Harlow out indiscriminately:
The Secret
Six
(31, George Hill); Tod Browning’s
The Iron Man
(31); Wellman’s
Public Enemy
(31); Benjamin Stoloff’s
Goldie
(31); and most successful of all, Frank Capra’s
Platinum Blonde
(31), for Columbia, a genuinely sexy comedy, in which Capra randily photographed Harlow’s body. One shot, tracking with Harlow, is an unashamed sexual homage, a desert island shot.

At this stage, Harlow stood out for a one-studio contract and Hughes sold her to MGM. Her first film there,
The Beast of the City
(32, Charles Brabin), was not successful, but her next, Jack Conway’s
RedHeaded Woman
(32), achieved the notoriety of prompting the Hays Office to issue sterner edicts against unpunished screen adultery. She married Paul Bern, Thalberg’s right hand at MGM, and survived the scandal that followed his suicide only weeks later.

Bern’s death knows no burying. But its mystery is a lot less than the mystery of why he and Harlow ever dreamed of marrying. Bern was an intellectual, a watcher, an insecure man. There may be no better example in Hollywood history of the longing for class and the dream of earthy vitality making for tragedy. Was Bern impotent? Could Harlow be as potent as on screen or in George Hurrell’s great stills? Bern did have a common-law wife from the past, and she came to the house on the fateful night. David Stenn believes the two wives met, and that Harlow stormed off, telling Bern to sort it all out. So he shot himself, unable to stop behaving like someone in a Metro melodrama. I buy that version: in Hollywood, I’d always trust the plain messy answer rather than the sinister secret. A few days later, the common-law wife killed herself. Harlow soldiered on—she would have another marriage, of eight months, to cameraman Hal Rosson. She acted like an idiot offscreen—what better reason for staying onscreen as much as possible? But she
really
loved William Powell, or whomever. She was really the creation of her mother and her own foolishness. MGM tried a cover-up in the Bern death, but it was inept. They wanted Jean free from scandal—so
they
could exploit it.

Harlow’s next film, Victor Fleming’s
Red Dust
(32)—in which for the first time she played opposite Clark Gable—was her most uninhibited sexual encounter, and the clearest proof that she was a man’s woman. It was as much Harlow’s attitude as her deportment that achieved the effect of frankness.

She stayed with Gable for Sam Wood’s
Hold Your Man
(33), Tay Garnett’s enjoyable
China Seas
(35), Clarence Brown’s
Wife vs. Secretary
(36), and her last film,
Saratoga
(37, Conway). In addition to these, before her death she made
Bombshell
(33, Fleming);
Dinner at Eight
(33, George Cukor);
The Girl from Missouri
(34, Conway);
Reckless
(35, Fleming), with William Powell, in which she marries wastrel Franchot Tone and, when he kills himself, suffers the sanctimonious disapproval of Tone’s socialite friends;
Riffraff
(36, Walter Ruben);
Suzy
(36, George Fitzmaurice);
Libeled Lady
(36, Conway); and
Personal Property
(37, W. S. Van Dyke).

Woody (Woodrow) Harrelson
, b. Midland, Texas, 1961
In the years from 1985 to 1993, Woody Harrelson did 198 episodes as Woody Boyd in
Cheers
. At first, he seemed like a supporting character in that show, but Harrelson played dumb with such delighted integrity he turned Woody into a national figure and he made the barman’s stupidity stand up as sublime innocence. Who could have guessed then, with the show’s frequent nudges to say that one Woody was made of the same timber as another, that he had it in him to become a very talented actor? Thus it’s a real grievance in
No Country for Old Men
(07, Joel and Ethan Coen) when his silky Carson Wells is offed. We want to hear so much more of that drawl. We want to see Carson stretched out as a real player in the absurdist board game. And we remember that Harrelson is an authentic idiosyncrat—his father died in prison where he was serving a sentence for murder. The real thing. In addition, Harrelson is a hemp-smoking vegan, a political demonstrator, and an altogether strange guy. Think of Shelly Long and Ted Danson now, and it’s so striking to see the crazy rate at which Woody has grown.

His movie debut was in
Wildcats
(86, Michael Ritchie), but he wasn’t really noticed in feature films until
Doc Hollywood
(91, Michael Caton-Jones). A year later, he had a hit with Wesley Snipes in
White Men Can’t Jump
(92, Ron Shelton). A year after that, he was the husband in
Indecent Proposal
(93, Adrian Lyne), seemingly happy to fade away from that silly venture. After
I’ll Do Anything
(94, James Brooks), he showed his potential for mad energy in
Natural Born Killers
(94, Oliver Stone). He did
Money Train
(95, Joseph Ruben), with Snipes again;
The Sunchaser
(96, Michael Cimino), acting as if he understood what it was all about. He did
Kingpin
(96, Peter and Bobby Farrelly).

At that point, he had easily his best part so far, as the outrageous and indecent publisher in
The People vs. Larry Flynt
(96, Milos Forman); very good in
Welcome to Sarajevo
(97, Michael Winterbottom);
Wag the Dog
(97, Barry Levinson);
Palmetto
(98, Volker Schlöndorff);
The Thin Red Line
(98, Terrence Malick);
The Hi-Lo Country
(98, Stephen Frears);
EDtv
(99, Ron Howard);
Play It to the Bone
(99, Shelton);
Anger Management
(03, Peter Segal);
She Hate Me
(04, Spike Lee);
After the Sunset
(04, Brett Ratner).

It was not clear whether he could be a lead actor, and it was largely his instinct that carried him toward supporting roles:
The Big White
(05, Mark Mylod);
North Country
(05, Niki Caro);
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
(05, Jane Anderson);
A Scanner Darkly
(06, Richard K. Linklater);
A Prairie Home Companion
(06, Robert Altman); very intriguing and suave as the gigolo in
The Walker
(07, Paul Schrader);
The Grand
(07, Zak Penn);
Battle in Seattle
(07, Stuart Townsend);
Transsiberian
(08, Brad Anderson);
Sleepwalking
(08, Bill Maher);
Semi-Pro
(08, Kent Alterman);
Surfer, Dude
(08, S. R. Bindler);
Management
(08, Stephen Belber);
Seven Pounds
(08, Gabriele Muccino); startling in
The Messenger
(09, Oren Moverman)—and nominated; and having a big hit in
Zombieland
(09, Ruben Fleischer). He is the new Dennis Hopper.

Ed
(Edward Allen)
Harris
, b. Englewood, New Jersey, 1950
For the 1996 Oscars, Ed Harris was nominated as best supporting actor for his spiffy-vested Mission Control in
Apollo 13
(95, Ron Howard)—it was a terrific performance, terse, manly to the point of macho, utterly competent, and with a ghost of a smile in those sad, wise eyes that kidded the man’s mix of decision, decorum, and stiff upper lip. (Harris has maybe the best eyes among contemporary American actors.) Yet Harris could easily have been one of the astronauts—chipper, laconic, modest, grim in a crisis and a pal at chow time, chasing the strands of orange juice like a kid bobbing for apples. He had done that role—twelve years earlier, he had been John Glenn in
The Right Stuff
(83, Philip Kaufman), when the real Glenn suffered on the campaign trail because he wasn’t as dry, loose, or charismatic as Ed. Meanwhile, of course, for 1996, Harris might just as easily have been nominated for the true id to people like John Glenn, Howard Hunt in
Nixon
(95, Oliver Stone), a chronic agent who wore his vests and his soul inside out.

Harris has been a lead actor, and learned to live with his being a touch too short and several inches too hair-impaired—not that he has ever toupéed up. Indeed, he is more likely to go hairless, as for his FBI man in
The Firm
(93, Sydney Pollack). But he has become a faithful, unfailing supporting actor, increasingly respected, and loved.