The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (252 page)

The directorial presence of Roach on the early shorts and of Newmeyer and Taylor on the features was nominal: “I never took credit for direction, although I practically directed all my own pictures. The directors were entirely dependent on me. I had these boys there because I felt they knew comedy, they knew what I wanted, they knew me and they could handle the details.” After
Why Worry?
(23, Newmeyer and Taylor), he formed his own company, still working for Pathé:
Girl Shy
(24),
Hot Water
(24), and
The Freshman
(25), all with Newmeyer and Taylor. He then moved over to Paramount:
For Heaven’s Sake
(26, Taylor),
The Kid Brother
(27, Ted Wilde), and
Speedy
(28, Wilde). He made
Welcome Stranger
(29, Clyde Bruckman) with a few sound sequences, but
Feet First
(30, Bruckman) flopped.

Thereafter he worked more slowly:
Movie Crazy
(32, Bruckman);
The Cat’s Paw
(34, Taylor) for Fox; and, back at Paramount,
The Milky Way
(36, Leo McCarey). After
Professor Beware
(38, Elliott Nugent), he retired as an actor, but produced
A Girl, A Guy and A Gob
(41, Richard Wallace), with George Murphy and Lucille Ball, and
My Favorite Spy
(42, Tay Garnett). He was called out of retirement by Howard Hughes to appear in
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock
(46, Preston Sturges), spoiled, according to Lloyd, by Sturges’s inflexibility. In his last twenty years, Lloyd reissued some of his best silent work in two compilations:
Harold Lloyd’s World of Comedy
(62) and
Harold Lloyd’s Funny Side of Life
(64).

Ken Loach
, b. Nuneaton, England, 1936
1965:
Up the Junction
(TV). 1966:
Cathy Come Home
(TV). 1967:
Poor Cow
. 1969:
Kes
. 1971:
Family Life
. 1979:
Black Jack
. 1980:
The Gamekeeper
. 1981:
Looks and Smiles
. 1986:
Fatherland/Singing the Blues in Red
. 1990:
Hidden Agenda
. 1992:
Riff-Raff
. 1993:
Raining Stones
. 1994:
Ladybird, Ladybird
. 1995:
Land and Freedom
. 1996:
Carla’s Song
. 1997:
The Flickering Flame
(d). 1998:
My Name Is Joe
. 2000:
Bread and Roses
. 2001:
The Navigators
. 2002:
Sweet Sixteen
. 2004:
Ae Fond Kiss …
2005:
Tickets
(codirected with Abbas Kiarostami);
McLibel
(d.). 2006:
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
. 2007:
It’s a Free World
. 2009:
Looking for Eric
. 2010:
Route Irish
. Born the son of an electrician in the English Midlands, Loach has remained steadfastly attentive to working-class experience—to such an extent that some of his films have had (or needed) “English” subtitles when released in America. He read law at Oxford and was active in experimental theatre at the same time. He did a little acting, before he joined the BBC and learned his craft on the excellent series
Z-Cars
, about police in the northwest of England. From there, he began to make docudramas, often with unknown actors and an air of improvisation, but just as often dependent on published source material.

Up the Junction
may have seemed like a raw slice of south London life, but it came from a book by Nell Dunn.
Cathy Come Home
was a good deal tougher and better organized, and it caused great controversy in Britain as to whether or not the BBC should have revealed such harsh social conditions.
Poor Cow
was an attempt to carry the TV method over into a feature film, but it was less effective (perhaps because it used such excellent but conventional young actors as Terence Stamp and Malcolm McDowell).

In those early days, Loach worked in partnership with the producer Tony Garnett:
Kes
was their major film, about a working-class kid who tries to raise a falcon—it is probably still Loach’s best-known film.
Family Life
was a very bleak work, written by David Mercer, about a nineteen-year-old woman whose failure in life leads to her being institutionalized and actually going crazy. The movie seemed as gloomy about mental health care as about the maddening pressures of the family—true to life, perhaps, but without redemption.

For the next few years, Loach had a hard time finding films.
The Gamekeeper
was a more conventional narrative, about the barriers of the class system. But Loach seemed less himself in traditional narrative. Gradually in the eighties, with varying degrees of success (perhaps because of his comfort with different writers), he worked his way back to tough, exploratory pictures about a more-or-less beleaguered working class.
Hidden Agenda
—set and filmed in Northern Ireland—is the most accessible of these, though its structure is awkward and the film requires a good deal of background knowledge in the viewer.

But Loach has persevered, and in
Riff-Raff
and
Raining Stones
he did his best work yet. These are still unforced, naturalistic movies, studies in banal and “hopeless” poverty, but well acted and with growing humor. For me, it is easier to respect Loach than enjoy him: he seldom has the bite of Alan Clarke, for instance. But in his dedication and seriousness, he is an exemplary figure.

Even in the insane prosperity of the nineties, Loach pursued his destiny, and he grew gentler, subtler, and funnier. It was one of the most impressive developments in a filmmaker. Who else—with
Bread and Roses
—would get to make a film about the Los Angeles janitors’ strike that was a serious contender for prizes at Cannes?
Land and Freedom
was a remarkable recreation of the Spanish Civil War (with violence, boredom, and the interminable political arguments)—spoiled by a trite, didactic framework.
Carla’s Song
brought together a Scotsman and a woman from Nicaragua—Loach has a nice, shy taste for Latin women. And best of all,
My Name Is Joe
followed a romance between a drunk (Peter Mullan) and a social worker. I still don’t find myself getting excited with Loach—but I begin to see more clearly how that is my loss or shortcoming.

Margaret Lockwood
(1916–90), b. Karachi, India
Here’s a little game: which English actress, born in India, with dark hair and flashing eyes, sauce and humor, got a huge chance in 1939? Yes, of course, it was Vivien Leigh, born in Darjeeling, three years earlier than Miss Lockwood. But just suppose: Lockwood looked a lot like Leigh; she looked as much like Joan Bennett (who was also in the running); she would have been twenty-two when Scarlett was cast—and she might have been pretty good, to judge by her several performances for Carol Reed in the late thirties and early forties, or to judge simply by Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes
(38), a better calling card than anything Vivien Leigh could muster. Of course, Leigh had Olivier and Myron Selznick—she got herself there in the firelight of Atlanta. But Margaret Lockwood was plainly a favorite of Carol Reed—maybe just not in the right way, or maybe Reed was a bit stuffy about Hollywood?

Still, it’s an intriguing call, and enough to remind us that Margaret Lockwood had her moment as a woman of spirit, pride, and even danger. She had worked on stage first, but the camera clearly loved her:
Some Day
(35, Michael Powell);
Midshipman Easy
(35, Reed);
Man of the Moment
(35, Monty Banks); Annie Ridd in
Lorna Doone
(35, Basil Dean);
Honours Easy
(35, Herbert Brenon);
The Case of Gabriel Perry
(35, Albert de Courville);
The Amateur Gentleman
(36, Thornton Freeland);
The Beloved Vagabond
(36, Curt Bernhardt);
Jury’s Evidence
(36, Ralph Ince);
Irish for Luck
(36, Arthur Wood); with George Arliss in
Doctor Syn
(37, Roy William Neill);
Who’s Your Lady Friend?
(37, Reed);
The Street Singer
(37, Jean de Marguerat);
Melody and Romance
(37, Maurice Elvey);
Owd Bob
(38, Robert Stevens);
Bank Holiday
(38, Reed).

What’s more, she did go to Hollywood. At the very moment in question, she was invited west for two pictures:
Rulers of the Sea
(39, Frank Lloyd), with Doug Fairbanks Jr., and
Susannah of the Mounties
(39, William A. Seiter), with Shirley Temple. Yet there’s no evidence that Selznick knew of her.

She came back to Britain and did her best work in the war years:
The Stars Look Down
(39, Reed);
A Girl Must Live
(39, Reed);
Night Train to Munich
(40, Reed);
Quiet Wedding
(40, Anthony Asquith);
Alibi
(42, Brian Desmond Hurst);
The Man in Grey
(43, Leslie Arliss), with James Mason;
Give Us the Moon
(43, Val Guest);
Dear Octopus
(43, Harold French);
A Place of One’s Own
(44, Bernard Knowles);
Love Story
(44, Arliss); and her big hit, with Mason, as highwaymen,
The Wicked Lady
(45, Arliss)—a very Scarlett role.

She was only thirty, but after the war she failed to attach herself to Rank or Ealing and her career suffered:
I’ll Be Your Sweetheart
(45, Guest);
Bedelia
(46, Lance Comfort);
Hungry Hill
(47, Hurst);
The White Unicorn
(47, Knowles);
Jassy
(47, Knowles); a TV version of
Pygmalion
in 1948;
Look Before You Love
(48, Harold Huth); as Nell Gwynn in
Cardboard Cavalier
(49, Walter Forde);
Madness of the Heart
(49, Charles Bennett);
Highly Dangerous
(50, Roy Baker); and then three pictures for Herbert Wilcox
—Trent’s Last Case
(52),
Trouble in the Glen
(53), and
Laughing Anne
(53).

She was doing stage again, and had a last movie fling in
Cast a Dark Shadow
(57, Lewis Gilbert), playing with Dirk Bogarde. Thereafter, it was just TV series—sometimes with her daughter, Julia—and the stepmother in
The Slipper and the Rose
(76, Bryan Forbes).

Barbara Loden
(1932–80), b. Marion, North Carolina
1970:
Wanda
.
Barbara Loden was Mrs. Elia Kazan, and the director of one film with a feeling for wayward, unordered lives, for the haphazard detracting from drama, and for an off-center, unsentimental pathos that are characteristics missing from her husband’s work.
Wanda
did not go without praise, but sadly there were no more films from Ms. Loden.
Wanda
is a bank robbery picture, and never ashamed of that. It is by adhering to its narrative form that it is most eloquent about the benighted feminine character. A more strident director, with less respect for the medium, might have made a revolutionary tract out of
Wanda
. As it is, it shows a listless, none-too-bright woman on the point of a divorce who becomes the accomplice of a tetchy hold-up man. This is no pact of misbegotten romantics;
Wanda
is bolder than Kazan’s movies in granting that people do not control their own destinies. Wanda interrupts one robbery and helplessly tags along, infuriating and bewildering the man and his headaches; and then muddles a larger job when she gets lost in traffic.

This action is no more underlined than the squalid small towns, bars, and motels; the impermanent life on the road; and the touching failure of the characters to conceive of any satisfactory role for themselves. Shot originally in 16mm Kodachrome,
Wanda
is full of unexpected moments and raw atmosphere, never settling for cliché in situation or character. It often has an air of improvisation—Loden admitted the influence of Warhol—but it is quite prepared for slow, simple effects, such as Wanda in white, in long shot, trudging through a coal yard. Above all,
Wanda
sees no need to stoke up the dignity or worth of its female victim. No woman director has given a fuller, less biased portrait of a man.
Wanda
—the title is a gentle pun as well as the woman’s name—observes the unrealized desperation of millions of lives.

Otherwise, Barbara Loden acted in two of her husband’s films—as the sour secretary in
Wild River
(60) and the rampaging sister in
Splendor in the Grass
(61). She worked more consistently in the theatre, playing the “Marilyn Monroe” part in the original production of Arthur Miller’s
After the Fall
, but her sharp face was made for films.

Joshua Logan
(1908–88), b. Texarkana, Texas
1938:
I Met My Love Again
(codirected with Arthur Ripley). 1956:
Picnic; Bus Stop
. 1957:
Sayonara
. 1958:
South Pacific
. 1960:
Tall Story
. 1961:
Fanny
. 1964:
Ensign Pulver
. 1967:
Camelot
. 1969:
Paint Your Wagon
.

Logan was a man of the theatre. President of the drama group at Princeton, he formed a university company of actors that included Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and Margaret Sullavan. In the 1930s he visited Stanislavsky in Moscow, produced in London, and began a Broadway career as producer that included
Annie Get Your Gun, Happy Birthday, John Loves Mary, Mister Roberts, Charley’s Aunt, South Pacific
, and
Fanny
. In fact, he was coauthor of
Mister Roberts, South Pacific
, and
Fanny
.