Auteurs Gone Wild: A Look at the Series at Anthology Film Archives

Recently, over breakfast at their favorite neighborhood joint, the Siren’s close personal friend Glenn Kenny twitted her gently about that time in the very recent past when she made a crack about auteurism. The Siren thought about it and told him, “You know how people talk about à la carte Catholics? I’m an à la carte auteurist.”

In other words, the Siren has some problems with the rock-ribbed Cahiers-carrying version of auteurism. But let’s face it, the Siren also has pets.

And Anthology Film Archives, via programmer David Phelps, has done an uncanny job of selecting eight of her favorite directors for the now-playing series “Auteurs Gone Wild.” The premise is simple and delightful: A look at those times when genius took a left turn at Albuquerque and wound up making something that doesn’t fit neatly with the other work. The schedule is here, it's all on 35mm, several are not on DVD, and any Siren readers in the New York area should definitely try to catch a few.

The Siren wrote up You and Me a while back, and it’s enchanting. There’s a particularly good analysis of The Bitter Tea of General Yen in Dan Callahan’s Barbara Stanwyck book, and the Siren recommends it. (Victoria Wilson, in volume I of the monumental Stanwyck bio that You Should Be Reading, doesn’t seem to like Bitter Tea all that much, but she gives an excellent rundown on its making and reception.) The Siren doesn’t have a lot to say about A Countess From Hong Kong; it’s often amusing, even sweet, but it’s hard to get over the casting. (Did Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando ever look more sulky?) The Siren wants to get reacquainted with A Woman of Paris, the other Charlie Chaplin film in which he did not star, and she also hopes to see The Saga of Anatahan, Josef von Sternberg’s Japanese-made swan song.

At Mubi's Movie Poster of the Week, Adrian Curry celebrates the series with ravishing posters for all the films. Meanwhile, some thoughts on the others.

The Siren was surprised to find herself heartily disliking Under Capricorn, which Hitchcock made in in London in 1949. The plot concerns a carefree young man (Michael Wilding, a little too lightweight) who goes to colonial Australia to seek his fortune. He finds childhood love Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman) has also moved there after marrying several rungs down the social ladder, and that her sole recreation in this remote location is drinking herself into insanity. The husband is former groom Sam Flusky, played by Joseph Cotten as the most grating, self-pitying nudnik in all of Hitchcock. (Hitchcock said Burt Lancaster would have been better, but the character’s beyond even Lancaster’s redemptive charm.) Hovering around to add to Henrietta's peril is Margaret Leighton as the sinister maid. Made just after The Paradine Case and Rope, Under Capricorn shares those films’ obsessively intricate takes, although the biggest plus here comes from genius Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor. Formalists tend to worship Under Capricorn, and this is one gorgeous film. The confession scene with Ingrid Bergman unfolds in an eight-minute take that seems to make the camera itself an instrument of her isolation and breakdown.

So yes, Under Capricorn looks good. It plays, however, as po-faced and rancid, a romantic melodrama about love with an emotionally abusive spouse — Gaslight, if she tried to work things out with Charles Boyer. Hitchcock later admitted he had little affinity for the material; Cardiff said the long-take process led to a fatal “loss of tempo” for both the actors and the film. Both men knew what they were talking about. The Siren continues to prefer Rope and The Paradine Case (now there’s a Hitchcock whose fans get mighty lonely). But a rare 35mm screening is the ideal place to see for yourself.

Edward, My Son is somewhat marred by a (possibly Production Code-mandated) framing device that has an aged Spencer Tracy shuffling up to the camera to ask for a moral judgment from the audience. He plays Arnold Boult, a man whose obsession with an easy life for his only child turned his son into a monster. Or did it? Edward is never seen on camera, a device that Donald Ogden Stewart’s script carries over from the play by Robert Morley and Noel Langley. The effect turns Edward into the picture of Dorian Gray: a reflection of the main character’s gradual corruption. Leaving Edward out of sight leaves the audience to decide whether Boult truly ruined his son, or whether the child was always doomed to inherit the father’s worst qualities. After all, as Edward’s upstanding mother Evelyn (Deborah Kerr) points out in her most emotional scene, many people spoil their children, without the kid turning into a liar, a thief and a bully. Even Edward’s evident alcoholism may be genetics at work, since Evelyn herself turns to drink as Boult's deeds get darker.

George Cukor’s biographer, Patrick McGilligan, labels this one “an ambitious dud,” but the Siren thinks it’s full of great twists and question marks; Tracy never lets you see Boult as a complete villain. Leueen MacGrath, a gorgeous and multitalented woman who was married to George S. Kaufman, is superb as Boult's secretary/mistress, moving from cool calculation to heartbreak. Kerr is excellent early on, but MGM goes crazy with the old-age makeup later in the film, when logic suggests her character is still south of 50, but some smartass added a dowager’s hump. Still, Cukor offers Kerr a haunting fadeout. The camera focuses on Tracy and devoted family doctor Ian Hunter, while a drunk and heartbroken Kerr climbs the steps of her mansion, moving out of the frame for what we know will be the last time.

And in terms of technique, the Siren thought this was the most intriguing film of all, a play that never feels stagey. Cukor uses massively long takes, with sly changes in angle and slow, elegant camera moves that smoothly shift your attention within the frame. It’s one of his most ineffably subtle films.

Henry Hathaway's The Sons of Katie Elder is a Siren favorite. He directed Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which Ben Urwand has been so diligently reintroducing to the public, and Hathaway made a string of great noirs in the 1940s. Peter Ibbetson is definitely none of the above. It’s a dreamy romantic fantasy rather like Smilin’ Through, only considerably darker and with a leading lady — Ann Harding — far more nuanced than Norma Shearer. The title role is played by Gary Cooper. He’s a young man whose childhood sweetheart Mary (Harding) has married a much-older duke (John Halliday in full glower). The duke discovers their love, tries to shoot Peter and winds up dead himself. Peter is sent to prison, but his love for Mary is so powerful that they are able to meet in their dreams, acting out the love that was thwarted in life.

David Shipman says this film did not fare well at the 1935 box office. It’s a delicate conceit that strikes some, like Nick Pinkerton, as positively sappy. Well, the Siren, perverse mortal that she is, adores this movie. The lovers’ connection is entirely spiritual; there’s not the slightest hint that their dreams find them doing anything more carnal than romping through meadows together. Peter was born in France and raised in England; Cooper does great work without the slightest alteration in his sandy Montana voice. The screenplay (based on George DuMaurier’s novel) is utterly, at times painfully sincere. But there are few films more committed to the notion of soul-deep love than this one. Charles Lang’s cinematography, full of light-shafts and dreamy mists, will thrill anyone who loved the Criterion Blu-Ray of The Uninvited. He and Hathaway create a black-and-white world that seems supernatural well before it gives way to the lovers’ dreams. The first section, with Dickie Moore and Virginia Weidler playing the lovers as children, is heartrending. Yes, Virginia Weidler; the Siren shall snub her no more.

“One of his worst films,” is how Scott Eyman describes Broken Lullaby in his biography of Ernst Lubitsch. The Siren recommends Eyman’s book, but she doesn’t agree about the haunting Broken Lullaby at all. It’s far from Lubitsch’s most incongruous movie; the Siren would give that honor to Loves of Pharaoh. But it’s definitely an anomaly, with an opening that evokes nothing so much as All Quiet on the Western Front. Phillips Holmes plays Paul, a former French soldier racked with guilt over killing a German boy, Walter Hoderlin, in the trenches. (Like Lew Ayres and Jimmy Butler of No Greater Glory, life had some grim ironies in store for Holmes.) Paul mails the German’s last letter home, then goes to Walter's home town in search of what we moderns would call “closure.” Herr Hoderlin, a kindly old doctor played by Lionel Barrymore, feels bitterness toward the French; Walter's mother (Louise Carter) and fiancee (Nancy Carroll) are still numb with grief. Paul finds himself embraced by the family, and must decide whether to tell them the truth.

It’s based on a play and marks Lubitsch’s first collaboration with Samson Raphaelson, although Broken Lullaby was shot after The Smiling Lieutenant. ("It came out just as morbid and unattractive as I thought it would," was Raphaelson's review.) Bad box office led a desperate Paramount to change the title, post-release, to Broken Lullaby from the original The Man I Killed, babies presumably being an easier sell than corpses. (The Siren likes the original title much better, with its echo of Thomas Hardy’s poem.) The ending can be seen as equivocal, although the Siren points out that Lubitsch is not known for his punitive attitude toward his characters. One shot hooked the Siren. Walter's mother is at his grave, and there are any number of possible ways to film that: the flowers on the grave, the earth, the headstone, the back of the actress’ head. Lubitsch moves in on the mother’s hands unsnapping the clasp of her pocketbook, so close we can see that virtually all it contains is a handkerchief.

****

So, should this series meet with enough success to get a sequel, what offbeat films would the Siren's patient readers suggest? Her own nomination would be Otto Preminger's charming Centennial Summer, because the last thing she expected Otto to do was remind her of Meet Me in St. Louis.

Anecdote of the Week: "The Girl in the Black Tights"

Some big parties going on for the past couple of weeks and the Siren's best hats were all being re-blocked, so she didn't go. Thursday night TCM, in the slyest bit of counter-programming the Siren has seen in some time, ran an entire evening of Mack Sennett shorts.

Now if this doesn't prove to one and all that Turner Classic Movies is the greatest damn channel in the history of channels, television, or people named Turner, the Siren doesn't know what will. The Siren's been seeing Sennett shorts mined for years for "quaint" clips meant to poke fun at the primitive nature of early cinema. And here he was, lovingly restored, respectfully introduced by Ben Mankiewicz, and being shown in prime time.

The Siren has been having one of those months where she's all, "Gosh, my movie viewing is feeling so, so, well--current" so this was perfect. And who should jump out at her during these shorts? Not Chester Conklin or Raymond Griffith or the Keystone Kops or Chaplin or Arbuckle, but Mabel Normand.

Normand was a known quantity; the Siren loves Mickey and He Did and He Didn't and Tillie's Punctured Romance and many others. Sitting down with the Sennett films that put her on the map was fascinating, though. Normand was utterly fresh and natural on camera. Through more than two hours of viewing the Siren never saw her mug.

John Barrymore told Mary Astor, "Think! the camera is a mind-reader." And what Sennett's camera saw in Normand was unaffected charm. It's a charm that, oddly, doesn't read much in stills at all. What a Normand photograph shows you is a pretty woman with a cute smile. You have to watch her in motion to understand why she bewitched so many, including Chaplin and of course Sennett himself.



The short that captivated the Siren was this one, for reasons that will become clear. The Water Nymph is cute, but not sidesplitting; it's famous mostly for Normand's bathing-suit scene, which according to Ben Mank inaugurated the immortal Sennett Bathing Beauties. But look at Normand earlier, laughing behind her hand at her pompous suitor. It could easily play as mean, even bitchy; Mabel's mockery seems to come from a place of pure joy, not a hint of malice in it.

It's hard to watch Normand without some small spot in the back of your mind cringing away from what fate had in store for her. (It's even harder when she's playing opposite frequent costar Roscoe Arbuckle.) The Siren has read, and mightily enjoyed, Sidney D. Kirkpatrick's A Cast of Killers, about the William Desmond Taylor murder that started Mabel's slide. For those who don't know the book, it is based on King Vidor's unpublished papers.

Toward the end of his life, Vidor became fascinated with this unsolved Hollywood killing, and he wanted to make a movie about it. The book casts Vidor, delightfully, as a sort of Hollywood Jessica Fletcher, running around talking to the silent stars and film people still alive and trying to piece the story together. In the end he comes up with a culprit, one that's revealed in a scene that plays as tragedy, although Vidor's solution absolutely hasn't convinced a lot of the case's devotees. All the Siren can say is that whether or not Vidor had the right perp, it plays. (The case has spawned a whole school of theorizing, Taylorology, which seems to be the perfect hobby for people who find Kennedy conspiracy research to be boringly uncomplicated.)

Normand's in A Cast of Killers, of course, as lovable in that book as she was everywhere else. When it was published in 1986 there was talk of making it into a movie, which still hasn't happened. Certain of the Siren's far-flung correspondents have told her they believe the movie will never happen; that even today, there are those who want to bury the story. The Siren isn't plugged-in enough to say, but the fact that the book has never been filmed is a pity. The Siren adores King Vidor, and the idea of raising his profile with the general public appeals enormously to her.

Vidor would be hard to cast. Normand would be harder.

As the Siren recalls, A Cast of Killers doesn't tell the following tale from Vidor's autobiography, A Tree Is a Tree. Kirkpatrick probably was wise enough to know he couldn't equal it.

In 1931, Vidor and Laurence Stallings were at Vidor's home, working on a screenplay about Billy the Kid. The two men were dressed in tennis whites and bright sweaters, but when they received a summons to meet with Irving Thalberg, they dropped everything and didn't bother to change into anything more sober. They joined Thalberg in his limousine, along with legendary MGM executive Eddie Mannix (whose fearsome reputation has its own school of conspiracy thought). The men discussed Billy's bloody career for a while, when Vidor realized that this wasn't an aimless joyride, they had a destination.

Suddenly the car made a turn to the right and came to an abrupt halt. Quite a crowd was gathered on the sidewalk, and a number of dark limousines, similar to ours, were parked ahead of us. The doorman who stepped up to our car wore white gloves and a dark suit. I realized that we had stopped at the main entrance of a funeral parlo. Apparently we were late for a funeral!

Whose funeral? I wondered.

I was obliged to step out to permit egress for Thalberg and Mannix.

As I started to get back into the car and sit out the funeral service with Stallings, a strong hand gripped my arm.

"Aren't you coming inside?" It was director Marshall Neilan.

"Marshall," I said, "look how we're dressed."

"That's not important. They'll be expecting you."

Who'll be expecting us? I wondered.

Stallings, with the inquisitive soul of a journalist, had started to work his way out of the car. We must have made a pretty picture, two men in white flannels and bright sweaters, as we entered the crowded chapel.

"Who's dead?" I asked Larry in a whisper.

"Let's find out," he replied.

Inside there was another sober-faced gentleman, Lew Cody. This famous actor was a convivial man-about town, and I had never seen him in any mood except a light-hearted one. But Lew showed no surprise at our inappropriate attire and soberly showed us to two seats next to Thalberg and Mannix. A flower-draped casket reposed impressively before us. An organ played gently in the proper mood.

I didn't dare speak. Finally I pantomimed to Mannix to give me pencil and paper. On the back of an envelope I wrote: "Who is it?"

Mannix took the pencil and answered: "Mabel Normand. Don't you read the papers?"

Mabel Normand! I was shocked. It is true that I hadn't read a newspaper in several days. Beautiful, lithe-figured Mabel Normand. When I had been a young ticket-taker in the Texas nickelodeon, Mabel Normand had been my dream girl. I remembered her, black tights covering her body, as she walked to the end of the board and dived gracefully to the water below. I had known her as the Biograph Girl and as the star of dozens of Mack Sennett comedies. Marshall Neilan had directed her first full-length film, Mickey. Lew Cody had been married to her.

Thalberg leaned toward me across Mannix.

"Too many murders," he whispered.

Had she been murdered? I was stunned.

"The public won't accept it," he added and I suddenly realized he was talking about Billy the Kid.

I nodded temporary agreement, but I was pursuing another line of thought. I had begun to recognize faces. There was Marie Dressler of the large, expressive visage. She was never one for subtlety in comedy, nor was she subtle in grief. Ben Turpin was weeping unashamedly. The big face of gigantic Mack Swain of Gold Rush fame was marked with tears. Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Chester Conklin, Hank Mann, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon--all fellow workers of hers--were crying. I was fascinated by their faces. These funny faces had made people roar with laughter the world over. Now they were distroted by grief into another, yet equally ridiculous, grimace. These good people, who had not achieved fame by subtlety in facial expression, expressed sorrow in the same open manner; tears flowed plentifully over tragic countenances.

In due time good words were recited from a good book, and the service was over. We watched as the casket moved down the aisle toward the chapel entrance and the brutality of the sunlight beyond.

Presently the four of us were back in the limousine, whose windshield now bore a sticker with the word "Funeral" on it.

As the procession moved slowly along Figueroa Street, Thalberg instructed our driver to turn out at the intersection. With this quick maneuver we left the line of dark cars and headed back toward Culver City and the studio. When the driver stopped briefly to tear the telltale sticker from the windshield, Thalberg resumed our discussion of Billy the Kid.

"Was Sheriff Pat Garrett his friend during the time of the last five murders?" he asked. I couldn't answer. I was still thinking of the girl in the black tights on the end of the diving board...

The car passed again through the studio gates. As we stepped out on the narrow walk, Thalberg bounded up the steel steps to his office. At the top, he turned back. "I'll call you," he said.

The story conference was at an end.

*****

David Cairns knows the story-conference anecdote, and has written about what the tale tells us about Thalberg. (And he also loves A Cast of Killers.)

There are some haunting photos of the dramatis personae of the Taylor case at the site Looking for Mabel, including a photo of a locket she gave Taylor.

Chris Edwards of Silent Volume has a fine tribute to Mabel's Busy Day here.

Further to Mae Clarke, who got a shout-out in my John Gilbert post, here is Robert Avrech with a tribute to Cagney and Clarke in Lady Killer.

Anecdote of the Week: "I think Nathanael West was a creep."

Two excerpts from Eve's Hollywood, billed as "a confessional L.A. novel by Eve Babitz." James Wolcott wrote about Babitz not too long ago and the Siren, fascinated, managed to borrow a copy of the out-of-print and damn-near-unavailable book from a trusting and generous friend.

This little post is for that friend, and for Kim Morgan, who loves Los Angeles and who makes the Siren want to love it. And after reading this book, the Siren's smitten with Eve Babitz, too. The woman is a natural writer--unforced, unfussy, funny as hell.

First, a picnic by the L.A. River. Los Angeles has a river? wondered the Siren, as she read. Well, of sorts...

Vera Stravinsky once told me that in 1937 she went on a picnic, in a few limousines, that Paulette Goddard had prepared ("because she was quite a gourmet..." Vera said). On the picnic was the Stravinskys, Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell and the Huxleys. They got into the cars to drive to a likely spot, but there were no likely spots and they drove and drove. There had been a drought and everything was dry, there was no grass and so finally they spotted the measly L.A. "River" and decided to spread their blanket on its ridiculous banks and make the best of it. The "L.A. River" is a trickle that only looks slightly like a river if there's been a downpour for three months but even then it doesn't look like a river. Anyway, they spread out the food, the champagne, the caviar, the pate and everything and sat on the banks of the "river" beneath a bridge over which cars were going.

"Hey!"

They looked up and there was a motorcycle cop with his fists on his hips, looking cross.

"Yes?" Bertrand Russell stood up to inquire.

There was a sign that said people were not allowed to picnic by the "river."

The cop pointed to the sign and looked at Russell and then said, "Can't you read?"...

The cop only relented when he recognized Garbo.

The Siren is quoting this next bit because first of all, the Siren loves people who love their cities. Second, the Siren likes Nathanael West--and despite that, this made her laugh and laugh and laugh. Especially the kicker.

"Nathanael West is the best writer about Hollywood there ever was."

"No, he isn't."

The first speaker is someone from Chicago, the second is me, born in Hollywood. People from the East all like Nathanael West because he shows them it's not all blue skies and pink sunsets, so they don't have to worry: It's shallow, corrupt and ugly.

I think Nathanael West was a creep. Assuring his friends back at Dartmouth that even though he'd gone to Hollywood, he had not gone Hollywood. It's a little apologia for coming to the Coast for the money and having a winter where you didn't have to put tons of clothes on just to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a beer. And so people from New York and Chicago say, "Nathanael West is the best writer about Hollywood there ever was."

All the things that Nathanael West noticed are here. The old people dying, the ennui, the architecture and fat screenplay writers who think it's a tragedy when they can't get laid by the 14-year-old doxette in Gower Gulch, the same 14-year-old who'll ball the cowboys any old time. But if there had been someone, say, who wrote a book about New York, a nice, precise, short little novel in which New York was only described as ugly, horrendous and finally damned and that was the book everyone from elsewhere decided was the "best book about New York there ever was," people who grew up knowing why New York was beautiful would finally, right before dessert, throw their sherry across the table and yell, "I'll pick you up in a taxi, honey, and take you for a fucking guided tour, you blind jerk."

The Siren's been under the weather, but she'll be back to her old, erratic self in no time.

Oscar Levant on Film Music

The Siren is on a major Oscar Levant bender, having ordered A Smattering of Ignorance, Memoirs of an Amnesiac and A Talent for Genius: The Life and Times of Oscar Levant all in one binge. She isn't sure what prompted it, unless it was watching his big encore from The Band Wagon on Youtube and wondering once more what in holy hell was going on with his hands. Still, Levant, with his dangling cynicism and constant cigarette, is a welcome presence in every movie he ever made. And he's a wonderful writer too, stylish and assured, funny as hell and so informative about George Gershwin. (If you put the Siren under hypnosis she would probably admit Gershwin is her favorite composer.)

Anyway, from A Smattering of Ignorance, published in 1942, here are some vintage Levant thoughts on film scores.

It is a tradition in pictures (one of the most stubbornly respected) that nobody in the world goes to hear a movie score but the composer, the orchestrator and other composers. As a kind of compensation, I suppose, they hear every single sixteenth note in the score and are thereafter equipped to discuss its most obscure subtleties. Frequently, however, they have to be told what the picture itself is about.

This has its parallel in another tradition in the movies with which every composer comes into contact as soon as he reports to a studio. It was probably devised by the first producer ever to use a musical score for a dramatic film and runs as follows: If the audience doesn't notice the music, it's a good score. This I could never quite understand...

Perhaps one of the reasons for the low repute of picture music may be found in the words that fill the air when a Hollywood score is discussed by those versed in such matters. You never hear any discussion of a score as a whole. Instead, the references are to "main-title" music, "end title" music, "montages," "inserts" and so on, with no recognition of the character of the complete score. It is much as if one would discuss a suit in terms of its buttonholes, pleats, basting and lining, without once considering its suitability to the figure it adorned...

In the early days of the talkies the idea of writing music under dialogue was so revolutionary that a number of prominent producers (as, for example, Irving Thalberg) countenanced it only under the greatest pressure, and then but sparingly. They were not merely unfriendly to music; they were actually suspicious of its potentialities.

They made a great fetish, for example, of pointing out the conflict between the so-called "reality" of the movies and the "unreality" of music. Always when a situation seemed to demand a heightening by music effect they would come back at the composer with the question, "But where would the audience think the orchestra is coming from?" This was supposed to be the stopper for all arguments. When a musical background was absolutely inseparable from an effect they would go to the most extravagant lengths to relate the music to the scene by having a band playing outside the window, or secreting a string quartet behind a row of potted palms or having the sound come out of a radio. Unquestionably it is an additional virtue to make music an integral part of a dramatic situation, but it always seemed to me an example of remarkable shortsightedness that even the best directors and producers could not reconcile themselves to the thought that they were dealing with a completely artificial medium and adapt themselves to it accordingly.

The second half of that last sentence melted the Siren into a puddle.

Anyway, in honor of Levant, here is a list of twenty film scores. The Siren, at this point, knows better than to give this list a designation like "Favorites" or, god help us, "Best." After much thought, she has decided to call it "An Alphabetical List of Twenty Film Scores I Could Still Recognize and/or Hum After Two Glasses of Scotch," an organizing principle she feels Levant might approve despite his being more the prescription-drug type.

A Summer Place, Max Steiner
Alexander Nevsky, Sergei Prokofiev
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, Miles Davis
Band à Part, Michel Legrand
Limelight, Charlie Chaplin
Doctor Zhivago, Maurice Jarre
Giant, Dimitri Tiomkin
How Green Was My Valley, Alfred Newman
Kings Row, Erich Wolfgang Korngold
On the Waterfront, Leonard Bernstein
Peyton Place, Franz Waxman
Shaft, Isaac Hayes and J.J. Johnson
Spellbound, Miklós Rózsa
The Bad and the Beautiful, David Raksin
The Big Country, Jerome Moross
The Reivers, John Williams
The Third Man, Anton Karas
To Kill a Mockingbird, Elmer Bernstein
Vertigo, Bernard Herrmann
Walk on the Wild Side, Elmer Bernstein

Brian Aherne's A Proper Job

After writing about Brian Aherne's account of his friendship with George Sanders and Sanders' unforgettable advice on how to write memoirs, the Siren just had to order her own copy of Aherne's autobiography, A Proper Job.

And it's a wonderful book, despite Aherne's rather slighting his Hollywood films to devote more professional reminiscences to his theatrical career. Aherne was British and seems to have had the attitude often attributed to British actors, that films should be what one did to supplement one's theatrical calling. His career as a Hollywood actor was never as front-rank as that of his first wife, Joan Fontaine, a fact she alluded to with some asperity in No Bed of Roses and which he also admits, in a roundabout fashion. And his theatrical career had some brilliant high points, including his having originated the role of Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street on Broadway opposite the legendary Katharine Cornell.



Aherne was handsome and showed definite sex appeal in movies such as the strange and wonderful Sylvia Scarlett, as well as Merrily We Live and The Great Garrick (now available via the Warner Archives and yes, David Ehrenstein, the Siren promises to order it). But for whatever reason--luck, timing, lack of a killer instinct, probably all of the above--he never became a huge star. (CinemaOCD has a good rundown of his Hollywood parts here, with a link to many of the pictures from A Proper Job.) Eventually he moved gracefully into character parts, maintaining a stage career with roles like Professor Higgins in the touring production of My Fair Lady.

But the Siren has found that often it's the people on the margins of stardom who give the best picture of Hollywood life, and Aherne's book is remarkable not only for his intelligence, but for the compassion with which he treats the Hollywood figures he knew. It isn't hard to imagine why the saturnine Sanders kept returning to Aherne for companionship, year after year. Aherne was not a judgmental type. Even when describing a taxing experience, such as working with Bette Davis on Juarez, he does so wryly: "I even found Bette Davis attractive, when I played Maximilian to her Carlotta and, brilliant actress though she is, surely nobody but a mother could have loved Bette Davis at the height of her career."



While Aherne doesn't go out of his way to disdain the movie colony, he does permit himself the occasional joke at its expense. At one point the actor goes into a small California bookshop and complains to the manager that the poetry selection is too slight: "'What's the use of carrying more?' said the man. 'Only you and Katharine Hepburn buy it!'"

The small, precise portraits of Hollywood notables include John Gilbert, spinning out his contract while the studio tries to make him so miserable he will terminate it. "If motion pictures don't want him, where can a great screen star go? What can he do?" asks Aherne. "The gods and goddesses cannot jostle with the crowd, cannot take a job in an office..."

Aherne doesn't bother to add, but the reader can deduce, that he preferred his own fate. He found diversion in farming and flying, eventually married a woman with theatrical ancestry but no ambitions, took the roles that still came and took pleasure in things like the commotion of Sanders' occasional visits. Aherne does show some regrets, as when he ruefully describes how he lost the part of Sidney Carton to Ronald Colman, or how he repeatedly turned down Captain Blood (thus ensuring that Jack Warner forever cursed him for saddling the studio with the ever-troublesome Errol Flynn). But Aherne evidently felt it was better to be an occasionally working actor than a burnt-out star.



If any additional evidence was needed, there was also the fate of Aherne's good friend Ruth Chatterton. He advised her to take the part of the wife in Dodsworth, but Chatterton told him it would end her career to appear as a middle-aged woman. She took it anyway, gave a brilliant performance, and never got another Hollywood offer. Chatterton, whose Pre-Code talkies continue to bowl over critics, wound up in the Connecticut countryside, writing books and living happily with her husband until he died. Hollywood, however, never did come around to pay the great Chatterton her due:

I am happy to remember that my wife and I visited [Chatterton] shortly before her death. The walls of her bar were hung with photos of friends whom she had entertained lavishly at her home on Palm Drive in earlier days. I asked her if she had ever heard from any of them. No, she said, and when she had played Los Angeles some years before not one of them of had even sent her a word. She was alone with her four dogs when she died, and her body lay for three days on the floor, watched by her dogs and surrounded by the mute faces of her former friends.

Aherne gives a wistful description of an afternoon at Pickfair toward the end of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford's marriage. As Aherne's visit wound down, Pickford entered and, spurred by not very much, went to the window, looked out at the garden and spoke "almost tragically of the futility of ambition and the evanescence of fame." Aherne hastens to add that after her career ended, Pickford found great comfort in religion and Buddy Rogers. But he doesn't sound entirely convinced himself, and the Siren found herself thinking Billy Wilder's initial casting instincts were not far off when he approached Pickford about Sunset Boulevard.

And the Siren was mightily amused by the description of Marlene Dietrich: "She baked me a fabulous Viennese cake; she is a great cakemaker." According to Maria Riva, who was deeply fond of Aherne, he was making a great deal more than cake with Marlene. But the lady was alive and still technically married at the time the book was published, and chivalrously Aherne breathes not a word of their affair, though he admits to wondering "how I could manage to bake Miss Dietrich." George Sanders must have rolled his eyes over such determinedly uncommercial discretion.

But the story that caught the Siren was one she had never heard before, that of Aherne's affair with the stage actress Clare Eames. Eames was married to playwright and director Sidney Howard, who later wrote the screenplay for Gone with the Wind. Howard was in London to direct his play The Silver Cord, and Aherne was cast opposite Eames. All went smoothly until Howard returned to America and the play began its run, whereupon the attraction between the two actors swiftly became a headlong, passionate romance. "I forgot she was a married woman with a child," says Aherne. "I forgot she was six years older than myself. I forgot my Puritan upbringing. I forgot that I was nothing but a penniless young actor. I heard the angels sing. I was lonely no more."



The affair, as might be expected, caused as much pain as it did joy. Early on Eames gave Aherne a copy of Anna Karenina. The actor fretted that he "might become her Vronsky;" Aherne must have known he already was. Howard, according to his rival, played Karenin to the hilt. "He did not care for Clare, but he cared deeply about what people said," says Aherne. Howard "cut off financial support, refused a divorce, and insisted upon the return of the baby and her nurse."

Over the three years of their relationship Eames and Aherne struggled to find work. Howard's stature made New York nearly impossible, and the romance coincided with the British acting unions cracking down on the use of American actors. Eames tried at one point to reconcile with Howard, but it didn't work. "Young as I was, I doubt I fully realized the tragedy of her position," says Aherne, and he evokes Anna Karenina once more when he describes his lover slipping into her former house to see her child when Howard was out. Eames was sick, and getting sicker, although Aherne never says precisely what the trouble was--severe abdominal pain, is all we are told.

Finally, as Aherne was playing a wordy, difficult part in a dismal failure of a play, Eames became extremely ill. She had an operation, and the night after it took place Aherne slogged through a nightmarish performance in front of a tiny audience. When the curtain finally came down, a car was sent and Brian was driven, through a driving rainstorm, to Clare's bedside. They told him she needed sleep, but the rain had turned into a deafening thunderstorm, and Clare died as he held her hand.

"I went on blindly running for the next twenty years," says Aherne. You don't have to be as romantically inclined as the Siren to wonder if he ever stopped. Joan Fontaine certainly felt Clare's ghost when she married Aherne a full decade later. In her memoirs, Fontaine paints a picture straight out of Rebecca: Barely finished with her honeymoon, she was dragged to Connecticut to visit Eames' dying aunt, and found herself staring at pictures of Brian and Clare on the piano.

The daughter Eames stole time with was Jennifer Howard, who married Samuel Goldwyn Jr. in 1950. Their four children included Tony Goldwyn, most famous for playing an evil yuppie in Ghost.



It is this scene, which took place only a year or so after Clare died, that the Siren can't get out of her head. It is as cinematic as anything she has ever found in a star's memoirs. Aherne had returned to Hollywood, but in a stage production of Barretts, again with Katharine Cornell. The audience for the opening included everyone from the Thalbergs to Charlie Chaplin.

Afterwards, Ruth Chatterton gave a smart party for Miss Cornell at her beautiful house in Beverly Hills. Stepping back from the buffet with a plate in my hand, I bumped into someone who stood, hard and unyielding, behind me. I turned in surprise; it was Sidney Howard, looking straight in my eyes, a few inches away. He said, 'I seem always to be in your way, Brian!' For an instant we looked at each other, and then I said, 'I am sorry, Sidney,' and moved away. I never saw him again. He remarried and died tragically, crushed by a tractor against the wall of his barn in Massachusetts.

Anecdote of the Week: "Oh God, This Is a Dirty Picture"

The Siren has no particular reason for posting this anecdote, other than the way it consistently cracks her up. It concerns Samuel Goldwyn, whose fate it was to figure prominently in many anecdotes that simply never happened. His occasionally fractured English was irresistible to Hollywood wags, and eventually publicity folks just started making stuff up. This story, however, is from A. Scott Berg's excellent biography of the mogul.

Sexual liberation in the sixties turned the motion picture screen into an orgiastic playground, and most of Hollywood's latest product turned Goldwyn off. His private screening of Blow-Up in 1966 was going just fine until the scene in which David Hemmings cavorts with a couple of young girls. "Oh God," Goldwyn cried out, calling a stop to the screening; "this is a goddamned dirty picture!" Not long after that, Goldwyn complained to Billy Wilder that he had seen an even more disgusting disply--Hello, Dolly! Wilder was puzzled--not only because he could not imagine anything scurrilous in that harmless musical but also because Darryl Zanuck had not released it yet. Goldwyn insisted he knew what he saw, and it was one of the filthiest pictures he had ever seen. Wilder asked him to recite the plot. "Sam," he interrupted upon hearing about the drug-taking and sex lives of three aspiring actresses, "I think you're referring to Valley of the Dolls." "That's just what I said," Goldwyn insisted. "Valley of the Hello Dollies."

As the Siren flips to the notes of Berg's books she sees that the source for this bit of utter hilarity is Billy Wilder himself, which may, may mind you make it a teensy bit suspect. Like John McElwee the Siren has never bought the old story of Wilder telling L.B. Mayer--Mayer!--"go fuck yourself" after the first screening of Sunset Boulevard.

But it's a great story, isn't it?

The Siren will be mostly off-line today but she invites you to catch up with the following, as she has been.

Speaking of old dark houses: Six Martinis and the Seventh Art brings you The Bat Whispers.


Film in Focus's Behind the Blog interviews fine film writer and all-around good guy Peter Nelhaus, one of the Siren's first friends in the blogosphere.



The Siren has been tracking Gareth's Watching Movies in Africa project and finally read his entry on Captain Blood, a feast for any admirer of red-blooded 1930s screen manhood.

Gloria uses a splendid photo of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester as a jumping-off point for...well, go read it, I won't spoil it. And Elsa looks quite pretty.

Brian at Bubblegum Aestheticswrites a lengthy and utterly absorbing post on the intertwined, but not-so-parallel lives of two film legends who shared a birthday.

Raquelle at Out of the Past is writing up a storm about TCM's Latino Images in Film (did anyone else catch the original And Now Miguel? lovely film), and she endeared herself to the Siren no end by putting in a good word for George Stevens' great widescreen epic Giant. On a related note, last month Allure ran a post full of scans from Latin American movie magazines.

Another way to get on the Siren's good side: praise Charlie Chaplin.

This also goes back to March, but the Siren has to point out Greenbriar Picture Shows' beautiful elegy for Wallace Reid.

Not classic-era, but kudos anyway: Stinky Lulu issues a defense (albeit somewhat qualified) of Marisa Tomei's unjustly maligned Oscar-winning turn in My Cousin Vinny. Why does everyone complain, year after year, that the Academy snubs comedy, and then pitch a hissy fit when an extremely funny performance wins over actresses doing Important Drama? Yeah, Miranda Richardson was great in Damage. The movie was a mess, and the Siren says this as a longtime Louis Malle lover. The Siren's own pick that year would have been Judy Davis for Husbands and Wives, but all the same, if you fired up Vinny on the DVD player right now, the Siren would happily watch just for the part where Mona Lisa Vito gets out of the car and says, "I bet this place has lousy Chinese food." As an Alabama native, the Siren has to tell you truer words are seldom spoken on screen.

10 Favorite Heretofore Unmentioned Movie Characters

The Siren has been feeling glum. Unable to gather thoughts on dear George. Aweary, aweary. All day within the dreamy house, the doors upon their hinges creak'd (and then slamm'd as the kids stomped in and out) and the Siren said, I got nothin' today. And then over she went to Flickhead's site and found she had been tagged. A meme! Reason to live! Reason to post!

Thanks, Flickhead.

So here's the idea, via The Film Doctor: 10 Favorite Movie Characters. Clearly this is impossible to do in any complete sense--who can do a definitive 10 favorite movies, let alone characters? But you can pick 10 that you particularly love. And so the Siren did.

And for kicks, the Siren decided to borrow a conceit from the spectacular If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Lot of Dead Copycats: The Heretofore Unmentioned. So the Siren is picking characters who have gotten, at most, a mere glancing reference in her posts before. That makes it a bit more sporting.

Here we go. Yodel-ay-ee-hoo, on the comeback trail.


1. Lenore (Eleanor Parker), Scaramouche
Lenore, the smart, resourceful actress, is so much more enjoyable--and beautiful--than simpering Aline (Janet Leigh) that it absolutely kills the Siren when Stewart Granger makes the wrong choice. Wrong, wrong, wrong choice, do you hear me? But Lenore, she'll be all right, as the filmmakers show clearly with a delicious fadeout. Not tonight, Josephine! (The above picture blatantly stolen from Bob Westal's wonderful piece on Scaramouche, and Lenore, at Forward to Yesterday.)


2. Annabella Bonheur (Martha Raye), Monsieur Verdoux. A brief stroll around the Web reveals this is still a love-hate movie. You may put the Siren squarely in the "love" category. She thinks it's a masterpiece. (She has excellent company.) And how very, very sad it is that Martha Raye rings a bell more for her commercial-making, producer-suing, somewhat dotty old age than for this performance. Annabella is a remarkable creation, a character so annoying you start guiltily rooting for the homicidal Verdoux, and yet you also can't get enough of her. One of the few occasions when anyone stole a scene from Charlie Chaplin. Scene, hell, the indestructible Annabella almost walks off with the movie.


3. Laura Partridge (Judy Holliday), The Solid Gold Cadillac. A still-relevant movie about accidental activist Laura Partridge, played by Judy Holliday at her funniest. There aren't many actresses who can send the Siren into fits of giggles just by raising a hand at a shareholder meeting. While this isn't the best movie Holliday made, Laura gets the Siren's vote for Holliday's most "relatable" character, with more native intelligence than Billie Dawn, far more gumption than Gladys Glover and a great deal more feminist edge than husband-shooter Doris Attinger in Adam's Rib. "You're scared of girls," she tells Paul Douglas--how many men in high places still need to be told that?




4. Lora Mae Hollingsway (Linda Darnell), A Letter to Three Wives. Darnell was usually (mis)cast as a femme fatale, but she never seemed to bare her fangs enough to tear into the type. Despite her fiercely sensual looks, her good-girl qualities remained visible around the edges. So she was perfect casting for this comedy of manners, as a siren from the slums who is seeking not just fortune, but love and ladylike treatment from a boor. In all the many celluloid sex-battles, there are few things as satisfying as watching Darnell count out the beats that will force Paul Douglas to open that car door for her.



5. Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) Easy Living. A character name so dull it could only belong to one of the most appealing screwball heroines ever. Mea culpa, Tonio and others. There isn't enough Jean Arthur on this site. How the Siren treasures this movie, and her favorite moment is pure Jean, delivered in that unforgettable voice: "Now wait just a minute, Santa Claus!"


6. Baines (Ralph Richardson) The Fallen Idol. Richardson is sometimes described as an uneven screen actor, but this performance is absolutely flawless, as is the character of Baines, married to a harridan, in love with Michèle Morgan (but who isn't) and spinning out stories for the lonely little boy in the embassy: "Some lies are just kindness."


7. Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed) The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. An offbeat, flawed movie that is one of the Siren's great guilty pleasures, largely due to Reed's silky performance as the gentleman assassin. Dragomiloff is essentially a Russian James Bond, sexier than Connery in the Siren's heretical opinion, and demonstrating that the Bond role really should have gone to Reed at some point. Dragomiloff is a professional killer, but one with a conscience, a practical nature and great wit. Asked by Diana Rigg to explain why he wants to prevent war, Ivan responds, "How can we charge our sort of prices with everybody happily killing each other for a shilling a day?"



8. Josef Tura (Jack Benny) To Be or Not to Be. If Addison DeWitt is the ultimate critic, surely Joseph Tura is the ultimate actor.

Josef Tura: Someone walked out on me. Tell me, Maria, am I losing my grip?
Maria Tura: Oh, of course not, darling. I'm so sorry.
Josef: But he walked out on me.
Maria: Maybe he didn't feel well. Maybe he had to leave. Maybe he had a sudden heart attack.
Josef: I hope so.
Maria: If he stayed he might have died.
Josef: Maybe he's dead already! Oh, darling, you're so comforting.

9. Max (Jean Gabin) Touchez Pas au Grisbi. Max has an attachment to his criminal buddies that far outstrips any love for a mere woman, even one played by an unbelievably young Jeanne Moreau. Here's when the Siren fell hard for Max: Before an urgently needed talk with Riton, his longtime partner, Max carefully lays out a midnight supper complete with wine, pate and a baguette. Both men tear into the elaborate snack before a word is spoken, making the scene a marvelous little capsule of things to love about the French. They're about to get hammered by a rival gang, but that doesn't mean you can't have wine with dinner.


10. Kasper Gutman (Sidney Greenstreet) The Maltese Falcon. The Siren has seen this movie--well, as many times as most people have, and with each viewing she's more and more convinced that Gutman is the real hero. He's the sex-magnet (Elisha Cook Jr. and Lorre), the real wit ("I distrust a man who says 'when.' If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does."), and the real thwarted romantic--ah, Greenstreet's expression as he chips away at lead is the sum total of every man who ever found a cherished love object to be dross. And Gutman is the real knight-errant as well, ready to ride anew at the end: "Well, sir, what do you suggest? We stand here and shed tears and call each other names--or shall we go to Istanbul?" Is the Siren the only one who would far rather know what happens in Istanbul than whether Sam waits for Brigid?

Anecdote of the Week

Oy, quite the week chez Campaspe. Mr. C is in Australia on business. Periodically he calls to tell the Siren how great the weather is. Things here in Brooklyn are hot, humid and rather frantic, as the Siren tries to come up with a New York blog post in time for the Derelict's blogathon.

For some reason, all week the Siren has had Charlie Chaplin on the brain. Perhaps it is because she is child-wrangling by her lonesome. Chaplin was beloved by children around the world for such a long time. Do they still love him, if you show them the movies? Or is his art too faraway and antique now? The Siren plans to find out, soon.

Meanwhile, I couldn't stop thinking about this passage, from Griffith and Mayer's The Movies, and I had to share.

They were dreadfully poor. Charlie's parents were third-string strolling players. His father died early of alcoholism; his mother was often in asylums, whether through drink or because of periodic mental illness. Whenever this happened, Charlie and his brothers had to shift for themselves on the streets of London. Robert Flaherty used to tell the story of one of these times: 'It was a rainy winter night. Charlie, who was about eleven, had no place to sleep and was sheltering under an overhanging roof. A solid-looking man came by, took a look at the boy, and asked him what he was doing there. Charlie told his story. The man stroked his chin for a moment and said, "Well, I've a bit to eat at my place. I've only one room, but you're welcome to stay the night if you don't mind sleeping on the floor." They went to the man's furnished room, where Charlie slept on a pallet at the foot of his host's bed. Next morning when he woke, the man had gone, but Charlie found a note saying, "If you've no place to sleep tonight, come here." Charlie had to avail himself of his friend's help for many nights, but always in the morning the man had gone to his work. Charlie became curious about what that work might be. One morning he managed to wake early. The man was taking out of the closet and measuring in his hands a long, strong rope with a noose at the end of it. He was the common hangman.'

Out of such experiences came the greatest comedian in the world.

Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration

We've had several lively discussions of the Production Code Administration, so the Siren was eager to read Hollywood's Censor, Thomas Doherty's biography of PCA honcho Joseph I. Breen. Doherty's book is intelligent and occasionally amusing. He obviously developed a real affection for his subject, and if the Siren in no way came to share that affection it's no reflection on Doherty. This is, however, a frustrating book. Like a pre-Code film shredded for later release, it's the things left out that are the most tantalizing.

The author is probably the first to write of Hollywood's head censor without condescension or smirking, pointing out that Breen genuinely loved movies and saw his role as more of a script advisor than anything else. Contrary to the picture many people have of classic-era Hollywood censors, the PCA's chief role was to vet scripts, not scissor prints. Most of Breen's work consisted of horse-trading with the producers and screenwriters, haggling over word choice and suggesting ways to comply with the Code's various strictures. Those rules enforced a rigidly Catholic sensibility, one with strict views about sin, repentance and redemption. If other faiths countenanced such things as birth control and divorce, the Catholic Church did not, and so for the duration of Breen's tenure they were virtually unknown in Hollywood movies as well.

Doherty, while giving time to Breen as a particularly rigid example of what he calls "Victorian Irish," also wants to correct the image of the censor as a dimwitted bluenose. As a movie lover, Breen had taste; his letters to Charlie Chaplin when vetting The Great Dictator practically grovel, as Breen apologizes repeatedly for presuming to scissor genius. (But presume he did, as Breen reminded Chaplin that the word "lousy" was forbidden.) One of the few moments when the Siren felt real warmth toward Breen came when she read the glowing praise he sent to Orson Welles after viewing rushes for The Magnificent Ambersons. And while Breen left himself open to mockery, then and later, with his finger-wagging over things like Nick and Nora's king-sized bed, his chief desire was what a later generation would call "deniability." If Ernst Lubitsch's Angel presented a well-appointed "salon" where ladies offered "an amusing time," that was fine. The audience could see a brothel if they liked--Breen's chief concern was whether the up-front appearance was clean. The most talented filmmakers learned to smuggle the smut.

It's become so common over the last few decades to discover the clay feet of moral arbiters, from Jim Bakker to Eliot Spitzer, that it's pleasant to hear Breen had no such personal failings. He was a faithful husband, good father to six children and restrained in his personal habits, a man who neither overindulged in alcohol nor partied till the wee hours with his fellow Hollywood Irish. Those searching for censorable qualities in the censor will find only a dedicated smoking habit and salty language--that is, aside from the several historians who have alleged something darker.

"These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence," wrote Breen in 1932 to a Jesuit priest, continuing with phrases such as "the scum of the scum of the earth" and "dirty lice." Doherty says the priest refrained from responding in kind, as did another priest, Martin J. Quigley, when Breen wrote him that same year to say "these damn Jews are a dirty, filthy lot." Doherty doesn't try to pretty up the correspondence. He does point out, however, that at this time "blunt slurs were lingua franca at most levels of American society." Doherty also says that the really intemperate language disappears from Breen's correspondence after about 1934, about the time that the Hollywood studio heads consented to enforcement of the Code. (There is an excerpt from the book online that discusses this controversy.)

"Rabid antisemitism is a full-time job," Doherty asserts. "If Breen were a frothing bigot, if his hatred of Jews were passionate and pathological, the fever would infect his entire life and writings, not only a handful of letters written in the early 1930s."

Well, no. Bigotry is nothing like a full-time job. Perhaps the key there is the adjective "rabid," but the Siren doesn't think anyone was suggesting Breen's antisemitism was in line with Nazi eliminationism. Everyday prejudice can be quite passionate, and it is situational, something to be brought forward when you need it and denied when you don't. If--just as a hypothetical, of course--you are promoting a movie about the last hours of Christ's life and you want as many tickets sold as possible, why then you have nothing but respect for the Jewish people. Even in solitary moments away from the camera you may convince yourself of your own broadmindedness. When, on the other hand, you are knocking back a few at a bar, get pulled over on the highway and fumble through your alcohol-sodden brain for the reason you are not being treated with the deference you expect, time to trot out the Great Global Jewish Conspiracy.

The Siren has some other questions about whether Breen deserves the antisemite tag that has followed him for some time. Most of her queries come from re-reading another book in tandem with Doherty's. Hollywood Goes to War, by history professors Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, was published in 1987, and because the Siren hasn't access to the original correspondence from Breen she doesn't know whether their scholarship has been superseded. But here is an interesting passage:

The conservative head of the Production Code Administration [Breen] was deeply suspicious that Jews in Hollywood, chiefly writers, were trying to use the Nazis' treatment of Jews to make propaganda pictures. He felt the center of this conspiracy was the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which was, he said, 'conducted and financed almost entirely by Jews.' Their response to the Spanish Civil War was to vilify [sic] 'the communistic loyalists.' Indeed, Breen feared an attempt to 'capture the screen of the United States for Communistic propaganda purposes.' The censor said he had been able to eliminate all attempts at propaganda thus far, but it was increasing at an alarming rate.

Koppes and Black are quoting a private letter from Breen to Jesuit priest Daniel Lord, who wrote the original Code with fellow priest Martin J. Quigley. This letter was written in 1937, five years after Breen's first burst of slurs and a year after Breen attended a banquet for the anti-Nazi exile and prominent Catholic Prince Hubertus zu Lowenstein. Doherty contends that Breen supported the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, which was left as left could be although Breen most assuredly was not. Doherty's evidence for this is that Breen attended the League's first-year anniversary celebration, as well as the Lowenstein banquet. Koppes and Black, on the other hand, depict Breen going to Rome, script for Idiot's Delight in hand, and having the Mussolini government vet it. This trip took place in 1938, after the invasion of Ethiopia and after Rome had passed antisemitic laws based on those of the Nazis.

Doherty tells of Breen writing thoughtful letters of support to Lord and another priest, Joseph N. Moody, after they wrote pamphlets urging Catholics to turn away from antisemitism. At the same time, Koppes and Black have Breen writing in 1938 to Walter Wanger about a screenplay then called "Personal History," later to become Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. Breen told Wanger that "in the opinion of the PCA, the script contained 'pro-Loyalist propaganda...pro-Jewish propaganda, and anti-Nazi propaganda...[which] would inevitably cause enormous difficulty, when you come to release the picture.'"

Doherty doesn't recount the long journey of Foreign Correspondent to the screen, but he does quote a letter from Breen to Warner Brothers when that studio was about to greenlight Confessions of a Nazi Spy, one of Hollywood's first openly anti-Nazi films. Breen's note, which warns that the film will run into trouble in Germany, sounds "pro forma" to Doherty, telling the Warners things they already well knew.

So late in the 1930s, was Breen going through the motions as an adviser to the industry, as Doherty says, or actively striving to keep the politics off the screen, as Hollywood Goes to War sees it? It is quite true that the PCA, which saw its job as working in tandem with the studios and not against them, was merely pointing out some economic facts of life to Wanger. It's also true that Wanger needed no reminding, and that in 1938, well after the Nuremberg laws and mere months before Kristallnacht, it rings an odd note for a supposed Anti-Nazi League supporter to be writing to a producer about "pro-Jewish propaganda."

We seem to have a mess of contradictions here, but then again, maybe not. The Siren understands Doherty's desire to balance the picture of Breen--to our eyes, almost seven decades after Auschwitz, antisemitism is the purest kind of evil. As Doherty points out, it is difficult to see how common certain prejudices were and to recognize that not all antisemitism was the direct equivalent of Nazism. But, even if we accept Doherty's interpretation of Breen's late-1930s activities, the Siren still doesn't find Breen's alleged mellowing at all inconsistent with his earlier proclamations. His later dealings with the Hollywood moguls were more pleasant, so Breen was too. Doherty does acknowledge this: "A cynical reading would conclude that the Irish bigot was smart enough to keep his true feelings to himself and suck up to the men who were buttering his bread. Or one might conclude that, on balance, the venom was a transient spasm, the product of a hot temper and simmering frustration."

All righty then. Call the Siren a cynic.

Since Doherty's book is bringing forward an important piece of Hollywood history, the Siren wishes the book spent less time with tales we've all heard many times, such as the fusses over Ingrid Bergman's affair with Rossellini and Jane Russell's breasts in The Outlaw. Hughes' battle over the Billy the Kid movie had important implications, it is true, and there's no way to leave it out, but the movie itself is lousy. The Siren would have trimmed some of the ink devoted to those episodes in favor of discussing, for example, Breen's permanent scissoring of various pre-Code films and locking up others altogether.

The book also discusses Breen's role in how Gone with the Wind expunged Margaret Mitchell's frequent use of the "n" slur. Doherty contends that the depiction of African Americans actually improved with the institution of the Code. The Siren would love to see this explained at more length by Doherty, because it's news to her. Doherty grants that after the institution of the Code, mainstream Hollywood's roles for blacks narrowed almost completely to comic relief, until small improvements began in the early 1940s. But he argues that Breen's office enshrined one uniform stereotype of black Americans, thus ridding the screen of the "slack-jawed simians" that were common to silent film and pre-Code movies. The professor wrote a history of pre-Code Hollywood, next up on the Siren's nighttable, so he must feel that sympathetic pre-Code movies such as The Emperor Jones and Hallelujah! were vastly outweighed by the loathsome depictions in other films. Certainly Breen seems to have relished playing the broadminded good-cop to some of the South's more racist censors, including Memphis's Lloyd T. Binford, who banned the innocent Hal Roach comedy Curley because it showed a class with black and white students.

The notorious "miscegenation clause" was inserted in the third draft of the Code in 1930 by persons in the Hays office whom Doherty does not name. The two priests who wrote the code, Quigley and Lord, were infuriated by its inclusion and said so to Breen. Doherty doesn't record Breen's response, but notes that any picture with an interracial angle of any kind would never have played in segregated states. After the war, some loosening of racial attitudes began. Doherty says the federal Office of War Information's harping on the theme of a united America "opened the eyes of the Breen Office to its racial blind spots."

To which the Siren responded, "You don't say." The "national feelings" clause of the Code said "The history, institutions, prominent people and citizenry of other nations shall be represented fairly." This worked fine if you were German; the files are full of Breen and OWI admonishing producers not to depict all Germans as Nazis. It worked even better if you were from what Doherty calls "the most-favored nations of Ireland and Italy." Even the Chinese did all right, if they could tolerate being played by Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston.

If, however, you were Japanese, you were out of luck, whether or not you were a fascist. And that's something Doherty discusses not at all.

This isn't merely the Siren applying latter-day liberalism to another era. As Hollywood Goes to War points out, there were movie fans at the time who found Breen's standards puzzling, like the woman who wrote him after hearing that the censor planned to delete "hell" from the lines permitted General "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell in Objective Burma. Why, she asked reasonably, was the general's language being scrubbed when "she heard the Japanese referred to again and again as 'dirty yellow rats,' 'blasted monkeys,' and the like"? Breen eventually passed on "hell" as an exact quote from Stillwell but drew the line at "by God."

Another speech, however, passed without a murmur. After Errol Flynn's character discovers the bodies of his friends, mutilated after hideous tortures by the Japanese, a newspaper correspondent spits out, "They're degenerate, immoral idiots. Stinking little savages. Wipe them out, I say. Wipe them off the face of the earth." Flynn says nothing in response.*

This was passed by the Breen Office, without any cavils at needing "good Japanese" or any other balance. All you have to do is spend an afternoon with a few WW II movies set in the Pacific theater to realize that under Breen, the PCA strictures to respect other nations simply did not apply to Japan. It was the studios who churned out the racist films. But Breen, who objected when the first draft for Fritz Lang's Man Hunt showed all Nazis as "brutal and inhuman people," self-evidently enforced no such even-handedness for the eastern half of the Axis. If Doherty is going to say, as he does, that Breen "silenced the sounds of racial invective," then the sounds of scripts calling the Japanese "monkeys who live in trees" (in Guadalcanal Diary) need to be talked about, too.

Overall, the Siren strongly disagrees with the general premise, summed up in the last chapter, "Final Cut: Joseph I. Breen and the Auteur Theory." Films of the classic age are cherished, Doherty says, because of a "longing for the certainty of standards and the security of tradition, and an affinity for a mannered time where curse words, nudity and bloodshed are banished, where bedrooms are for sleeping and bathrooms are unmentioned."

This sounds suspiciously like Dume3's acid comment on a prior Siren post about the Code, that some people like old movies "because they're clean." The Siren likes them because they're good--because the studios, aided by a magic combination of lack of competition, vertical integration and an ability to throw money at some of the world's most talented people, produced literate, interesting, visually beautiful movies. The Siren is no more going to thank Breen for the vision behind those movies than she's going to write to the printers at Penguin Classics to thank them for the layout of Great Expectations. He was a technical obstacle, not a creative talent. The moral vision that Breen worked into classic-era movies often feels tacked on, as in John Garfield's ludicrous explanation of why it's all right to execute him for the wrong murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. And the Siren really doesn't think Lubitsch--or, for that matter, Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder or the Epstein brothers--needed Breen to make them more subtle or delicious.

There's a cute picture of Breen on the cover of this book, showing Hollywood's censor yukking it up with some starlets on the set of a Baghdad-and-boobs epic. It's meant to show that he was no bluenose. In another pronouncement, however, the Siren hears a far more convincing dose of the man's real personality: "If at any time you are a bit foggy as to what constitutes honor, purity and goodness or where sophistication stops and sin starts, I'll tell you."



*Screenwriter Alvah Bessie, of later Hollywood Ten fame, had written a reply for Flynn's character that said the violence was fascist, not inherently Japanese. But producer Jerry Wald cut it.

(From top: Joseph I. Breen; The Great Dictator; Foreign Correspondent; Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind; Objective, Burma!)