Miss Wright Regrets She's Unable to Pose Today

Above, Teresa Wright bestows the look of love on Dana Andrews at the end of The Best Years of Our Lives. They showed it again last night on TCM, for Memorial Day, causing some to point out that the holiday is about remembering the dead, not honoring the living veterans. In the way of most pedantry, this is technically correct, and tiresomely literal. Wyler's film needs no grave scenes; it is death-haunted throughout. Fredric March, Harold Russell and Dana Andrews carry the dead with them, and they always will.

It falls to the women to help bring them back to life, and Wright was the perfect foil for the traumatized Dana Andrews. Throughout her career she played normal, and showed that a good girl has as many angles as a bad, if you approach her with sincerity and don't condescend. What makes her Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt so marvelous, and somewhat unusual in Hitchcock's filmography, is that the girl's essential decency is, for once, made more intriguing and less predictable than the serial killer she's up against.

Wright was eager to play this role for Wyler, says Goldwyn biographer A. Scott Berg, because Peggy Stephenson is a homewrecker, albeit one with the purest of motives. Wright was getting a little tired of being what Wyler called "the best cryer in the business." Then again, this smart and dedicated actress also knew exactly what she did and did not want from the business. The Siren here gives you a key clause from the contract Miss Teresa Wright signed with Samuel Goldwyn Productions at the outset of her career:

Miss Wright shall not be required to pose for photographs in a bathing suit unless she is in water. Neither may she be photographed running on the beach with her hair flying in the wind. Nor may she pose in any of the following situations: in shorts; playing with a cocker spaniel; digging in a garden; whipping up a meal; attired in firecrackers and holding skyrockets for the fourth of July; looking insinuatingly at the turkey for Thanksgiving; wearing a bunny cap with long ears for Easter; twinkling on prop snow in a skiing outfit while a fan blows her scarf.

Perhaps the second sentence of that clause was what Sam Goldwyn had in mind when he allegedly tried to get Wright to loosen up a bit during filming of The Little Foxes by calling to her from behind the camera, "Teresa, let your breasts flow in the breeze!"

You won't find much in the way of Teresa Wright cheesecake, but this shot is readily available on the Internet. The Siren includes it to demonstrate that had she chosen to do so, Miss Wright could have looked insinuating any old time she wanted.

Five Questions About Five Came Back: An Interview with Mark Harris

When the news came that Pearl Harbor had been bombed, John Ford was having Sunday lunch at the home of Rear Admiral Andrew Pickens in Virginia. Like a true Southern hostess, Mrs. Pickens tried to make sure no one’s lovely meal would be ruined: “It’s no use getting excited. This is the seventh war that’s been announced in this dining room.”

Hollywood for years had brought everyone many more wars than that, wars that on film were often, as Peter Pan enthused about death, “an awfully big adventure.” John Ford and four of his fellow directors — Frank Capra, William Wyler, George Stevens and John Huston — had, like the rest of the world, been primed for this particular war for quite some time. Or so they thought.

This week sees the publication of Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, Mark Harris’ stunning book about the wartime experiences of these filmmakers. They knew, respected, worked and occasionally clashed with one another.

John Ford earned a Purple Heart shooting footage of The Battle of Midway. John Huston, already a notorious hell-raiser, packed his bags for Alaska and later Italy, only to come back with experiences that kept him awake no matter how hard he tried to party them away. Capra spent much of his time supervising the Why We Fight series, engaged in constant back-and-forth with the U.S. government he fiercely wanted to support. When still in the States, the Alsace-born Jew William Wyler tried with mounting desperation to help people get out of Europe; when in Europe, he flew and filmed combat missions that eventually cost him much of his hearing. And George Stevens, Wyler’s good friend who’d made his name with wise, humane comedies, filmed Dachau after the camp was liberated, footage intended only for use at the Nuremberg trials. In later years, Stevens himself couldn’t bear to watch it.

The author's done impressive research and uncovered much that was new to the Siren. Harris knows all about the directors' art as well as their lives, treats them all with fairness, and he doesn’t neglect their humor, either.

The Siren devoured an advance copy. Then she got in touch with Mark, with whom she’s friendly, and asked if he’d answer a few questions via email for the benefit of her patient readers. He kindly agreed.

The Siren has, where possible, linked to the films that are available free on the Web. Mark also writes a column for Grantland and dispenses wit and wisdom on Twitter under the handle @MarkHarrisNYC. Meanwhile, you definitely want Five Came Back.

Your previous book, Pictures at a Revolution, had a similar five-way structure, built around the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture in the watershed year of 1967. What attracts you to this type of construction? Was Five Came Back harder?

The “rule of five” similarity is mostly an accident, I swear! My books tend to start with wildly overreaching proposals for cast-of-thousands narratives that, if executed according to plan, would run about 2500 pages each. Then, in the first stages of research, I narrow what I’m doing considerably when I realize what I want my real narrative to be. So Five Came Back began in my head as a book about 13 or 14 people—including producers, studio heads, actors, writers, emigres—and I very quickly figured out that I wanted to tell this particular story through the lives of directors, and that almost everyone else I was interested in would end up as supporting characters in their stories. I cringed a little when I realized there were five—but there wasn’t one I could naturally add or omit, so five it was.

The part of this structural similarity that isn’t an accident or a coincidence is that I like to have a large group of people to play with, and I really enjoy working on multiple narratives that not only interweave but occasionally intersect. In both books, I think readers might start out thinking that they’re reading five different stories, but the deeper they get into the narrative, the more they come to feel (I hope) that they’re actually reading one big story with many characters, which I feel this is. It’s the story of five directors, but they collaborate, and compete, and occasionally collide. And I couldn’t tell the full story of how Hollywood moviemakers reacted to the war without discussing all of them.

Much of the book deals with the wartime documentaries made by these directors. Some of those films included extensive re-enactments, a technique that is controversial to this day. Did you draw any fresh conclusions about the ethics of re-enactments, both during World War II and our own time?

When you write about the early 1940s, you’re writing about the documentary form in or near its infancy—it was a time when the ethics of documentary or journalistic filmmaking had not been the subject of all that much discussion or judgment. In talking about re-enactments, which are an important part of this story, I tried very hard to strike a careful balance. On one hand, I don’t enjoy reading histories that use the smug perspective of present-day knowledge as a bludgeon to abuse their subjects; on the other hand, it’s sometimes too easy to wish away ethical or moral deficiencies via the umbrella exoneration, “Well, those were different times.” Yes, they were different times, but these ethical questions were not foreign to the men I was writing about.

The truth is that John Huston and George Stevens were both profoundly uncomfortable with their roles in foisting false footage on both the Allies and the public—those were instances of clear-cut wrongdoing, and I write about them. But did William Wyler err by recreating a soundtrack for The Memphis Belle? And what are we to make of Huston’s restaging of battle scenes of San Pietro, which were acclaimed as examples of unprecedented realism even though they were faked? In the book I try to be as detailed as possible about how and why these decisions were made and executed, but I think different readers may reach different conclusions. I am surprised at how resonant the question has turned out to be. Two of last year’s strongest documentaries, Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing, made extraordinary and inventive use of re-enactments and made some of the ethical issues surrounding them explicit, so it’s clearly something with which we’ll continue to wrestle.

What are the best films these directors made during the war?

I’ll have to stretch the definition of “during” in both directions a little to answer that. Wyler’s two wartime movies, Mrs. Miniver, which often gets dismissed as cloying or sentimental but which is astonishingly effective and affecting, and The Best Years Of Our Lives, which is just one of the all-time great American movies, would have to head the list, and his wartime documentary The Memphis Belle is very strong. Ford’s They Were Expendable, which he made in 1945 immediately following his Navy service, is excellent, deeply personal and revealing. Huston was the least experienced of the five directors at the time war broke out—he had just made his directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon—and when you watch his three wartime documentaries, Report from the Aleutians, San Pietro, and Let There Be Light, you can see him developing as a director in fascinating and idiosyncratic ways. Stevens didn’t make any theatrically released documentaries during the war, but The More The Merrier, which he made just before joining the Army, is sophisticated, funny, and romantic—one of the best wartime comedies. And Capra’s Why We Fight series is certainly of huge historical interest (by the way, like just about all of the war-era documentaries, you can see those movies for free on any number of streaming services).

These directors were all stars themselves in some sense, with public personas that affect the perception of their work to this day. Did spending so much time with these artists alter your take on what they were like as men?

I spent almost five years on the book, and for me those years were a process of trying to get to know those five men. I was very fortunate that in all five cases, their papers had been archived. Without that, and without the archiving of war papers in the National Archives, I don’t think I could have done the research that made writing the book possible. There’s something deeply intimate and also very humbling about sitting in a library holding a letter from a father to his son or a husband to his wife or a diary that was written 75 years ago, or seeing the rough draft of a speech or a chunk of narration, a piece of paper on which one of these directors had scratched out words over and over again while looking for the right way to express himself. You really do feel like you’re the custodian of their thoughts at that moment, and it’s a trust you’d better not break by distortion or manipulation. I didn’t want this book to be an act of hero worship, because while I do find a couple of the directors heroic, many of them were also problematic, flawed, tormented people, and I wanted to convey those truths as well. By the end of the process I thought I understood more about, say, Huston’s bravado or Ford’s taciturn quality than I did when I started. It would be arrogant to say I “know” them, but I feel I got as close to understanding them as men as I possibly could.

Did writing Five Came Back affect your view of the films of Huston, Ford, Stevens, Wyler and Capra, especially the ones they made afterward? If so, how?

Some more than others—and that was something I felt I wanted to kind of bite my tongue about in the book, which is a narrative history, not a critical essay, and which (more to the point) ends in early 1947. It wouldn’t have felt right to me to end the story by saying “…and therefore, here is how I think you should look at The Searchers.” That said, I very much hope that readers go look at The Searchers! I’d love them to feel inspired not only to go watch some of the movies I mentioned above—movies that I deal with directly in the book—but the later movies as well. I certainly look at Stevens’s Shane, which he called his “war movie,” differently as a result of the years I spent on the book, and the same is true of how I comprehend Ford’s relationship to defeat and lost causes in his Westerns. And I think I have a better understanding of why social realism and noir both flourished after the war. But that’s for another book!

***

Here are some related links of interest:

Lou Lumenick at the New York Post writes about how John Huston faked parts of The Battle of San Pietro.

George Stevens’ The Nazi Plan, which was screened at Nuremberg, can be watched here.

Letters, photos and other materials relating to one of the dozens of historical figures in this book, novelist and screenwriter Irwin Shaw, are available here.

Photos from top: William Wyler (in the middle, with hands in pockets) and most of the crew from the Memphis Belle; John Huston in his Signal Corps uniform attends the 1943 Academy Awards with Olivia de Havilland; John Ford films They Were Expendable in Florida in 1945;  Frank Capra receives the Distinguished Service Medal from General George C. Marshall; George Stevens filming in Europe after D-Day.

Anecdote of the Week: Merle and David Make a Death Scene

The Siren has been saving this one, from The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven, the funniest star autobiography she's ever read. Warning (and I am very serious here) read no further if you treasure the death scene in Wuthering Heights. You will never look at it the same way again.

So, if you're still here, it's 1939, and Niven, as Edgar Linton, is playing the death scene of Catherine Earnshaw, played by Merle Oberon. Flora Robson, Laurence Olivier and Geraldine Fitzgerald are on set for Cathy's final moments. Niven is supposed to break down in sobs. The problem: Niven can't cry. He tells Wyler, who by way of consolation bellows to the assembled cast and crew, "Here's an actor who says he can't act!" Niven attempts to give Wyler what he wants.

I tried and it was pretty grisly. Tam Williams got hiccups bottling his laughter and Larry looked up the chimney.

I tried again.

'Jesus,' said Wyler, 'can you make a crying face?'

I made some sort of squashed-up grimace.

'Oh God,' he groaned. 'IRVING!'

Irving Sindler, the prop man, was instantly at his side.

'Give him the blower,' said Wyler.

Gregg Toland, the cameraman, gave his signals, and the film started passing through the sprockets.

'The blower, Irving!' said Wyler.

Through a handkerchief, Sindler puffed menthol into my open eyes.

'Bend over the corpse...Heave your shoulders.' Crying face...Blink your eyes...squeeze a little...'Bend over the corpse...Heave your shoulders.'

A terrible thing happened. Instead of tears coming out of my eyes, green slime came out of my nose.

'Ooh!! How HORRID!' shrieked the corpse, who shot out of bed and disappeared at high speed into her dressing room.

By the way, the Siren adores the still above. Maybe it's just her dirty mind, but it suggests all sorts of scenarios that would give Joe Breen apoplexy.

Merle and Sarah Jane

Imitation of Life and The Oscar lead, in the Siren's convoluted mental Hollywood, to Merle Oberon, the lady who gives out the Oscar in the latter's finale. In her early roles, like The Private Life of Henry VIII and These Three, Oberon had one of the most exquisitely, symmetrically beautiful faces in the history of movies. A perfect oval shape, a nose and mouth balanced just so and breathtaking eyes.

But here is the Imitation of Life twist, no great secret anymore: Oberon's mother was a dark-skinned Ceylonese woman named Charlotte Selby. Some say Charlotte was actually her grandmother, complicating matters; but she raised Merle, and Merle appears to have thought Charlotte was her mother. In any event, Oberon, née Estelle Merle Thompson, spent her life hiding her heritage from Hollywood and the world.




A modern person gazes at the features that columnists called "exotic" and can't figure out how Oberon managed a 40-year career without anyone wising up to the fact that she was half-Asian. And, in fact, she didn't keep it from everyone. The rumor about Oberon's parentage was around for years before it was confirmed in the 1980s by writers Charles Higham and Roy Moseley and by Michael Korda, her nephew by marriage, among others.

Unlike Sarah Jane, Oberon didn't abandon the woman she thought was her mother. She provided for her, stashing her in a flat in London, visiting her and paying all her bills. Oberon lived in glamourous digs that contained no nostalgic pictures of little Queenie, as she was nicknamed in childhood, in her mother's arms. When in London, Merle never said to a friend, "I'd like you to meet my mother." It is said that when visitors asked, Merle pretended Charlotte was the maid.

The Siren likes actors, and even when she doesn't, she admires them. Most of them. When I trouble to write at length about an actor, occasionally I start out rather cool, but I almost always end by feeling affection.




I feel no such affection for Oberon. But she intrigues me no end. How do you reach that point in your ambitions--the point where you'd deny your own mother?

Wikipedia has a odd little phrase in its lengthy and tortuous Merle Oberon entry: "She believed the truth would have destroyed her career prospects." Believed, rubbish. Without question the truth would have kept her from playing leads, thanks to the Production Code's miscegenation clause. No Anglo-Indian woman would ever have played Catherine Earnshaw in 1939. In fact, that casting would cause grumbling in some quarters in 2010, albeit carefully phrased in terms of history and plausibility.

Lena Horne tells of how in her early days, showmen said she was light-skinned enough to play Latina or white. Horne snapped back that she was also dark enough to be what she was. Horne had the courage. But Oberon had the stardom.

If Oberon would not acknowledge her mother in public, neither did she leave her to fate. Her mother was cared for, but concealed. And the Siren will always wonder, how did Charlotte feel, day by day? Was it enough to be provided for by her dazzling daughter, or did that make it worse?

She had a hardscrabble childhood, did Merle, one that she pulled herself out of by becoming a companion to older, wealthy, well-connected men. Whether that extended to outright prostitution is another Oberon mystery. But she worked her way to London and hitched her wagon to Alexander Korda, marrying him some years later.




Oberon became a star, but not a great actress. Oh, she was just right on occasion. Under William Wyler's steel hand she was perfect for These Three, impossibly lovely and poised, the very essence of the things that will always elude Miriam Hopkins. Her character is the sort of woman to whom fate will always lend a hand, because she is beautiful, because men adore her.




She played the same kind of part in The Scarlet Pimpernel, yet made Marguerite more sympathetic than she was in the book. She had a brief affair with Leslie Howard and a more serious one with David Niven. The Siren can't tell you whether Niven, a canny mortal and a world-class gossip, knew. If so, it did nothing to diminish her appeal for him at the time; but he didn't marry her.

During the 1937 filming of I, Claudius Oberon, who'd been cast as Messalina, was in a car accident that sounded the production's death knell and gave us one of the great "what ifs" of movie history. Her face was badly cut and required surgery. In later movies she is still a great beauty, but the pure perfection is gone.




The decade wound down with The Divorce of Lady X and closed with the biggest role of Oberon's career, Cathy in Wuthering Heights. She is appealing in that romantic movie, enough to make Laurence Olivier's love believable, but she lacks the wild, deeply unnerving passion that is the essence of Bronte.




Later good parts for Oberon came in That Uncertain Feeling and Lydia. Some sources claim an allergic reaction to sulfa drugs, compounded by dermabrasion afterward, further marred her looks. She made movies throughout the 1940s, including a preposterous piece of biopic casting as George Sand in A Song to Remember. She also made the very good Jack the Ripper thriller, The Lodger, where she met the great cinematographer Lucien Ballard and eventually married him. He invented a light to help keep the illusion of Oberon's beauty. Still, toward decade's end she began to experience the fading appeal that is the lot of most actresses.

Charlotte Selby, whether mother or grandmother, died in 1937.




As her roles dwindled Merle had compensations. She collected jewelry, she had parties, she painted pictures of flowers. She eased into a jet-set lifestyle, adopted children, and finally moved on to retirement with the Dutch actor who eventually moved on to Audrey Hepburn.

Her filmography consists of roles as love objects of varying degrees of fragility and refinement. You have to look hard in an Oberon performance to find any glint of the iron will that could take a woman from squalid beginnings, to Calcutta nightclubs, then to London, then to Hollywood, and finally to international society, all the while living Sarah Jane's lie. The Siren has never managed to spot it. Each time I see an Oberon movie, I get a thrill from her beauty, but no hint of the riddle's solution. Was she a Scarlett O'Hara who was never going to go hungry again, one to be pitied for the choices racism foisted on her? Or just a Fane-type conniver plying her primary gift, her face, for whatever advantage it would bring?




June Duprez had an opinion, and she expressed it at length in John Kobal's People Will Talk. Duprez had memorable roles in two of the Siren's favorite movies, The Four Feathers and The Thief of Baghdad, but her stay in Hollywood was a miserable one partly, she said, because Oberon backstabbed her. Oberon went out of her way to snub Duprez, and may also have done her best to see that the rest of Hollywood society snubbed the young actress as well. Maybe, said Duprez, it went back to the time that they both showed up at a party in London wearing a white lace dress and a diamond necklace.

Well, Duprez resembled Oberon, but Duprez was seven years younger. That alone could earn an actress's grudge.

Or maybe Duprez needed to cast a single villain in a role that belonged to sheer bad luck. By the time Duprez talked to Kobal, Oberon had been dead for six years, felled by a stroke in 1979.




Now we all hear a lot about the pain and pathos of stardom. Some stories are tragedies by any definition: Wallace Reid, Clara Bow, Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, John Garfield, Canada Lee. Other actors' laments leave you thinking that ordinary people make sacrifices, too, only with less fuss and far fewer rewards.

Oberon's life was no tragedy; her mother's, perhaps, was.

A Director Out of Wood*

The Siren has been pondering auteurism. Some time back Girish had a long and fruitful discussion of it, and last week Glenn Kenny went over to the Auteurs to proclaim "an auteurist film is an interesting film."

Glenn is right, of course. But the Siren runs into two problems with auteurism. One is the tendency of some auteurists to overpraise their idols' lesser works. The other, more significant problem is what to do with Jean Negulesco, Jack Conway, Roy del Ruth, Vincent Sherman, Archie Mayo, Henry Hathaway or today's guest star, Sam Wood.

Sam Wood is an excellent example of a studio man who helmed some good-to-great movies--namely, Hold Your Man, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, the 1937 Madame X, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Our Town, Raffles, The Devil and Miss Jones, Kings Row, Pride of the Yankees and oh, all right, some people like this one, For Whom the Bell Tolls. (Ivy, starring goddess Joan Fontaine, is also supposed to be pretty good, and Lord Jeff too.) Yet Wood garners career evaluations that range from tepid to eye-rolling. In the afterlife, Vincent Sherman probably reads Sam Wood mini-bios to make himself feel better.

Let's be frank. Wood's hard-right politics have played a part in how he is remembered, as his post-war anti-Communism went from vocal to obsessive in nothing flat. He founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and in that guise was a driving force behind the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, where he testified grimly that certain Directors' Guild members were trying to "steer us into the Red River." Such was Wood's fear of subversion that after his death in 1949, his heirs discovered a clause in the will stipulating that they had to take a loyalty oath ("I am not now nor have I ever been...") before they could collect a dime.

The result was that during the years when books and interviews and documentaries were brought forth to celebrate the Golden Age, a number of Wood's ex-colleagues had little good to say about him; "a fascist," was Groucho Marx's encomium. And later critics, mindful of Wood's role in the blacklist and with no Wood still alive to discuss anything, haven't been inclined to give him much credit. His bad or mediocre films (and they are many) have been deemed as much or more representative of his abilities than his successes. And Wood's successes were discussed without much enthusiasm for his role. Mind you, the Siren is all for giving ample credit to James Wong Howe, William Cameron Menzies and Gregg Toland, or Rudolph Mate, Cedric Gibbons and Norman Krasna, for that matter. But watch Kings Row on a double bill with Picnic and tell me if you think the difference is all Howe.



It is possible to read a critique of a Sam Wood picture and wonder if the thing directed itself. In fact, some have pretty much suggested that's what happened on the two Marx films. While Thalberg had the final say, and the Marxes drove many (all right, most) collaborators crazy, the idea of Wood as glorified traffic cop doesn't fit so neatly with Simon Louvish's statement that Wood "refused to take any Marx Brothers nonsense and insisted on endless and exhausting retakes" (a signature Wood technique, although his taste for takes doesn't seem to have been quite up to Wyler levels). The Siren would never argue for Wood's sole authorship of those movies, but she doesn't see why we should presume that he contributed nothing.

Anyway, the blacklist ended forty years ago, Wood's been dead for more than sixty and the Siren thinks no one need be ashamed to be caught loving a good Sam Wood movie. The fact is, pace M. Truffaut, I would much rather watch The Devil and Miss Jones than Hatari!; would curl up with The Pride of the Yankees well before I'd sit down with The Long Gray Line; and would take King's Row over Frenzy in a heartbeat. Does this mean that I consider Wood to be the equal of Hawks, Ford or Hitchcock? Nope. But it does mean I think he deserves to be taken seriously, and given credit for the things he did well.

There, that's my Sam Wood defense.

Unfortunately, it's all leading up to a brief discussion of a not-terribly-good Sam Wood movie, Saratoga Trunk.



"You can't go home again," said Thomas Wolfe, in a title the Siren first encountered via Charlie Brown. While there are few movie experiences as great as rediscovering the virtues of an old favorite, it's pretty depressing to go back to a movie you loved in youth and find that it looks kind of cheesy. The Siren was crazy about Saratoga Trunk when she was about 13 years old, but custom has staled this one something awful. There are good visual moments, such as the opening, a late-movie train chase and crash, Ingrid Bergman's untrammeled joy as she tastes her first jambalaya, and Bergman in her Saratoga hotel room getting tiddly on peaches in champagne. Bergman's mouth meeting peach is erotic as it got in 1945. She was quite the sensualist, was Bergman, one who loved her food, and the Siren wonders if that was why she was so hot to play Clio Dulaine. It couldn't have been the script.

Overall, however, it's a slog. Ingrid Bergman is Clio, a Creole adventuress who arrives in New Orleans to seek revenge on her father's snooty family for ruining her mother's life. The first scene is entrancing, Bergman arriving at a French Quarter mansion where the garden has taken over, walking around the broken-down rooms and reliving her mother's heartache. The Siren would definitely point to the sequence as an example of Wood's fluid but inconspicuous camerawork at its best.

But then Clio settles in, and the movie stagnates. There is way too much of Clio's "mammy" figure, Angelique, played in glowering blackface by Flora Robson and topped with eyebrows that would scare the daylights out of Frida Kahlo. (Blackface. Can you believe it? in a serious role, in 1945? and Robson got an Oscar nomination for it!) The character is a snooze, serving only to make you appreciate Hattie McDaniel. And there is too much of Cupidon, played by little person Jerry Austin and used in most early scenes as not much more than a terrier with a French accent (although he gets some better moments later on). For about 70 long, long minutes we watch Ingrid force the Dulaine family to pay her off, merely by showing up at various public places and looking like her mother. That's a long time to wait to get to Saratoga, and the meat of the story, such as it is. Perhaps the fact that Edna Ferber helped adapt her own novel accounts for Saratoga Trunk's length. It definitely smacks of a writer who wrote a long book and was going to get it all in there, by gum, no matter if pacing begins to stagger and finally falls in a ditch.



Gary Cooper has to wear an oversized hat that brings up unfortunate Yosemite Sam associations, but when he takes it off and makes love to Bergman the Siren understands what first drew her adolescent hormones to this movie. Bergman's features look smashing with dark hair, but then we of later years already knew that. The beauty of the leads and the occasional good scene notwithstanding, this one would have been better screened in the Siren's cinema of the memory.

* The story goes that during one of the many tense moments on the set of A Night at the Opera, Sam Wood snapped, "You can't make an actor out of clay," only to have Groucho flash back, "Nor a director out of Wood."

In Memoriam: Jean Simmons, 1929-2010

In the Siren's head, there is a triangle of aristocratic mid-century actresses, one that goes Europe-America-Britain--Hepburn, Kelly, Simmons. Jean Simmons, who has died in California, age 80, is the apex. Alas for the Hollywood in my head, Simmons isn't a household name like the other two. But her filmography is packed with layered and intelligent performances as well as darkly ambiguous characters the likes of which the other two ladies, great as they were, never dared.


Simmons began as a child actress, an excellent one. The Siren hasn't seen much of her juvenile work but like everyone else she's seen Great Expectations, and Simmons was fine as the young Estella, wounding and luring young Pip. In Black Narcissus her body makeup was the one false note in the masterpiece, but as the sensual, predatory serving girl Simmons put it all into her movements and snake-charmer eyes. In Hamlet, James Agee said she was "the only person in the picture who gives every one of her lines the bloom of poetry and the immediacy of ordinary life." She earned an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress and Hollywood was interested, but she was still under contract in Britain and continued to make films there.

She made the 1949 version of The Blue Lagoon and if the Siren's memory is to be trusted, that one was no less silly than the remake, although Simmons worked valiantly. Much better was the beloved So Long at the Fair, a mystery-romance centered on the old legend of a disappearance at the Paris Exposition of 1889. There are many reasons to cherish this atmospheric, dreamy movie; for one thing, the sinister Parisians who take turns gaslighting poor Vicky (Simmons) fit neatly with the perception one can get of customer service in that city. But more credit goes to Simmons, who displayed her signature ability to yank a damsel-in-distress role out of mothballs and make the girl seem courageous, intelligent and worth saving.

Simmons had her own distress in the early years of adult success. There was her romance with Stewart Granger, who left his wife for her in 1950, causing some anxiety for Simmons and her employers in those sterner times. She weathered the Granger publicity, then endured a long series of contract disputes that held up her career and occasionally forced her into parts she didn't want. Rank, the studio that had the actress under contract, averted their eyes as Hollywood beckoned, casting Simmons in pictures that did well at the box office, if not always with critics. (There are a number from this era that the Siren would like to see, including Uncle Silas, The Clouded Yellow and Cage of Gold.) Finally, as Granger prepared to go to MGM, Simmons was permitted to go with him as Rank loaned her to RKO for Androcles and the Lion.

The Siren thinks she's charming as Lavinia, but the movie must have been a bad memory for Simmons. The filming dragged on and on, she couldn't take any of the offers pouring in, and then Rank sold her contract to RKO with just six months left to go. RKO, then being run into the ground by Howard Hughes, claimed she made an oral agreement to stay on. Simmons said she did no such thing, and indeed it seems unlikely as Hughes made his sexual interest in the newlywed vulgarly obvious. She was so miserable that Granger claimed in his memoirs that the couple discussed the advisability of pushing Hughes off the cliff near their home. Instead, she agreed to do three more films and in a fortunate move for everyone, not least Simmons' fans, she made Angel Face.



Robert Mitchum biographer Lee Server says Hughes hired Otto Preminger to direct the movie in hopes of making the leading lady's life as difficult as possible: "I'm going to get even with that little bitch," quoth the ever-gallant Hughes. Preminger was often brutal to his actors for the sheer hell of it. Given explicit encouragement by a studio boss he "absolutely, totally destroyed me," Simmons said later. But she was no fragile Jean Seberg, thank goodness; when Hughes made one too many demands about her hairstyle she cut it all off and was made to wear a wig during filming. A scene where Mitchum slapped Simmons resulted in the legendary moment when, after Preminger had done take after take, Simmons bearing each blow until her eyes watered from the pain, Mitchum turned around and slapped the director instead. But oh, the film they made. Simmons is magnificent, an evil, father-obsessed, psychopathic beauty to place beside and even eclipse Gene Tierney's similar turn in Leave Her to Heaven. Simmons, so often cast as a schoolteacher or a missionary, takes her Black Narcissus sexiness and turns it full force on Mitchum's chauffeur. Their erotic chemistry is as potent as any in film noir.

Hughes continued to be a putz, refusing to loan Simmons out for Roman Holiday. The RKO dispute landed in court and Simmons eventually won a qualified victory and the ability to work at other studios. At MGM she made Young Bess, a movie notable mostly for Charles Laughton's return to his Henry VIII role (his scene with Simmons is the best in the movie) and her fiery, wilful Elizabeth, a girl you can easily see growing up to defeat an Armada. She made another film at RKO and then it was back to MGM to play The Actress, a role intended for Debbie Reynolds, who would have been pleasant, I suppose. Under George Cukor's direction, Simmons turned it into the definitive portrait of stagestruck youth. Part of Simmons' talent is that she never tries to signal the audience that she sees a character's flaws--she plays foolishness straight up. She takes the girl beyond the acting bug into a place for all adolescent dreaming. It is one of Cukor's best films and the Siren's favorite Simmons role. But the movie did poorly and David Shipman notes the irony, in a verdict the Siren agrees with; "she was wan as the heroine of The Robe with Richard Burton, a tremendous success...[but] a rotten version of a rotten novel by Lloyd C. Douglas."

The 50s were Simmons' years at the top, as she was cast in big-budget fare like Desiree and The Egyptian. Neither was very good, though the Siren gets plenty of pleasure from both. The Siren has little use for what Samuel Goldwyn and Joseph Mankiewicz did to Guys and Dolls, but no less an authority than Steven Sondheim called Jean's joyous dance in Havana "a high point of the picture." (In the 1970s, Simmons toured as Desiree in A Little Night Music and originated the role in London; she's said to have been terrific.) The Siren does think Simmons is swell in a somewhat anemic, but enjoyable women's picture, Until They Sail, about sisters in New Zealand experiencing World War II chiefly as man trouble.



Just after that, Simmons made The Big Country with William Wyler, who thought highly of her talent although he annoyed her as much as he did any other actor. The Siren cares not what others say of this movie, when she hears that music she sits and watches it all over again, yep, all three hours. Simmons, as she often did, had the hardest character of the lot, a well-bred orphan meant to be a battleground as vital as the movie's Big Muddy watering hole. Instead she breathes such intelligence that certain less-plausible ideas, like courtly treatment from Burl Ives' otherwise ruthless rancher, cause nary a flicker of disbelief. Of course he would defend this woman. Such is her radiant dignity, he might even lumber off his horse and bow. (He doesn't, but he could have.)



The marriage with Stewart Granger began to fail, as marriage with Stewart Granger must, and Simmons made Elmer Gantry with Richard Brooks, who became her second husband. It was one of the finest roles of her career, an evangelist doomed by belief in her own cant. Simmons is remarkably free of any condescension to Sister Sharon, her conflicts or her beliefs. There haven't been many performances like it since, as we live now in an age where we see a preacher address thousands and just assume there must be a Jim Bakker backstory somewhere. Incredibly, Simmons did not get an Oscar nomination though her work was as great as that of Burt Lancaster, who won.

She was professional as always in Spartacus, but while the movie is good and has acquired a devoted following, the Siren thinks Simmons' part isn't particularly interesting. She gets a couple of chances to shine near the end, however. Her kiss for Laughton is so loving you feel his reaction may not be acting at all, and the moment where she sees Spartacus dying, and the camera stays and stays on her face, is the most heartbreaking in the movie.

Shipman says that around this time, "to protect this marriage and to bring up her children," (she had one from each marriage) "she began to refuse work." Simmons is darling in The Grass Is Greener, her giddy Mitford-esque flirt out-shining onetime Granger love Deborah Kerr. She was great again as the mother in All the Way Home, a beautiful movie based on Agee's A Death in the Family that had an equally fine Robert Preston. But the downbeat story was a flop.

As the 60s hurtled on, Simmons found her offers getting fewer and less interesting, as they do for most actresses with the nerve to get older. Her beauty was striking to the end, but what does that ever matter in Hollywood? The Siren hasn't seen much of her work past about 1967, including her Oscar-nominated role in Brooks' The Happy Ending. The Siren did see her in The Thorn Birds; she was lovely. Simmons was always lovely, even in silly fare like North and South where her presence was like using a Stradivarius to play "Oops, I Did It Again."


Joseph Mankiewicz called her "a fantastically talented and enormously underestimated girl. In terms of talent she is so many head and shoulders above most of her contemporaries, one wonders why she didn't become the great star she could have been." He went on to theorize, "it doesn't matter to her much." The Siren isn't so sure; stardom means good parts, and those mattered a great deal to Simmons, enough to keep her working nearly her entire life. "Maybe it doesn't help to have been so good so young," said Shipman. Well, Simmons deserved better from the movie business, as did so many actresses. But the Siren, a Jean Simmons admirer now and always, got much indeed from her.

(Please note: the beautiful picture at the bottom is copyright-held by the gentleman we know as Yojimboen. He took it himself, the lucky devil.)

Devotion (1946)

Ever see a movie that was bad, that announced itself as bad from the opening moments and never really got any better, and yet you could not bring yourself to miss a single moment? Such was the Siren's reaction to Devotion, the Brontë Old Dark Moors fantasia that TCM showed last week on a double bill with Wyler's Wuthering Heights. Devotion is a survey course in everything that ever goes wrong with Hollywood biopics.

Inscrutable casting? Check. The very American Arthur Kennedy as Branwell Brontë, the worldly, wised-up Ida Lupino as reclusive Emily, the beautiful man-magnet Olivia de Havilland as plain, yearning Charlotte, the extremely Continental Paul Henreid as the Reverend Arthur Nicholls.

Appalling liberties taken with the facts? Check. Emily conceives a hopeless passion for Nicholls and spends the rest of the movie mooning over him, in a perfect example of Hollywood's prosaic approach to the interior lives of artists. Never mind Emily Dickinson or Robert Herrick--fiercely sensual writing must have its origin not in the imagination, but rather in some sort of literal love affair. For years some people would try to prove that Branwell wrote Wuthering Heights, due mostly to the immensely irritating notion that a woman living a circumscribed life couldn't conceive of such tormented, passionate lovers. Devotion's screenwriters at least attribute the novel to the right author, but attach an "explanation" for Heathcliff and Cathy that is almost as insulting to Emily.

De Havilland, an exquisite beauty who seems to have bowled over male directors and costars like so many ninepins, had the odd fate of frequently playing the plain (Gone With the Wind), the spinsterish (To Each His Own, Hold Back the Dawn) or both (The Heiress). Her talent could usually make you believe in the character, if not her lack of looks, but here she's obviously having a lousy time. (You can read about this movie's checkered production history, and its connection with de Havilland's famous contract-busting suit, here at TCM.) She's third-billed and it shows, but the Siren cannot blame de Havilland. The character of Charlotte as written and conceived is a simpering, self-centered blight, a "ninnyhammer" as the Siren's beloved Georgette Heyer would have put it. That Henreid is anywhere close to believable when he falls for her demonstrates his gift for conveying men who make lousy romantic choices, something his characters do in almost every film.

Inconvenient details summarily dispensed with? Check. Anne Brontë, a talented writer, is a cipher here and if it weren't for a throwaway line toward the end of the movie you'd never realize she could hold a pen, let alone write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. There is barely a hint of the Brontës' poverty and isolation, as they all attend a ball at one point in drop-dead gowns that probably cost some Warner Brothers seamstress several weeks of her life and a good deal of her eyesight.

So why did the Siren enjoy herself? Well, after a while she watches some movies the same way she tunes into a particularly unhinged political commentator--the waves of crazy just wash her out into the sea of batshit and she starts to have a great time. Favorite moments include Henreid blandly explaining away his Austrian accent by saying he had spent a lot of time on the Continent, as though one could send Wallace Beery over there and he'd come back sounding like S.Z. Sakall. Emily bounds around the moors with an enormous sheepdog whose magnificent coat flaps in the breeze like he's doing an Alpo commercial. She takes Nicholls on a walk, points up a hill to a perfect Old Dark House and remarks helpfully, "I call it Wuthering Heights!" The rest of the time she pulls Branwell out of gutters and tells Charlotte to think of someone else for a change. The complicated, cerebral professor who became the object of Charlotte's affections turns into Victor Francen, tilting his head at everybody and doing a nonlethal version of his bad guy from San Antonio. Tuberculosis manifests itself as a couple of concertgoer coughs before you go out in a rainstorm to pull Branwell out of gutter No. 3 (or was it 4?) and catch your death.

But some things are genuinely good. Curtis Bernhardt keeps things moving and manages some nicely angled shots, such as the black-clad horseman who shows up in Emily's dreams from time to time. You don't know what he's doing there--she wrote Wuthering Heights, not "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"--but he looks great. Erich Korngold's score is omnipresent, underlining each beat in that vintage studio way (here comes the love theme! here's the "Branwell is drunk again" music!) but it's gorgeous to the ears, as Korngold always was. Arthur Kennedy sounds like he always does (did Branwell spend a lot of time in Massachusetts?) but he does a hell of a job as an alcoholic wastrel, turning Branwell into an intriguing dry run for his equally drunken and indolent pseudo-intellectual in A Summer Place.

And then there's Sydney Greenstreet, and oh how the Siren loves him in anything. Greenstreet shows up as William Makepeace Thackeray about 3/4 into the movie but he is worth the wait and then some. As the great satirist, Greenstreet looks so right and he sounds so right that it doesn't matter that Signor Ferrari somehow landed in London and started squiring around lady novelists. And Greenstreet gets the best dialogue, complete with hat-tip. "Good morning, Mr. Thackeray." "Good morning, Mr. Dickens," replies Greenstreet, as the other gentleman takes his frock coat and fright beard into the publishing house.

But finally, the real reason to watch Devotion is the extraordinary cinematography by Ernest Haller, who lensed Gone with the Wind, Jezebel, The Roaring Twenties and many others. It's simply gorgeous, the interiors of this fantasy Haworth flickering with shadows and suggestiveness. The look of the picture suggests more Brontë than all the sisters' flutterings together.

In Which the Siren Reads an Anecdote That Ties Up All of the Past Two Weeks

The day after posting about The Letter the Siren took Heavy Baby to the library story hour and on the way out spied Dark Victory, film writer Ed Sikov's new biography of Bette Davis. The Siren believes that she has read enough, perhaps even too much, about Davis but she admired Sikov's careful research and deft writing in his Billy Wilder biography, so she picked it up. And it is well done, although still somehow not the book the Siren truly wants about Davis--the one that focuses almost entirely on the work, and primarily on what she did up to the year she left Warner Brothers, 1949. Yes, that eliminates All About Eve, but that movie has also probably been chronicled enough and the Siren would rather just watch it.

Sikov is a real writer, not a sensationalist, so although he does have some gossipy bits (and truly, with a subject as rich as Davis it would take someone as self-denying as Teresa of Avila to resist those) he gives her artistry and methods enough attention to keep things interesting. He spends a lot of time on her peculiar line delivery, how that works in her good movies and grates in her bad. He points out how her overflowing energy could result in too much movement in early performances, and chronicles how she brought it under control, performance by performance, aided by her best directors. ("Do you want me to put a chain around your neck?" snapped William Wyler, tired of Davis's head motions during the filming of Jezebel.) Sikov begins the book by warning readers that they may wind up disliking Davis, and him for revealing her flaws, but in fact he is pretty fair-minded.

He has a fine chapter on The Letter, although he does make one observation about the opening that the Siren obviously doesn't agree with: "For reasons that aren't clear, Wyler cuts to some startled but irrelevant plantation workers..." There's a great discussion of the scene where Herbert Marshall discovers the amount of the blackmail payment, though. And the Siren didn't know that Wyler second-guessed his own work and wanted to reshoot the end to make Leslie more sympathetic. Davis arranged to screen the first cut and talked him out of major changes, although they did reshoot the final bedroom scene with Marshall.

But here's the payoff, the Sikov passage that, for reasons which will become clear to her readers, made the Siren double over with laughter. It isn't often that you get the sort of synchronicity that ties together everything you've posted on your blog for a couple of weeks. Sikov discusses how Davis's character endures a beating at the hands of Humphrey Bogart's goons in Marked Woman.

On the day she filmed the scene, Bette decided that she'd had enough of the type of glamorous beating she'd endured under Michael Curtiz's timorous eye in 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. From Bette's perspective, a new year had turned. It was 1937, and Warners' executives, producers, directors, and makeup artists still didn't get it. She alone did. The script called for Mary to be thrashed and knifed and scarred for life, but as Bette later described herself after she came out of makeup that morning, "I don't think I ever looked so attractive. Lilly Dache herself could have created that creamy puff of gauze at the peak of her inspiration. It was an absolute gem of millinery." According to Davis, she "smiled sweetly" and left the studio, supposedly for lunch.

She went instead to her physician, Dr. F. Le Grand Noyes, to whom whom she explained the plot turn and who she asked to bandage her as though she had, in fact, been kicked hard, punched repeatedly, and knife-gashed in the cheek.

Bette may have added a few contusions of her own before showing up at Hal Wallis's office, where Wallis greeted her at the door, saw her swollen eyes, outrageously broken nose, brown abrasions, and acres of bloody gauze, and burst into laughter. 'Okay, you get your way,' the producer told her--'all except that broken nose. You can't have that.'

The Letter (1940)

Pauline Kael once broke up with a man because he loved West Side Story and she hated it. Twitted about this on a talk show years later, she said unapologetically, "well, taste IS the great divider." Most of us aren't quite that drastic, but it's distressing to have someone hold in high regard what you consider trash. It can be worse to have someone not share your love for a certain movie, like having a pet only you find lovable. But the third, and for the Siren the worst, category of dismay belongs to those who like something you like, but in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons.

Which brings us to The Letter, which the Siren watched for probably the sixth or seventh time last week. Afterward she went to IMDB to browse the external reviews, and what she found there left her scratching her head. At least half the critics did not, in the Siren's considered opinion, get this movie at all, even some of the ones who claimed to like it. The swelling in the Siren's face has gone down somewhat, leaving her more like Renee Zellweger on a very bad red-carpet walk than De Niro as La Motta, so the Siren is feeling chirpier and she isn't out to pick a fight. But see here, gentlemen. This is not a mere melodrama, not just a Bette Davis vehicle, nor a dated back-number that's lost some of its juice. It's a masterpiece, with layer on layer of images and themes that touch on colonialism, marriage and the lives of women.

(Warning: the Siren is going to discuss the entire movie, including the end. Spoilers abound.)


We all know the brilliant tracking shot that opens The Letter--how it finally comes to rest on a cockatoo, which flies off, startled, at the sound of the first shot from Bette Davis's gun. Another shot, the workers stir, then the camera moves in toward the plantation house and shows a man who clutches himself as he staggers down the steps, Bette Davis in pursuit as she empties her revolver into him, her face an impassive executioner's mask that each viewer must spend the rest of the movie interpreting.

But that's the socko finale to the sequence. The meat comes earlier, establishing the symbolic vocabulary and the themes of the movie with incredible elegance and economy. It begins with the full moon, the ancient image of another world gazing dispassionately at us, from a distance. The camera moves to a tree and down to where the bark has been cut open and a shunt stabbed into the trunk, as the white rubber drip, drip, drips into a bucket--more than just sexually suggestive, the image tells us the life of the plantation is steady, monotonous, wearing away at the residents like the proverbial water torture. The sound of the dripping carries over the music played by the workers, then fades as the camera moves steadily to their open-sided hut. And the camera begins to ascend back toward the trees, showing the Malayan workers playing mah-jongg, talking quietly, sweat still gleaming on their bodies, their clothes still dirty from the day's labors. They try to sleep in their hammocks despite the mosquitos and the still, heavy air, a sense of suffocation that will echo throughout the film. Up to the thatched roof of the quarters, and only then back down, through the bamboo sides of the quarters and the latticework in the garden (the first of innumerable "cage" images) over to the bird. Then the gunshot, and a cut to the workers, then the owners' house, the white man dying in his proper jacket, Davis in correct at-home evening attire as she shoots him, again and again. And the workers running to the house, stopping and staring at the dead man, and then at Davis with mingled apprehension and revulsion. She drops the gun, the first of many shots that will connect the ground to death, either past or future. Finally, the camera moves in for a close-up on Davis, establishing the suspense for the audience, the whydunit.

We've just been given the whole movie right there--it's as complete as one of Shakespeare's prologues. The rest of The Letter will build on those images, one by one. The relentless monotony of colonial life; the English carrying every last one of their conventions to a place where their rituals are worse than useless; the Malayans, always given the dirty work, veiling contempt behind subservience; Leslie Crosbie's supernal calm, and what it masks in her life and marriage.

The answers to the plot's mystery can be taken simply and solely from Davis's famous confession: "With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!" Or, like all other great movies, you can look closer and find a great deal more. Almost the whole of Wyler's movie measures up to that justly famous beginning, the images locked together like the pattern in Leslie Crosbie's lacework, yet it isn't the least bit overbearing or didactic. The Letter entertains and involves as the plot winds closer and closer around Leslie Crosbie.

Any American movie from the 1940s is bound to have, at a minimum, complicated attitudes towards Asian characters. The Letter is striking, however, because while from one angle the Malayans fit neatly into the era's preconceptions, their point of view is present from the beginning, and it's shown in a way that undermines the racist notions held by the English characters. Take the "head boy" (as he's called) who runs to see who's shooting and speaks the first line of the movie, "That's Mr. Hammond!" The delivery of the actor, Tetsu Komai, is as close to a verbal accusation as the Malayan characters ever get. Leslie orders him to get the plantation workers out of the house, and he does so. She retreats to her bedroom, her quiet but agonized sobbing the first hint we get of her relationship with Hammond. Komai hears it too, as he picks up Leslie's lacework and looks at it for a moment, visibly shaken and also evidently deciding what to do. Komai is given, in a word, motivation, something other movies often presumed the "sinister Oriental" not to need.

Later we see him "run off," as the English note while eating a meal Leslie cooks before being taken to jail. "Out here one gets so lazy," she says, apologizing for her inexperience at cooking, "the boys take such good care of us." As the audience later infers, the "boy" was off informing Hammond's Eurasian widow of his death--an action that in the end will "take care" of Leslie for good. And when Leslie meets her fate, one of the last things she will see is Komai's face in the shadows, wearing an expression almost identical to the one he used when confronting her in the beginning. So on one level, The Letter gives us a stereotypical Asian, but he is also an instrument of justice, taking Leslie's casual sense of superiority and turning it into the last mistake she will ever make.

The Letter gives all of its major Asian characters motivations, as we shall see, which may not seem like saying much, but for 1940 Hollywood, it certainly was. And what's more, while the audience of the time certainly could (and probably did) sit back and think "ah, poor Bette Davis, at the mercy of these connivers," The Letter gives you a very clear bead on the Malayans' contempt for their foolish, deceitful, greedy "betters," and it gives you plenty of reasons to share their opinion, even as the British toss off insults: "Too bad rubber won't grow in a civilized climate." "One of those haphazard Chinese estates." "Where's the head boy?"



We see how the English continually underestimate the people they've colonized, as the attorney finds out when his own clerk tells him about the letter on which the entire plot turns. Dennis Grunes, whose splendid blog the Siren just discovered, describes the shot that tells you all you need to know about Ong Chi Seng (Victor Sen Yung, marvelous):

...the Crosbies, and by implication the British, simply don’t belong in this environment, which they have nevertheless quite taken over.

It is in this context that the contrast between Leslie’s English lawyer...and his Malayan assistant, Ong Chi Seng, is best understood. The former seems rock-solid, as smooth as silk; the latter is an unctuous schemer, out for his (and his people’s) own ends: a portrait of pure hatred seething almost invisibly beneath an accommodating smile. In the parking lot of the courthouse, Wyler scores a visual coup. We watch one lawyer leave in his big, magnificent, smooth-running automobile, thus revealing what it blocked from view: the Malayan lawyer’s rickety, noisy, tiny vehicle in which he, too, now leaves. This is cinema!

(Grunes also explains the real-life case behind the movie, so please, follow the link and read the whole thing.)

While James Stephenson as Leslie's lawyer and Herbert Marshall as her husband are both superb, it's Davis's movie, with everything hanging on this, one of the best performances she ever gave. The Letter should be required viewing for anyone who derides the actress as overly mannered, loud or abrasive. Davis is quiet, proper, there are no tics or obvious gestures to let you know what's seething underneath. It's all behind her eyes, not in her voice but in the pauses that seem to make her constant calculation visible. Andrew Sarris noted her best moments,

...her amazingly quiet, tense, sensitive scenes with James Stephenson's gently probing defense counsel, the scenes in which talk dribbles on and on until it is transmuted into the most ringing truth. There are also the sequences in which she does her needlework with such passionate devotion that we come to understand all the maddeningly quiet moments in the lives of women.

Here the Siren rises to a small point of order with Grunes and Sarris: it isn't needlepoint, nor yet just vague needlework, but lace-making, an important detail. There's the scene where lawyer Howard confronts Leslie with the letter's existence. He notes that her story hasn't varied in even the smallest detail, and says "It suggests either that you have an extraordinary memory...or you're telling the plain, unvarnished truth." "I'm afraid I have a terrible memory," says Leslie, pulling away at her lace hanky--reminding us that lace just happens to require a great deal of precision, concentration and memory, in order to keep track of the patterns. It's just one instance of Leslie lying even as the truth sits in front of her. Moments later she will do the same thing, saying "I swear to you, I did not write this letter."

Leslie works and works at the lace, it grows larger, but we never see it finished and we never learn what she's supposed to be making, either. It's busywork done to fill quiet hours, perhaps the same emptiness that brought Hammond into her life in the first place. In one of The Letter's most famous scenes, Davis wears a large white lace veil. But it's evident in the many close-ups that the lace couldn't have been made by Leslie. It's much finer and more delicate than anything we ever see her working on. Like Leslie herself, the lace-making ultimately fulfills no purpose.

That veil comes into play as Leslie and Howard go deep into Singapore to retrieve the letter that implored Hammond to come to the house. The Siren loves the small moment as Howard and Leslie wait to be escorted upstairs. They idle about a bit in the storefront, and then the man who admitted them, who must know the English are there on a secret errand, walks over, removes a cover and starts showing them the wares. When you have Anglos in a shop, no matter how sinister their errand, like all tourists they must want to rummage in the knickknacks. This is when Leslie unsheaths a dagger that will, of course, show up later. They're escorted upstairs finally, to the movie's major flaw.

What, you didn't think the Siren was going to admit the movie has flaws? Good as it is, it does. The Siren here appropriates Randall Jarrell's line, and describes a movie as a narrative film of some length with something wrong with it. Here's what's wrong with The Letter: Gale Sondergaard. A fine actress, she is ten different kinds of wrong in this scene. That she looks about Asian as the Siren does is just the start. (I know, I know, she's "Eurasian"--please. Her makeup is straight-up yellowface.) Sondergaard has no English lines and she overcompensates, with a body almost stiff with hatred, a mouth pulled down hard at the corners and eyes bulging more than Davis's ever did on her worst day. It's a Dragon Lady, all the more so because the other Asian characters in the movie are at such pains to put a veneer over their hatred. The moment when Davis must kneel to retrieve the letter is knocked out of kilter, because you are wondering if Sondergaard is actually going to kick her. The moment of reverse subservience is there, the tension is maintained, it's undeniably effective. But the Siren dislikes the way Sondergaard's stereotypical playing feeds right into the quietly devastating racism Leslie had expressed earlier: "Horrible. She was all covered with gold chains and bracelets and spangles, her face like a mask." Instead of highlighting how Leslie's prejudices played a part in her fury over being jilted, a point established so beautifully earlier, we get Leslie's bias confirmed, in spades. Given Wyler's famed obsession with his actors, it seems likely that this was his choice as well as Sondergaard's, and it just doesn't work. It even makes the Code-mandated ending worse, by raising the question of why, if Hammond's widow hated Leslie this much, she would wait until after an acquittal to murder her.



Ah well, it's just one scene, and if it throws the thematic symmetry off, it does keep the dramatic momentum going. And Sondergaard's last scene does a great deal to make up for it. Leslie has retreated to her room during her "victory" party, after having confessed to her husband that she still loves Hammond. She goes to the French doors that open onto the garden, and Davis was never more beautiful than she is here as she looks at the moon, a full moon exactly like that of the beginning, the pearls around her neck glowing like echoes of it. It seems almost to pull her out of the room and across the garden, the camera following her shadow on the ground. And when she meets Sondergaard, as we knew she would, Sondergaard looks far more at ease wielding the dagger than she did selling the letter.

Hammond's widow and the "head boy" start to move off, when they are stopped by a Malayan policeman. While the conversation isn't in English, he is evidently taking them off. He gives no indication that he saw Davis's body, but we can presume either they're being arrested, or told to move along, for being in the area without permission. It seems inevitable that when Leslie's body is found, the incident will be remembered and the murder unraveled. Order is being restored--by the natives.

And now we close, as we opened, with a tracking shot. We move to Davis's body, crumpled out of sight beside the wall. Up goes the camera over the wall that was separating the English from Singapore, gliding along to show us the party still in swing. A dissolve back to Davis's bedroom, with the light coming in through the slats and the breeze stirring the still-unfinished lace, then across the floor and back out to the moon, still observing as the English play out their dramas in a place that carried on fine before them and will carry on fine after they leave.