Happy Birthday, Paul Newman

December Music: Day Three

Marina and the Diamonds, "I Am Not a Robot"

Happy Birthday, Brody!

Happy Birthday -- Louise Brooks

Lulu says...

... have a drink on her.



Quotable (Happy Birthday -- Vivien Leigh)

"He returned with a box of roses to beg my forgiveness...he implored my forgiveness...but some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable! It is the one unforgiveable thing in my opinion and it is the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty."

Happy Birthday -- Jean Arthur

So, today really is Jean Arthur's birthday -- there's some dispute over exactly what year she was born, but the most widely-accepted date is 1900 -- and since I already talked a bit about her film career in my post on Carole Lombard, I'll just say now that, all things considered, she's probably my favorite classic movie actress of them all, and I think it's a shame she's not better known today -- although she'd probably be more happy than anybody that her name hasn't achieved Bette Davis or Joan Crawford status. However magical and self-assured she seemed on screen, she was apparently extremely shy everywhere else, to the point that she often made other people uncomfortable and became increasingly difficult to work with as she grew older. She was by no means an unpleasant person, but she sometimes let her anxiety get the better of her and often depended on the right director to make sure she channeled her energy into her acting rather than fretting in her dressing room. Frank Capra was probably the director who understood her best, eliciting some of her finest performances while also devising tricks to keep her stage fright at bay, as in her first scene in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town where he had her play with a piece of string while delivering her lines.

When you look at her in that light, you almost wonder why anyone bothered to work with her at all, but throughout her career she consistently worked with the best directors of her day: in addition to Capra, there was John Ford, Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Borzage, Mitchell Leisen, Howard Hawks, Sam Wood, George Stevens and Billy Wilder; she also costarred with nearly all of the major actors of the thirties and early forties (though, surprisingly, almost none of her fellow top actresses): William Powell, Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Charles Boyer, William Holden, Cary Grant, and Ronald Colman. What's more, many of these directors and costars had nothing but nice things to say about her, with Jimmy Stewart picking her above the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Ginger Rogers as the best actress with whom he ever worked. No matter how shy Arthur was in her private life, she is undeniably enchanting on screen, partially because of her unusual voice, which sounds a bit like tinkling glass, a bit like she has a frog in her throat, and her ability to transform even the thinnest character sketches into people with hearts and souls. What I see when I watch Jean Arthur is an actress who is never, ever on a pedestal, who stands eye-to-eye with her male costars and whom they in turn treat as both a romantic interest and an equal, something that can be extremely rare in the classic film world. She had chemistry with nearly all of those male costars I listed, and managed to draw genuinely erotic performances out of some of them. Her scene with Joel McCrea in The More the Merrier is the be-all and end-all on sex scenes without sex. 

For anyone who's never seen a Jean Arthur film, I think The More the Merrier is a good place to start, but my personal favorite role of hers is Babe Bennett in the aforementioned Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Her scene with Gary Cooper on the park bench is one of the best from any movie in the thirties, and one Capra himself tried to recreate with her in You Can't Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Happy Birthday -- Carole Lombard



Carole Lombard

Yesterday I mistakenly claimed that today is Jean Arthur's, not Carole Lombard's, birthday, which is understandable, considering they both have birthdays this month (Arthur's is on the 17th), but also strangely coincidental because each of them has her rightful claim to the title "Queen of Screwball Comedies" during the 1930s -- although in different ways. Lombard is probably the true queen of screwball comedies, in that more of her films met the criteria set forth by the screwball genre, but Arthur is undoubtedly the queen of "working girl" comedies in the late thirties, and possibly the queen of comic-dramas as well. Plenty of actresses in the thirties, including Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert and Myrna Loy, were skillful comedians, but Lombard and Arthur rose to the top because of their exceedingly unique comedic personas: Lombard was at once glamorous and frenetic, beautiful and sharp-tongued and just as comfortable wearing evening gowns as she was brawling with her male costars; Arthur's appeal is hard to describe to people who have never seen her, but I think the film critic Charles Champlin summed it up best when he said, "Jean Arthur suggested strongly that the ideal woman could be -- ought to be -- judged by her spirit as well as her beauty. ...The notion of the woman as a friend and confidante, as well as someone you courted and were nuts about...became a full-blown possibility as we watched Jean Arthur." Arthur was unique because she seemed so real; Lombard was unique because she seemed almost unreal.

The other major similarity between Lombard and Arthur is that neither had a strong screen presence at the start of her career. Arthur found minor stardom as a silent actress before leaving Hollywood for a few years and then returning to make talkies, and it wasn't until 1935's The Whole Town's Talking that she began to exhibit signs of the "Jean Arthur" we know today. Lombard, meanwhile, is more physically recognizable in her early ingenue roles, but she had a rather boring screen persona until Howard Hawks gave her a chance at comedy in his landmark film Twentieth Century with John Barrymore. The primary difference between Lombard and Arthur (and I'll talk more about Arthur on her birthday) is that while Arthur was extremely shy and reclusive in her everyday life, Lombard's success depended largely on Hawks first allowing her to channel her own personality into her roles. By all accounts, Carole Lombard was an extremely warm, friendly person who also happened to be unflinchingly blunt and swear like a sailor, so some of what we see on screen is simply a heightened version of her true self (minus the swearing, of course). What we don't see on film, but what has been recounted numerous times over the years by her coworkers, was her dedication to equal treatment on the studio lots, to the point that she took all of her meals with the crew (as seen in the picture above) and sat outside with them between takes, rather than retreating to her trailer. She was extremely well-liked among the Hollywood elite, as well as the movie-going public, and if she were alive today, she would be 103 years old.

(pics via here)

Happy Birthday -- Fredric March and Scott Speedman

Two of my favorite actors -- well, one of them is a favorite actor; the other I mostly just like to look at -- had birthdays today and yesterday, respectively; Scott Speedman is 36, and Fredric March would have been 114.

March is one of my favorite actors, period, and certainly one of my favorite classic actors. I already wrote about some of his work here, but for more of his films, I would also recommend the original A Star Is Born (1937), the war drama The Best Years of Our Lives, and the technicolor screwball comedy Nothing Sacred, with Carole Lombard.

I haven't seen as much of Scott Speedman's work as an actor -- I never watched Felicity, and I don't have any interest in the Underworld films -- but he was pretty good in the indie drama The 24th Day, and if you were to go into my brain and create a composite picture of whatever my "type" is, it would probably come out looking a lot like him, so I tend to maintain an interest in him even when he makes dumb movies like The Vow. (An entire movie built around the old soap opera amnesia twist -- really?) He's kind of the male equivalent of Sarah Michelle Gellar in my mind: somebody who's really good on TV but has a patchy movie career, with some good roles interspersed among the middling ones. Maybe they could find him room for him on Gellar's new show. Now THAT I would watch.