MARY OF SCOTLAND (John Ford, 1936)

In addition to being a great actress, Katharine Hepburn was one of the most beautiful women to appear on-screen; and nowhere else is she quite so beautiful as she is in Mary of Scotland, based on Maxwell Anderson’s play, where (following Helen Hayes, for whom the part had been written) she plays Scotland’s ill-fated Mary Stuart, for whom “Mary’s Comet” was named: the “falling star” that scarred the heavens when this rightful claimant to the throne of England was put to death by Elizabeth I, whose grip on power trumped the illegitimacy of her position. Elizabeth Tudor had her second cousin beheaded because Mary ruled “too close” to her own throne.

What explains Hepburn’s extra measure of beauty in this particular film? For starters, for whatever reason(s), the befreckled Hepburn never suffered the pastiness that bedeviled the appearances of some other actresses, Joan Crawford and Shirley MacLaine among them, whose freckles were buried under a blanket of white-out makeup; Hepburn, somehow, always looked natural, her makeup restrained, light, even. This could not have been the case; but it seemed to be. Beyond that, she was more beautiful than ever in this particular film because John Ford directed it. We all know that Ford was enraptured by her, infatuated; he believed he was deeply in love with her, and indeed he may have been. It makes an incredible difference when we watch an actress through a director’s adoring gaze—think Dietrich as envisioned by Sternberg (1930-1935); Stanwyck, with that glow that Capra gave her (1930-1933); Bette Davis as Julie in Wyler’s Jezebel (1938). In every view of her in Mary of Scotland, Kate Hepburn sets our hearts to racing and takes our breath away. She is as gorgeous here as Garbo or Elizabeth Taylor ever was.

Hepburn’s role arrived to her from the play already considerably softened; Anderson’s Mary Stuart is Elizabeth’s victim more than she is Elizabeth’s fierce opponent—and, of course, her own victim, too, for loving James Hepburn (a relation?), the Earl of Bothwell, whom she married: the last of her three husbands, and the one of them she did love. This marriage to a Protestant—Mary herself was Catholic—eroded the loyalty and support of Catholic subjects, who already felt threatened by the inroads made into Scotlandby John Knox and his loathsome Presbyterianism. Whatever the actual Mary’s designs on power, her motto in Anderson’s version might be, “Most for love.” In Ford’s version, which his feelings for Hepburn guided, this became “All for love.”

Indeed, Hepburn softened Mary beyond the softening that Andersonhad already applied. In the confrontation between Elizabeth and Mary in Mary’s prison chamber hours before her beheading (historically, a meeting that never took place), Elizabethpleads with Mary to renounce the English throne and thus spare her own life; Mary, however, will not budge. Instead, she taunts Elizabethwith a glimpse into the future: the “Virgin Queen” will have no heir, and Mary’s son, James, will succeed Elizabeth. In fact, Mary utters two lines of unmitigated taunt and vehement triumph: After referring to the fact that she (unlike Elizabeth) has known a woman’s love for a man, she crows, “Still I win [despite my execution]!” Even in such a line as this, Ford’s Hepburn doesn’t budge from her deepened softening of Mary, whose delivery registers more irony than malice or spite. Not for the last time, Hepburn—whose courage did not match that of Stanwyck or Bette Davis—held herself back from the abyss of a character’s grimmest or most convoluted aspect. Thus in Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942), the first of her films with Spencer Tracy, she more or less ignores the premise of the romance and, later, marital relationship, to wit, that her (again gorgeous, but calculatedly sexy) Tess Harding manages to enforce her own rules between them by seducing Sam Craig into silence whenever it seems she might not get her own way. Hepburn goes through the motions but never explores the grotesque implications of such contemptuous behavior. Likewise, in The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968), where she plays Eleanor of Aquitaine, when Eleanor instructs her son Richard to seduce his former lover, who happens to be the King of France (“Promise him anything”), for her own advantage in her quarrel with her spouse, England’s King Henry II, Hepburn betrays not the slightest sign that she grasps the line she is delivering, that she knows what she is asking Richard to do. Hepburn rarely courted unpleasantness in the roles she enacted, perhaps a lingering result of her youthful discovery of the body of her brother, whom she adored—an apparent suicide.

Whatever its “softening,” Hepburn’s Mary Stuart is among her greatest performances, perhaps surpassed in her filn career only by her dazzling, uproarious Susan in Howard Hawks’s darkest comedy, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and her staggering, soul-shaking Queen Hecuba in Michael Cacoyannis’s film of Euripedes’ The Trojan Women (1971). Her Mary Stuart is a seamless blend of gracious personality, stirring characterization and intuitive insight. Not until John Huston’s The African Queen fifteen years (and nearly as many films) later would she be so convincing and compelling in a romantic role.

Ford was not pleased with this film, which tanked at the box office; since his relationship with Hepburn bit the dust (in later years Hepburn denied that the two of them had been lovers), Ford may have felt that he compromised its rich historical material in his pursuit of the radiant redhead. Although it is vastly superior to such Fords of the same period as Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and Four Men and a Prayer (1938), Mary of Scotland has taken a lot of hits over the years. No one can deny that Ford’s staging of its few “action scenes” is stagy and clumsy, and the purging of Anderson’s blank verse in Dudley Nichols’ adaptation was probably a mistake; nevertheless, this is an estimable work, mature, engrossing, very moving. Hepburn is nothing short of shattering, and Fredric March is robust and vulnerable as Bothwell—the film’s best performance. Douglas Walton is very good as Darnley, Mary’s namby-pamby weakling of a second husband (Mary and Bothwell, here, escape all suspicion of his murder) and, from the Broadway cast, Moroni Olsen is a hoot as that slimeball Knox, who, some may insist, loomed as a more credible figure than this film suggests. Ford may have been Hollywood’s foremost atheist, but the culture of Irish Catholicism was deep in him, regardless of the absence of his faith.

The final shot is strange and powerful: enrobed in early morning darkness, Mary/Kate ascends to the scaffold to meet her fate, the camera withdrawing and withdrawing to hold her image in the frame. No matter how quickly he wanted to get through with the shoot, John Ford couldn’t let this woman go.

 

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THE ICEMAN COMETH (John Frankenheimer, 1973)

Although Lee Marvin is only moderately effective as Hickey, The Iceman Cometh is a powerful, witheringly complex, brilliantly acted film—the finest achievement of director John Frankenheimer’s career, based on Eugene O’Neill’s greatest play, indeed, the greatest American play ever produced. In the grip of this electrifying work, with its Ibsenian overtones, for four straight hours, I could not even imagine what were my reservations several decades ago when I saw the film for the first time in a movie house. Nor do I believe anymore that Sidney Lumet’s 1960 version, broadcast as part of television’s Play of the Week, is superior. (Both versions are available on DVD.) Frankenheimer’s film is an American masterpiece.
     Traveling salesman Theodore Hickman has lit upon Harry Hope’s drinking establishment for the occasion of what is being celebrated as Hope’s sixtieth birthday. It is the summer of 1912. “Hickey” strikes the others there, residents of the flophouse upstairs from the bar and, mostly, perpetual drunks downstairs, as somehow changed; he isn’t as sociable or as funny as he usually is during his sporadic visits. Hickey himself accounts himself transformed; he is now, he claims, at peace with himself, having faced and discarded his “pipe-dreams.” A parody of Jesus, he has made it his mission to pry loose from their illusions his old friends at Harry Hope’s, including Hope, and especially Larry Slade, the former I.W.W. activist who currently dispenses cynicism and philosophizes impotently among his fellow drunks. From all quarters, Hickey meets increasingly hostile resistance.
     Frankenheimer refrains from showing the sprawling, dingy bar whole; this presentation reflects the fractured, fragmented lives of the characters. Hope’s place suggests a hellish domain, a storage garage for loose ends and dead-ends. Youth and old age, and every age in between, desperately cling to their illusions amidst a fog of despair.
     Three performances are superb: Robert Ryan’s Larry Slade (posthumous acting prizes from the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review), Fredric March’s Harry Hope, whose principal illusion is that he adored his deceased wife (March, the original James Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, came out of retirement to play Hope), and Jeff Bridges’ Don Parritt, who, consumed by guilt involving his mother, attaches himself to Slade for dear life. Lamentably, Slade will not be attached-to.
     Brits, beware! A corner-cutting hour has been deleted from the Frankenheimer DVD available to you at home.

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MAN ON A TIGHTROPE (Elia Kazan, 1953)

The circus of life, where death continually hovers—a rootless or uprooted existence reflecting realities ranging from the status of refugees who were generated by war’s dislocations, to political upheaval and uncertainties, such as behind the Iron Curtain: these and related themes partially account for the plethora of films set around a circus, or employing the circus as metaphor, in the 1950s: among them, The Greatest Show on Earth (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952), Twilight of a Clown (Ingmar Bergman, 1953), La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954), Lola Montès (Max Ophüls, 1955), Trapeze (Carol Reed, 1956). His gripping Man on a Tightrope, one of Elia Kazan’s best films, is another of these notable works.
     Written by Robert E. Sherwood from the novel by Neil Paterson, for which Paterson’s story “International Incident” served as a blueprint, the plot revolves around Cirkus Cernik, a small Czech circus that aims to cross the border to escape into non-Communist Germany in 1952. This fictional group is based on the actual Circus Brumbach, which succeeded in sneaking out of Communist East Germany, animals and all, in 1950 and whose members have been interwoven with the film’s cast of Hollywood actors.
     Chief among these is Fredric March, who plays brilliantly Karel Cernik, the one-time owner of the circus, the property of his family for generations, who as a result of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia has been reduced to managing the circus for the state. No longer is Cernik, a circus clown, supposed to be funny; instead, his performances must embody the Communist Party-line. He is thus driven to engineer the circus’s flight to freedom.
     Cernik must also contend with an unfaithful younger wife and a daughter who is romantically involved with someone of whom he disapproves. This Arthur Millerish melodrama somewhat damages the film, reaching its most embarrassing moment when Cernik slaps wife Zama, who responds that he should have done this much sooner. Oy!. Another problem is that the lyrically explosive Kazan has little talent for the kind of sustained suspenseful adventure that the film requires. Fortunately, his superb black-and-white cinematographer, George Krause, collaborates on images of intense realism bordering on Surrealism, with startling camera angles that analyze relationships within the circus and between the circus and the Communist officials breathing down its neck. Kazan, here, is at the top of his form. He also draws from Richard Boone a splendid portrayal of Krofta, the Communist member of the circus who imperils its escape. One wonders at the extent to which the Cernik-Krofta conflict resonates with Kazan’s own competing loyalties and split political autobiography.
     It had been a year since Kazan’s infamous testimony before the House Un-Anerican Activities Committee, and he is determined to show how evil Soviet-style Communism is in order to justify that testimony. Political evil, alas, has more guises than Kazan was willing to admit to. Regardless, here he made one helluva good film.

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LES MISERABLES (Richard Boleslawski, 1935)

Efficiently condensed by scenarist W. P. Lipscomb from Victor Hugo’s mammoth 1862 novel exposing social injustice, Les Misérables—note the Hollywood hybrid here: the accent, yes, but the upper-case “m”—is a grand, engrossing thing. It is the highest screen attainment of Richard Boleskawski, born Boleslaw Ryszard Srzednicki—a Pole, who trained at the Moscow Art Theater, and who has suffused the film with intense feeling, including religious feeling, that might pass for either Polish or Russian. Early on, the profuse appearances of the Christian cross—whether directly in a sculpture, or indirectly in formations of window lattices, wood beams, shadows, etc.—are strictly associated with Christian suffering, for instance, Jean Valjean’s decade-long ordeal as a galleys prisoner; curiously, Boleslawski seems uninterested in resurrecting this imagery for any aspect of Valjean’s redemption, or even Inspector Javert’s ultimate redemption after a lifetime of hounding Valjean in the name of the law—perhaps feeling that Javert’s suicide denies him any claim to God’s eternal embrace. I hope not. In any case, Boleslawski himself would be dead, of cardiac arrest at 47, in less than two years.
     Valjean’s crime: stealing a loaf of bread so that his sister and her children wouldn’t starve. How all this must have resonated with audiences during the Depression. Indeed, the American public had already warmly embraced an uncredited contemporary version of Hugo’s book, Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
     It is Bishop Bienvenu (Cedric Hardwicke, briefly wonderful), who alone gives Valjean lodgings upon his release from the galleys. The bishop, whose silver Valjean steals, enabling his future, thus provides Valjean his lifelong credo: “Life is to give, not to take.” By dying, Fantine, Cosette’s mother, frees daughter Cosette, whom Valjean raises, for a life of her own.
     France’s year-earlier Raymond Bernard version is beautifully acted by Harry Baur and Charles Vanel as Valjean and Javert. In Boleslawski’s version, Fredric March is a fine, occasionally excellent Valjean, while Charles Laughton is a consistently brilliant Javert. Unlike Bernard’s version, the grown Cosette is played exquisitely here, by Rochelle Hudson.

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ANNA KARENINA (Clarence Brown, 1935)

Greta Garbo, cinema’s greatest actress and most intoxicating beauty, played Anna Karenina twice, both times for Clarence Brown, her favorite director: in 1927, in the silent Love; in 1935, in the talkie, which reclaimed two things: the title of Lev Tolstoi’s novel; Anna’s suicidal end, which a happy ending had replaced for the sake of love. The newly formed New York Film Critics Circle named Garbo its first “best actress.” Hers is both a precise and a fluent performance, one so brilliantly judged that the characterization never submits to soap opera. This was producer David O. Selznick’s penultimate film at M-G-M before Selznick “went independent”; in New York City, his A Tale of Two Cities (directed by Jack Conway and Robert Z. Leonard) was released just two days later, on December 27.
     At 96 minutes, Brown’s film ruthlessly condenses the 900-page novel; playwrights Clemence Dane and S.N. Behrman nonetheless achieved a smooth, polished script, while Salka Viertel deepened the result by providing at least one woman’s viewpoint. Moreover, all hands, but especially Garbo, Brown, cinematographer William H. Daniels and scorer Herbert Stothart, give the film (despite little philosophy) a philosophical air, a melancholy beneath the upper-crust tsarist opulence, a sense of foreboding and fate—the idea that we are puppets of our feelings, which our intelligence or wit helps us to either deny or exaggerate.
     I am presuming that every reader of this blog already knows the story contained in what many (including I) consider the single greatest novel ever written. In any case, married to an ambitious bureaucrat, Anna resists Count Vronsky’s professions of love until she falls in love with him. Karenin, throwing Anna out and forbidding her to see their young son, will not allow social murmurings about her affair to sabotage his career. I was plain wrong, in my review of Julien Duvivier’s Anna Karenina (1948), when I described Basil Rathbone’s Karenin, for Brown, as villainous, unnuanced. It is sympathetic acting, making plain (at least to me now) the range of Karenin’s feelings, including the self-righteous, self-rationalizing ones. Garbo absolutely convinces when she confesses to her husband that he terrifies her and then, shortly after, just as convincingly, shows her bravery by lambasting him for his selfishness and hypocrisy. Unlike Vivien Leigh’s, Garbo’s Anna remains sane; her suicide is the result of her feeling she has lost all other options, including Vronsky’s love and access to her son.
     For me, the most captivating scene comes early on, at a ball, before Anna and Vronsky have become lovers. The mazurka is one of those light group dances where women flit from one partner to the next. (Chester Hale choreographed.) Anna begins the dance with Vronsky; when they are reunited on the dance floor, he tells her: “Our meetings are so brief. The dance, also.” Once she reciprocates Vronsky’s love, almost from the start Anna feels her life slipping away.
     As a lover, Vronsky remains a military man, and one wonders, had he and Anna remained a couple, whether Vronsky might have become Karenin’s mirror-image; already he is self-absorbed. Both characters, note, bear the same name: Aleksei. Fredric March, who plays Vronsky, is never at his best at romance; he is superb, however, in the last scene following Anna’s death, where Vronsky is past icy pride and full of regret. Vronsky is assured that Anna forgave him. “Who knows?” Vronsky replies. “Who knows?”
     The camera has already moved to a framed picture of Anna. Count Vronsky will remain haunted by his memory of her for the rest of his life.

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