Forbidden Divas: Oh, Doctor, I’m in Trouble

Yesterday’s piece from Chris Schneider malfunctioned slightly going into WordPress and lost a couple of paragraphs. They’re restored now. Today’s piece is also from a regular Guest Shadowplayer, David Melville Wingrove, who takes us through Loretta Young’s stations of the cross in William Dieterle’s THE ACCUSED.

FORBIDDEN DIVAS

Oh, Doctor, I’m in Trouble

or

Confessions of a Psychothymiac Cutie

“You hit me right in my inferiority complex.”

• Robert Cummings to Loretta Young, The Accused

When first we see Loretta Young in The Accused (1949) she looks as if she’s impersonating Humphrey Bogart. A huge slouching fedora hat hangs low over her beautiful face; a vast baggy trench-coat envelops her dainty ballerina’s physique. She is staggering away slowly, haltingly, from the scene of a killing. It is a crime where she was both perpetrator and victim. A cute but undeniably psychotic young man has tried to rape her in his car. Her instinctive and natural response was to grab a handy metal object and bludgeon him to death. Then she got a bucket, filled his lungs with water and sent his corpse hurtling over a cliff and down to the sea and rocks below.

There is crime passionel and there is cool premeditated murder. This one is both. What makes it worse is the fact Loretta knows that. She is Doctor Wilma Tuttle, a rising professor of psychology at a small but prestigious California college. Not many Hollywood stars can play an academic convincingly and Loretta is one of those very few. (Just try to imagine Joan Crawford in the role. Or rather, do yourself a favour and don’t.) Her looks here are strictly Movie Star Frump. Stark and mannishly tailored suits, hair wound so tightly in a bun that it looks like an excrescence of her skull. But she still has those delicate cheekbones, those haunting and luminous eyes. When she takes a jittery puff on a cigarette or anxiously grasps the receiver of a telephone, we are riveted by her exquisitely long and sinuous fingers.

But then Loretta Young was always famed for her contradictions. Tales abounded of both her fierce Roman Catholic piety and her voracious appetite for sexual adventure. “Every time Loretta sins she builds a church,” went the joke. “That’s why there are so many churches in Hollywood.” In the 30s she gave birth in secret to an illegitimate child by her co-star Clark Gable and then made a public show of ‘adopting’ this poor motherless girl. When the child grew up to have freakishly large ears, she challenged her mother as to why she had never told her the truth. “How could I?” replied the star. “You are a walking mortal sin.” Both on and off screen, Loretta Young played the image of a perfect lady. But in her most effective movie roles, that image is seldom if ever the full story.

Like many academic high-flyers, Doctor Tuttle is somewhat less than sophisticated outside her chosen and desperately narrow field of expertise. Hailing originally from Kansas, she has a childlike fear of the ocean and has no idea what an abalone is until someone explains it to her. That someone just happens to be a handsome but unruly male student who flirts with her blatantly in class. The professor is in no way blind to his appeal. In fact, his appeal is spelled out hilariously by the fact that the actor who plays him is called Douglas Dick. Undeniably easy on the eye – and perhaps not wholly without talent – this actor was hampered by more than his impossible name. He seemed unable to appear in any movie without being murdered in the first act. His other role of note was as the victim of the gay killers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.

Once his professor has unwittingly killed him, her chief concern is how to cover up the crime. In a decision only a movie star would make, she goes out and buys a new and far more stylish wardrobe and lets her hair tumble loose about her shoulders in long and luxuriant curls. That is to make sure that no witnesses (if there were any) will ever to connect her with the killing but also to make sure that Loretta Young’s adoring fans get their money’s worth in terms of glamour. Her best or, at least, her most eye-catching outfit is a classic Edith Head atrocity. A sharply tailored black suit with white gloves, a white lace collar and twin sprays of white lilac on either side of her black hat. The psychology in The Accused is necessarily Freudian in tone. Hence it is imperative that our heroine be visibly torn between poles of Light and Dark.

Her incipient schizophrenia carries over into every aspect of the movie. Not one but two conflicting love interests seem to materialise out of nowhere. Robert Cummings is a dashing lawyer who was the dead boy’s legal guardian. Wendell Corey is a tenacious cop who investigates the case. The tailoring of their suits is alarmingly alike; the styling of their hair is all but identical. Of course, Cummings is handsome and Corey is not but apart from that they might be identical twins. They can be slotted neatly into the Freudian grooves of Eros and Thanatos. One has the power to seduce our sexually uptight heroine and, eventually, to screw her senseless. The other has the power to send her (however unwillingly) to the electric chair. In case you think this is an accident, please note the director is the veteran German Expressionist William Dieterle. Note also that Expressionism did not die. It just moved to California where the light was better.

It seems distinctly cruel when Cummings drags Loretta to her first boxing match. Predictably, the young man being pummelled into unconsciousness is a dead ringer for the boy she has but lately beaten to death. (Dieterle even superimposes one actor’s face over the other, just in case anyone in the audience has stepped out for popcorn and might otherwise miss the point.) This barbaric spectacle reduces her to an ever-so-ladylike fit of the vapours. We know it cannot be long until The Truth comes out. Her young victim describes his killer, oops, sorry, professor in his end of term exam as ‘a psychothymiac cutie.’ I confess I have no idea what a psychothymiac is but I do think Loretta plays one superbly. It is critical cliché that nobody can play a bad girl like a good girl and nobody can play a good girl like a bad one. Unless you are Loretta Young, in which case it is anybody’s guess.

David Melville

Forbidden Divas: Many a Rainy Night in Brooklyn

David Melville Wingrove returns!

FORBIDDEN DIVAS

MANY A RAINY NIGHT IN BROOKLYN

“Did you ever see a crocodile yawn?”

– Lynne Overman, Her Jungle Love

Has there ever been a film so bad that a halfway decent volcanic eruption could not put it right? “That is clearly a metaphysical speculation,” writes Oscar Wilde, “and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference to the actual facts of life, as we know them.” But then neither has anything else in Her Jungle Love (1938). So the question still strikes me as entirely valid. The climax of this movie is not just any old eruption. It brings with it a cataclysmic mudslide of ravenous man-eating crocodiles – who slither their way into a crumbling pagan temple and set about devouring much of the cast. I should add that the cast of this movie is quite a small one. At no point are the hungry reptiles in any danger from overeating.

But where is this temple and what is anybody doing inside it? It all starts when a pilot crash-lands his plane somewhere in the Malay Archipelago. Two other pilots head off in search of him and manage – with remarkable efficiency – to crash their own plane and go missing on the exact same tropic isle. (The islands of the Malay Archipelago number in the thousands, so this really is quite a slick bit of navigation.) These two pilots are Ray Milland and his annoying comic sidekick Lynne Overman. Both actors were popular stars at Paramount Pictures in the 30s. That gives us all the reassurance we need that they will not be allowed to go missing for too long.

The island seems at first to be deserted. But of course it is not. It is inhabited by a winsome jungle maiden named Tura. She is played by Dorothy Lamour in a gallon of fake tan and a daringly skimpy line of sarongs designed by Edith Head. She does not live entirely alone in this paradise. She frolics through the vibrant green palm trees by the dazzling blue Technicolor lagoon along with Gaga – a lovably mischievous chimpanzee – and Meewa – a cute and frisky lion cub. There is no sign of any adult lions or, indeed, of any other primates on this island. We can only assume that a third plane loaded with circus animals must have crash-landed somewhere in the vicinity.

A former Miss New Orleans of 1931 and future co-star of the Road movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour was one of those Hollywood icons who never even pretended to be an actress. Her assets were her lithe and curvaceous physique (not everyone looks good in a sarong) as well as her voluptuous Technicolor lips and her dark and sultry bedroom eyes. Her dialogue in Her Jungle Love consists almost entirely of ugga-wugga gibberish, which makes it one of her more successful dramatic roles. Even strumming on a ukulele – as she is required to do in one scene – appears to strain her acting skills to breaking point.

But alas, there is room for only one Queen on this or any other tropic isle. That role is reserved for J Carrol Naish as Kuaka, a villainous Malay prince who rules over a tribe of head-hunters that inhabit a nearby cove. His followers seem to be exclusively male; all of them are muscular and bronzed and clad in the skimpiest of loincloths. Kuaka himself wafts about in an iridescent peacock-green kaftan and with turban to match. He sports on one finger an emerald so splendiferously large and vulgar that Elizabeth Taylor might reject it as just a shade too ostentatious. He demonstrates his ascendancy by wearing even more eye make-up than Tura and speaks invariably in a low and sibilant hiss.

You have been wondering what had happened to that first missing pilot. The answer, to put it plainly, is Kuaka. He keeps the boy for quite a suspiciously long time as his private prisoner. Then he trusses him up like a mummy and sacrifices him to the Crocodile God. The rotter even hypnotises poor Tura and forces her to take part in the ceremony. He does at least dress her up in the film’s most memorable outfit: a long and trailing white cape with a headdress of white egret feathers and seashells. This man may be a savage and proud of it. But he does at least have some idea how to accessorise.

Need I add that in the course of this blood-soaked ritual, Dorothy Lamour gets hypnotised and shoved into a basket and impaled with giant spears and resurrected and brought back to life as if by magic and none of it alters her facial expression one iota? She looks only mildly perturbed when Kuaka suggests getting married, so the two of them may rule over the island together. Even a girl who has spent most of her life in a coconut tree must surely realise this is what is described in sophisticated circles as a mariage blanc. It seems quite wildly unlikely that sex could ever be a part of the deal.

By this time, Dorothy has fallen in love with Ray because…well, because he’s there and somebody has to. His pal, meanwhile, has formed what appears to be a tender inter-species ménage à trois with her animal friends. (A scene where the chimp kisses Lynne Overman is by some measure the raunchiest bit of the movie.) It goes without saying that Ray has an overpoweringly dreary fiancée (Dorothy Howe) who nags her henpecked father into taking her off in his yacht to search for him. We start to worry that she might actually find him. I mean, where on earth is that Crocodile God when he is really needed?

In the litany of sublime absurdities that make up the script, my favourite is the way Ray and Lynne manage to crash their plane without in any way damaging their portable gramophone. According to Lynne, this machine kept him company on “many a rainy night in Brooklyn.” Her Jungle Love may not be appreciably better or worse than The Jungle Princess (1936) or Typhoon (1940) or Aloma of the South Seas (1941) or any of Lamour’s umpteen other sarong pictures. Still, it is a well-nigh flawless antidote to rainy nights in Brooklyn.

David Melville

Pg. 17 #6

Shouts of “Shut the dampers!” and then “Draw the fires!” came from somewhere. Fireman George Beauchamp worked at fever pitch as the sea flooded in from the bunker door and up through the floor plates. In five minutes it was waist deep — black and slick with grease from the machinery. The air was heavy with steam. Fireman Beauchamp never did see who shouted the welcome words, “That will do!” He was too relieved to care as he scurried up the ladder for the last time.

*

On the way up, however, distinction without flamboyance should be your credo. And don’t be trapped by your own desire to follow the crowd by wearing the last scream of fashion. Subdue that urge to buy what merchants call a ‘hot number.’ This is the dress or suit that is copied in every price level and winds up in the closet of every third girl in the office.

*

Then you drive over to Suspension Bridge, and divide your misery between the chances of smashing down two hundred feet into the river below, and the chances of having the railway-train overhead smashing down onto you. Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but, mixed together, they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.

*

“Hey,” came a voice from the door of his office, “you look like a bear caught with his nose in a beehive.”

*

“Enh.” Johnny waded in again, but the tangle was no fun. The Judas fought with a strange unsureness, like a man who is off his feed. When Johnny closed in on him he clawed frantically, baring sharp teeth like a cornered rabbit. Disgusted, Johnny flung him in a corner.

*

“If that,” he said triumphantly, “is not cast porcelain I will extract all my own teeth without an anaesthetic and swallow them. What do you say, Benton?”

*

‘Now,’ he said, when I was seated, ‘my great day is at hand! And with a smile that freed and relaxed all the long-frozen wrinkles on his face, he declared proudly, ‘I was fired last night.’

*

Selections from the page seventeens from seven books found randomly at my bedside.

A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord; A Day at Niagara, from The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain; How to Dress for Success, by Edith Head with Joe Hyams; The Minds of Billy Milligan, by Daniel Keyes; Judas Bomb, by Kit Reed, from the collection Best S/F Six, edited by Edmund Crispin; In the Teeth of the Evidence, by Dorothy L. Sayers; The Day of the Dragon, by Guy Endore, from the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum.

I was excited to re-acquire the Monster Museum, a book I owned as a kid but never read. Somehow I was disappointed that the pages weren’t as crammed with monster as the front cover. Odd, because there is a genuine monster in every tale, no metaphorical cop-outs. The Guy Endore one is about DRAGONS!