Forbidden Divas: Jungle Red

David Melville Wingrove returns with a Forbidden Divas piece about one of my favourites…

FORBIDDEN DIVAS

JUNGLE RED

“I do not need wine to set my blood on fire.”

• Paulette Goddard, Sins of Jezebel

Fans of bad movies cherish Bible epics for being the one entirely disreputable movie genre. To make the Best Bible Epic of All Time may not be an act of any special distinction. To put it bluntly, how much competition could there be? But to make the Worst Bible Epic of All Time is a truly spectacular achievement. The field is crowded and fiercely competitive and movies like The Prodigal (1955) and The Silver Chalice (1954) and Solomon and Sheba (1959) all have their fanatical adherents. But criticising these movies for their wooden acting, risible dialogue or lack of dramatic coherence is a bit like criticising a KFC Bargain Bucket for its lack of nutritional value. No product is a disaster simply because it does not do something it has never set out to do. To achieve a Platonic ideal of sheer and unadulterated awfulness, a Bible epic needs to be quite a lot worse than that.

Sins of Jezebel (1953) is the work of one Reginald Le Borg, an auteur who made his name in the 40s with classics like Jungle Woman (1944) and The Mummy’s Ghost (1945). It stars the irresistible Paulette Goddard as the infamously wicked pagan queen who tried to turn Israel away from the One True God and supplant Him with the blood-soaked worship of Baal. There is something less than terrifying about Baal in this movie. His effigies resemble very early models for ET (1982) and his followers show their devotion by lifting their arms to heaven and indulging in some truly excruciating bouts of interpretive dance. It is hard to believe in depravity when we never see anything that looks the tiniest bit depraved. We hear a rumour early on that the queen “paints her nails with the blood of sacrificial victims.” We never do find out if she does that or not. But one must admit her nails are a commendably bright shade of red.

Paulette Goddard was a movie star for the best part of two decades, but not even her closest friends ever pretended she could act. She was famous for her slightly hard-boiled glamour and her ineffably colourful off-screen love life. A fun-loving Jewish girl from Great Neck, Long Island (her real name was Marion Levy) she started off in the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies. In the 30s, she made her way to Hollywood and wound up marrying Charlie Chaplin and co-starring in Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). Her neighbour David O Selznick came perilously close to casting her as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) – but only briefly, when he despaired of finding anyone better. Divorced from Chaplin, she went on to marry such showbiz intellectuals as Burgess Meredith and Erich Maria Remarque. Her alleged motto in life was never to sleep with a man until he gave her diamonds. She was said to carry a suitcase packed with diamonds on all her travels, to remind herself and others just how well this system worked.

In short, Paulette Goddard embodied the kind of fragile and artificial movie glamour that made Lana Turner look like Meryl Streep. She got by in her better roles – as an 18^th century adventuress in Kitty (1945) or a Gay 90s adventuress in An Ideal Husband (1947) – on a sort of wry and ironical amusement. She looked, as Oscar Wilde wrote, like “an édition de luxe of a wicked French novel.” It was no surprise that she became Andy Warhol’s favourite escort at parties in the 60s. She was, in essence, a Warhol Superstar before that term was even coined. But it was a very great surprise indeed that she gave a realistic, touching and genuinely heartfelt performance as an ageing beauty in an Italian film, The Time of Indifference (1964), just before she bowed out of movies for good.

So what of Paulette as the evil Queen Jezebel? Her Majesty has barely arrived in Judaea when she is cheating on her fiancé King Ahab with a hunky Hebrew general (George Nader). Her bridegroom passes out drunk on the wedding night, but not before she has made him promise to build a temple to the heathen god Baal. This lady is a hybrid of all the sinister dictator’s wives who have wielded a malevolent power from behind the throne. Eva Perón, Imelda Marcos, Elena Ceauşescu – only with deeper villainy and sharper fashion sense thrown in.  “What are you, a man or a piece of dirt?” she sneers when Ahab hesitates to massacre his recalcitrant subjects who refuse to worship Baal. Not even her favoured boy-toy escapes from her tyranny unscathed. He wrestles with his conscience when he is forced to put believers in the True God to death. “In peace or in battle, people get hurt,” he explains to his fellow Israelites. You can’t make an omelette, etc…

What is truly fascinating about Sins of Jezebel is the fact it is an epic made on a ridiculously small budget. The soldiers wear helmets that look like kitchen pots spray-painted gold. The vases that adorn the royal chambers seem to have been stolen from somebody’s back garden in the San Fernando Valley. At every state banquet (there is not even the faintest hope of an orgy) the tables are laden with identical bowls of wax fruit. One might imagine these came from the studio’s front office – but the independent producers who made this movie were unlikely to have an office of any sort. To his credit, the resourceful Le Borg circumvents the lack of art direction through a strategic deployment of draperies. Every time Queen Jezebel seduces someone, the camera cuts away from the clinch to a swatch of brightly coloured fabric, rippling away. This effect reminds us eerily of the Kenneth Anger film Puce Moment (1949) and the whole production is redolent of one of those underground movies that drag queens in the 60s used to make in memory of Maria Montez.

Yet however drastically its producers may have skimped, Sins of Jezebel still seems to run out of money well before the end. Long stretches of it are not seen, but narrated by a sententious middle-aged Sunday school teacher in a badly fitting suit. The more the war between Good and Evil heats up – and the number of warriors needed rises above a dozen – the more this narrator tends to take over. Watching him light the seven candles on a menorah – and put them out again, a scene or so later – is dramatically thrilling, I grant you. But the fall of Babylon in Intolerance (1916) or the parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments (1956) it most definitely ain’t. It is the sheer lavish folly of Bible epics that audiences across the world respond to. So a Bible epic that fails even at that is a rare and precious object indeed.

If this Queen Jezebel really does paint her nails with blood…that can only be because blood was cheaper than varnish.

David Melville

Forbidden Divas: The White Orchid Type

David Melville Wingrove is back, with the perfect Forbidden Diva for this historical moment --

FORBIDDEN DIVAS

THE WHITE ORCHID TYPE

“I can’t face an unknown future with an un-powdered nose.”

– Barbara Stanwyck, The Other Love

What do you write about at a time when life as we choose to call it has been forcibly put on hold? Most of us today are made to live in our own private cells of suspended animation – in a void, an absence, a dream space. We are forced to be and not to do, to feel and not to act. We are in a glass room that lacks the usual walls or ceiling or floor. A smooth and unvarying expanse of crystal on all sides, it is fully transparent yet wholly impossible to break. Through it we can see and hear and speak, but we cannot touch. Can any film approximate a life that none of us have ever lived before? How do you make a film about the act of waiting? How do you deny motion when all a motion picture camera ever wants to do is to move?

Barbara Stanwyck at the start of The Other Love (1947) is forced – against all her instincts and all her will – to call a halt to her life. Here she is not the tough-talking dame of her other movies, the “high-ridin’ woman with a whip” who terrorises the Wild West with Forty Guns (1957), the gal so butch she makes John Wayne look like Liberace or Paul Lynde. Here she is an avatar of suffering nobility, who might be incarnated – in your average film of the 40s – by Greer Garson or Loretta Young. She is a lady concert pianist, glamorous and successful yet at the same time incurably lonely. She has no choice but to put her career on pause when she falls fatally ill with TB. She checks into a plush sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, the sort that looks more like a luxury hotel with a few X-ray machines stashed away in one room.

It seems a mystical, almost otherworldly realm. Snow-capped mountains dream away in the distance, while long white muslin curtains waft gently back and forth in the alpine breeze. (One sure test of the skill of a director is the way he handles curtains; the Hungarian émigré Andre de Toth passes this test with a splendour few others have ever matched.) She is taken immediately with her handsome doctor (David Niven) who tells her that all activity will henceforth be forbidden. Her one goal must be to rest, relax and recuperate. “You must try and think of yourself as being in a deep sleep,” he tells her. “Before you know it, the darkness will be gone.” He even forbids her to play the piano. Her response to all this is remarkably docile. She places herself, with serene resignation, in his hands and in the hands of Fate. It is largely a question of which one chooses to grab her first.

On her first night at the clinic, she finds a spray of fresh white orchids has been delivered to her room. She assumes they must come from the doctor. She has had a glance around the dining room and concluded that none of her fellow patients is “the white orchid type.” Then she finds out these orchids are a standing order – from a man who ‘left’ the sanatorium six months ago to a woman who ‘left’ it only last night. She realises she is in receipt of flowers sent by a dead man to a dead woman. It is a concept so morbid it smacks of outright necrophilia. The music by Miklos Rozsa goes into a lyrical frenzy surpassing even his Oscar-winning score for Spellbound (1945). She throws herself ever deeper – metaphorically speaking – into the arms of her doctor. Ah, but all may not be quite as it appears…

On her arrival, the doctor forbids her to smoke and takes her cigarette lighter – monogrammed with her initials KD for Karen Duncan – away for safe keeping. (We may be glad it is not engraved with Barbara Stanwyck’s own initials, BS.) One day she breaks into his private sanctum, opens a drawer and finds a whole trove of cigarette lighters that were left behind by previous (and deceased) lady patients. She starts to suspect, as we do, that her doctor’s methods are a fairly serious violation of the Hippocratic Oath. Is he in the habit of fucking his patients until they get better? Or – and this sounds a lot more likely – of fucking his patients until they die? This story, which is allegedly by Erich Maria Remarque, is coming more and more to resemble The Magic Mountain as rewritten by Mills & Boon.

Hell, of course, hath no fury that is quite like Barbara Stanwyck scorned. No matter if she is at death’s door. She takes up with a dashing racing-car driver (Richard Conte) who just happens to be driving round that particular mountain. In defiance of the best medical advice, he whisks her off to Monte Carlo. She sits up late at the gaming tables, where a sexy croupier (Gilbert Roland) gives her smouldering glances over a big stack of chips. She even gets to attend a party on board a yacht thrown by Natalie Shafer, famous to viewers of a certain age as the fruity and snooty Mrs Howell on the 60s TV sitcom Gilligan’s Island. A life-threatening illness seems a small price to pay for such an honour. But this jet-set debauchery swiftly goes pear-shaped. Babs ends up in the most perilous situation a consumptive heroine can face – wandering about Monte Carlo in the rain, clad in white mink and chiffon and minus an umbrella!

Speaking of outfits, the wardrobe that Edith Head designed for The Other Love must surely have been le dernier cri in tubercular chic. Most memorable is a long white Grecian shift with a black diamante sunburst at the waist, which our heroine wears to dine at the sanatorium. (Yes, this is the sort of hospital where the patients dress for dinner.) Memorable too, and for all the wrong reasons, is a truly hideous spangled sweater with Christmas trees and reindeer crawling across it. Like any great star, Barbara Stanwyck is impervious to embarrassment – but this looks like something a butch lady detective in a Scandi crime drama might wear in a festive mood. The star would not play an overt lesbian role until A Walk on the Wild Side (1962) but there she had Capucine as motivation.

It becomes apparent all too soon how this ill-starred flirtation with ‘normal’ life can lead only to doom. The one hope is to go back to that mountain-top clinic, submit to the ministrations of the doctor and do her best to wait this illness out. To seal herself away from life until the world, by an unimagined miracle, comes right again. Barbara Stanwyck does what all of us are constrained to do at this time. (Please note sparkly sweaters are optional and, also, they will not necessarily help.) Will she find her true happiness up there on that mountain? The Other Love is a movie; hence it is several shades more optimistic than the TV news. All we know is that strangely serene white realm – those vast stretches of crystal air, where everything is visible and nothing can ever be touched – is where she needs to be at that moment.

David Melville

Bickel Victory

Captures the mood chez mois round about now.

As these things do at Shadowplay, John Cromwell Week is running on into a fortnight or so…

I’m indebted to Nicky Smith for the information that it was John Cromwell who advised a young actor named Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel that he might do better under the name Fredric March. The name, and the actor, were subsequently so successful that they appeared together in two Cromwell films, VICTORY and SO ENDS OUR NIGHT. I admired both.

VICTORY adapts Joseph Conrad’s novel, previously filmed by Maurice Tourneur and later a dream project for Richard Lester (scripted by Pinter).

In The Hollywood Professionals Volume 5, Cromwell is quoted by author Kingsley Canham as expressing dissatisfaction with VICTORY, since he couldn’t get the performance he wanted out of chief villain Sir Cedric Hardwicke and he couldn’t find a cockney actor to play his “secretary,” thus was forced to resort to Jerome Cowan, a good all-rounder but no Londoner. In fact, to my eyes, Hardwicke appears excellent — a modern, minimalist take on malignancy. His sinister sunglasses, a touch borrowed from Ben Deeley in the silent version (Conrad makes no mention of them) make his face (even) more skull-like than usual.

If Cromwell was dissatisfied with his baddies, he surely must have been pleased with March and particularly Betty Field, who produces a remarkably credible English accent which really wasn’t called for, but which sounds very sweet. You may know her from OF MICE AND MEN, but this is an unrecognizably different characterisation. It’s essential that we care about this couple despite their age difference and the brevity of their acquaintance. March is so gentle and Field so vulnerable… Cromwell assists with the same direct-address camera angles he used in OF HUMAN BONDAGE, letting the audience inhabit each character in turn.

Also: Sig Rumann as the oily Schomberg, perfect if unimaginative type-casting as a sneaky blowhard. He doesn’t have a beard to point in this one, but his chin threatens to go off all on its own.

SO ENDS OUR NIGHT is a tale of stateless refugees in pre-war Europe, from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque. It suffers from a structural feature easier to make work in a book: a divided protagonist. A very young Glenn Ford gets most of the screen time, pursuing Margaret Sullavan (practically compulsory casting in Remarque adaptations, it seems), but March keeps popping up and taking the narrative away with him. He’s a more compelling actor and he gets Erich Von Stroheim and Frances Dee to interact with, but it has the effect of deforming the narrative.

Although my copies of both movies are pretty rotten, it’s just possible to appreciate the contribution of William Cameron Menzies to the latter film — as production designer, he did far more than plan sets, he sketched every composition, somewhat usurping Cromwell’s role with the director’s grateful cooperation. The film was a low-budget one — too depressing a story to excite Hollywood enthusiasm, even at the start of the war — and Menzies’ careful planning allowed miracles to be achieved.

Another Menzies-designed Cromwell flick, MADE FOR EACH OTHER (1939), is available in pristine form. Despite starring James Stewart and Carole Lombard, it’s pretty bad — two-thirds painfully predictable sitcom schtick (admittedly, they hadn’t had decades of domestic television comedy to wear out this kind of thing yet) followed by a mind-bogglingly inappropriate action climax. As a slight recompense, it does offer Louise Beavers (Mae West’s grape-peeler-in-chief, Beulah) playing an intelligent and capable woman, which she rarely got to do. Beavers would turn up very briefly in Cromwell’s late production, THE GODDESS, demonstrating his long memory.

After an hour devoted to Stewart’s struggle to raise a family and get on in his law firm (as boss, Charles Coburn plays an intransigent patriarch just as he did in the superior IN NAME ONLY), the movie abruptly swerves into lunatic melodrama, as the Stewart-Lombard baby gets sick and an experimental vaccine must be flown at once, overnight in a torrential storm, from Salt Lake City. Selznick, the presiding lunatic in this whole affair, throws resources at this totally left-field ending, and Menzies provides dazzling visual accompaniment. It’s like I Love Lucy suddenly decided to climax with the third act of DIE HARD. Madness.