The Paramount mountain dissolves to a slate-colored sky pouring a torrential, whistling rain, riven by claws of lightning and rumbling thunder. There’s a crashing fanfare from composer Franz Waxman that sounds magisterial, commanding and insinuating all at once, then descends into a tortured, frantic violin scherzo. Next the names of the three above-the-title stars — Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell — then the title itself. Alias Nick Beal is under way.

Alias Nick Beal is another “supernatural noir“, the subgenre I mentioned in my post on Night Has a Thousand Eyes. It may be the only other example. Of all the movies with supernatural plots, I can’t think of any but those two that dressed their stories so fully in the trappings of film noir. (If you know of any, please speak up; I’ll gladly kick myself for not having thought of them first.) 

Beal came hot on the heels of Night Has a Thousand Eyes for director John Farrow, writer Jonathan Latimer and producer Endre Bohem — so close, in fact (the pictures were released less than five months apart), that I have to believe Beal was being prepared while Night was shooting, and being shot while Night was being readied for release. Without access to Paramount’s detailed records I can’t confirm that, but the two movies are simply too close a match, variations on a theme of frail little humans trapped in a web of which they can see only the dark and shadowy outline. The difference between them — the variation — is this: Night Has a Thousand Eyes speaks of sinister and mysterious forces beyond our understanding; in Alias Nick Beal the sinister mystery is entirely comprehensible, and it has a name — most of us were raised on childhood tales of it — but as adults, our belief in our own sophistication blinds us, makes us willfully refuse to see it until it’s too late.

The screenplay for Alias Nick Beal was by Jonathan Latimer, from an original story by Mindret Lord. Lord’s name isn’t a familiar one even to movie-trivia buffs; he is sometimes misidentified as “Mildred”. In fact, he was born Mindred Loeb in Chicago in 1903. His early years haven’t left much trace in the permanent record, but by the late 1920s he was an aspiring writer and had embarked on a long affair with the opera singer Marguerite Namara, 15 years his senior.

 

In 1934 Lord met an old flame of Namara’s, tenor Hardesty Johnson, and his wife Isabel, daughter of Hamlin Garland, a popular early-20th century writer whose fame would pretty much die with him in 1940. Isabel had ambitions to be a writer like her father, so she and Lord had something in common; by this time he had begun selling stories to the pulps, detective fiction to magazines like Black Mask and tales of horror and the supernatural to Weird Tales and the like (“pot boiling” he called it), and he mentored Isabel on her own writing. They began an affair that eventually finished off his liaison with Marguerite and her marriage to Hardesty. Lord and Isabel were married on December 21, 1936.

Mindret and Isabel collaborated (as “Garland Lord”) on several mystery novels while he continued to boil pots for the pulps; he never really broke into the “slicks”, as they were called, though he did eventually get four short-short stories (fictional anecdotes, really) into The New Yorker in 1942 and ’43. By then he had contributed some sketches to New Faces of 1936 on Broadway, done some script doctoring for a wealthy Park Avenue wannabe-playwright, and picked up work writing for sundry radio series.

 

This got him a foothold in Hollywood (sort of), writing for independent producer W. Lee Wilder (Billy’s older, far less talented brother), who released his movies through Poverty Row’s Republic Pictures. Lord began drinking heavily, his marriage fell apart, he had an affair — though in what order, and which caused what, is anybody’s guess. In 1948 and ’49 he sold two stories to Paramount which became The Sainted Sisters and Nick Beal respectively. He wrote for a few second-string syndicated series in the early years of television, one last C-picture for Wilder, and finally, the script for The Virgin Queen (1955) with Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and Richard Todd as Sir Walter Raleigh. Near the end of that year, Lord committed suicide at 52. It’s not hard to imagine why — his writing career had never really gone anywhere, and he died one day after what would have been his wedding anniversary — but if anybody knows the real reason, or even how he did it, they didn’t leave the information lying around where I could find it.

 

Jonathan Latimer, who turned Lord’s story for Beal into a screenplay, was also born in Chicago and wrote for the detective pulps in the ’30s, but he was another case entirely — a more successful career, a longer life, and death from natural causes at 76 in 1983. Latimer started out as a crime reporter for the Chicago Herald Examiner — and later for the Tribune — where he became personally acquainted with Al Capone, Bugs Moran, and other Chicago underworld celebrities. In the mid-’30s he turned to fiction with a series of hardboiled, semi-comic mysteries featuring private eye Bill Crane.

 

Latimer branched out into non-crime fiction and non-series mysteries. One of the latter, Solomon’s Vineyard (1941) was so violent and sexy it came out only in England; it wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1950 (as The Fifth Grave), and then it was heavily expurgated (Latimer’s original text finally appeared in the States in 1982). It’s a good solid mystery that doesn’t waste a word, but it is violent, with at least a dozen killings (only about half of them offstage), and a surprising amount of hot and kinky sex, especially for 1941. It also has one of the greatest I-dare-you-to-stop-reading opening lines in the history of pulp fiction: “From the way her buttocks looked under the black silk dress, I knew she’d be good in bed.”

 

At a time when The Thin Man had spearheaded a vogue for comedy/mysteries, Universal bought three of Latimer’s Bill Crane books for a short-lived series starring Preston Foster: The Westland Case (from Headed for a Hearse) in 1937 and two more the following year, The Lady in the Morgue and The Last Warning (from The Dead Don’t Care). Those scripts were written by others, but in 1940 Latimer tried his own hand at screenwriting, first contributing the story for Phantom Raiders (with Walter Pidgeon as detective Nick Carter), then in 1941 co-writing the script for Topper Returns.

 

Like many newspapermen accustomed to deadlines, Latimer worked well in Hollywood, and he got some assignments that have aged gracefully among movie lovers: the 1942 remake of The Glass Key with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake; They Won’t Believe Me (’47) with Susan Hayward, Robert Young and Jane Greer; and The Big Clock (’48) with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton. The Big Clock was directed by John Farrow, and Latimer reunited with him for Night Has a Thousand Eyes — then, in ’49, with both Farrow and Milland for Alias Nick Beal. In fact, Latimer worked with Farrow more than with any other director (and Farrow more with him than with any other writer), ten pictures in nine years, and the titles would be among the best on both men’s resumes — there were also Plunder of the Sun, Botany Bay and Back from Eternity.

Like Lord, Latimer also got into television, but at the other end of the food chain, writing for important network shows: Hong Kong, Checkmate, Markham (Ray Milland’s one-season half-hour crime series), and a whopping 31 episodes for the original Perry Mason — that last gig was as high as a writer could go in early-’60s TV. Latimer’s last credit was another top-of-the-heap assignment: a 1972 episode of Columbo guest-starring his old friend Milland.

Alias Nick Beal is arguably the best thing Jonathan Latimer ever wrote, and it’s certainly the absolute pinnacle of Mindret Lord’s rather lackluster career. It takes place in an unnamed big city, one that closely resembles Lord and Latimer’s native Chicago: corrupt, crime-ridden, and ruled by oily political boss Frankie Faulkner (Fred Clark), so secure and arrogant that he doesn’t even bother to conceal his scheming or veil his threats.

However, Faulkner may have met his match in district attorney Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell), a paragon of legal rectitude and civic virtue — in his spare time he helps his friend Rev. Garfield (George Macready) manage an after-school recreation program for boys at risk of delinquency — who is prosecuting Faulkner’s underling Hanson on corruption and racketeering charges, hoping to bring down Faulkner’s organization brick by brick. But Faulkner isn’t that easily dismantled; through crocodile tears he informs the prosecutor that Hanson’s books, which Foster had subpoenaed only that morning, were destroyed in a fire the night before. Foster is stymied, checkmated; he had been careful to make it appear that he wouldn’t seek the books, then had sprung his subpoena at the last moment, just to forestall something like this. But Faulkner was a step ahead of him. Foster’s got to nail Hanson if he wants to clean up the city, and there’s nothing he won’t do to get him.

 

That’s when Foster receives a cryptic summons to a dingy dive down by the waterfront: “If you want to nail Hanson, drop around the China Coast at eight tonight.” The man he meets that night (Ray Milland) is clean-shaven and dapper, impeccably groomed and dressed, cutting a figure entirely at odds with the sqalid little tavern where Foster finds him. His card reads simply: “Nicholas Beal, Agent”. “Agent for what?” asks Foster. Beal grins slightly. “That depends. Possibly for you.”

Beal takes Foster to a nearby building, a rundown, darkened cannery where he presents Foster with the evidence he had sought that very morning — Hanson’s books, saved from the flames after all. Foster hesitates. He can’t take them, he says; he has no warrant. I thought you wanted Hanson, Beal says; here’s your chance. Foster continues to peruse the books. He doesn’t speak but we can imagine his thoughts: Here they are, can I take the chance on losing them again? I can always get a warrent tomorrow. When he looks up, Beal is gone.

Foster decides. He tucks the books under his arm, puts out the light, and makes his way out of the cannery by the beam of a flashlight Beal left behind. In the pitch dark of the outer room, his light startles a rat on a shelf. The rat sqeaks plaintively and stares at Foster, eye to eye. We can almost read the rat’s mind, as clearly as if he were speaking: Welcome to my world.

 

Foster gets his conviction and becomes a hero in the press. He’s still vaguely troubled about his hocus-pocus with the warrant, but shrugs it off. Still, Beal isn’t finished with him. No sooner do representatives of the state’s Independent Party arrive, asking if Foster will allow his name to be placed in nomination for governor, than Beal shows up in his study to collect for services already rendered. But what seems like a sly piece of blackmail takes an odd turn when Beal offers to contribute to his political campaign; he already knows about the overtures from the Independent Party (“I hear things.”).

 

 

 

That night, on the foggy boardwalk outside the China Coast, Beal takes the next step in whatever scheme he has afoot. A down-and-out slattern (Audrey Totter) gives him a come-on, but is taken aback when he knows her name, Donna Allen. He knows her history, too: a couple of years of college, ambitions to be an actress, then seduced and abandoned by an actor she called “Boysey” — who turned out to be married. They fought, he fell down a flight of stairs. “An accident, they said.” How do you know about Boysey, she asks; you a friend of his? “I met him once.”

 

 

 

 

 

Beal leads her to an expensive penthouse apartment, smart and stylish but somehow foreboding and unsettling, with Daliesque frescoes painted on the walls. It’s hers, he says, along with a wardrobe of silks and sables, diamonds and sapphires. She tries to bolt, but the delivery boy is at the door, and everything is just too tempting — and it all has her name on it. “What do I gotta do, murder?” “Just the opposite,” says Beal, “reform work. In a boys’ club.”

 

 

In the next scene Donna has made herself indispensible, organizing the boys’ club office and writing large checks for donations — and coyly flirting with Foster. It’s a scene she’s played often since her days with Boysey, but usually only for cheap drinks, and never with such lavish sets and costumes. Men are all alike, right? Boysey was married and here’s another one; this time she’s wised up, and if Beal wants her to tickle his vanity she’ll play along. Why should she care? 

 

As time goes on Donna will slowly realize that neither Foster nor Beal is the kind of man she thought he was. Neither she nor Foster can see what we see: that Beal is slowly, carefully drawing his net around them both. Every step, beginning with Foster’s compromise on the warrant and Donna’s following Beal from the waterfront to that apartment, calls for just a slight stretch of the conscience, a tiny little disregard of misgivings, moving them off true center by degrees they simply don’t notice.

 

We see other things the characters don’t. Beal’s plans involve conspiracy, duplicity, bribery, double-dealing, seduction and murder. Things come to a head as Beal prepares to spring his trap. He shows up at Donna’s apartment, telling her that Foster is on his way after a fight with his wife. Beal tells her how the conversation will go — what she’s to say, what Foster will answer, what she’s to say to that. She sneers at the melodrama; who would ever spout those cornball lines? Never mind, he says, just remember your part.

 

When Foster arrives their talk runs more or less as Beal said it would. Then, hearing her cue and hardly knowing what to expect, Donna segues into the words Beal gave her — and so does Foster. With growing horror, she tries to stop things, and her words take on a different, more frightening meaning — but they’re still Beal’s words! Try as she might, she can’t not say what Beal told her to. It’s a brilliantly written scene, and brilliantly played by Audrey Totter, the finest five minutes in her career.

 

Donna Allen becomes the first to sense the truth: Nicholas Beal isn’t just some slimy, amoral political operative. He is, in literal fact, the Devil Himself.

 

I’m not spoiling anything here; this isn’t a please-don’t-reveal-the-ending mystery. We’ve tipped to this long before Foster or Donna or Rev. Garfield. Beal knows things before they happen. He can’t stand to be touched. He refuses to read from the Bible, or even touch it. He cold-shoulders Rev. Garfield, who can’t quite place where he’s seen Beal’s face before. (“Did anyone ever paint your portrait?” “Yes, Rembrandt in 1655.”) The beauty of Alias Nick Beal isn’t that Beal’s character is revealed to us in a sudden, shocking whoa-didn’t-see-that-coming revelation. It’s that we can easily believe that the other characters can’t see him for what he is. To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, they see but they do not observe. We’re sitting watching a movie, but they’re living their lives; after all, this is the 20th century, and things like that just don’t happen, do they? But as Rev. Garfield finally says, “Maybe the Devil knows it’s the 20th century too, Joseph.”

 

Foster passes control of his soul to Beal by increments, one step at a time. The first step is both the smallest and the biggest, because once he’s started it gets harder to turn back, easier to go on, until finally he stands bewildered, unable to recognize himself. How did I get here?, he wonders. In a moment of self-knowledge, he realizes: “It’s not Beal, it’s me.”

Naturally, the mainspring of Alias Nick Beal must be Ray Milland’s performance, and he’s superb. His Beal is smooth, quiet, confident, glib. Nothing ruffles him. But don’t try to touch him. “I don’t like to be touched.” He says it simply, almost apologetic, but his meaning is clear: you won’t like what happens when you do something Nick Beal doesn’t like. When Beal once flares in anger, it’s over in an instant and his calm demeanor returns, but the moment is unnerving; though his eyes are angry slits in that moment, we can almost see the fires of Hell banked behind them.

Milland won a well-deserved Oscar for his tour de force in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, but I’m not sure he isn’t even better here — more subdued, certainly, his face often registering only the slightest movement of an eyebrow, a cheek muscle, the corner of his mouth. He’s the master puppeteer with no wasted motion, supremely in control, confident that his puppets will never feel the strings. Milland worked four times with director Farrow (not incidentally, all but one of them written by Jonathan Latimer), and they were an excellent match, never more so than here.

 

Alias Nick Beal is superbly directed, too, by the underrated Farrow, whose name is more familiar now thanks to his daughter Mia’s career than to his own. He was Australian-born in 1904, naturalized American in 1947, twice Oscar-nominated (1942 for directing Wake Island; 1956 for co-writing Around the World in 80 Days, which he won). He was also something of a polymath — author of plays, novels, short stories, a Tahitian-English dictionary and biographies of Thomas More and Father Damien. Besides the Oscar, he was also awarded an honorary Commander of the British Empire (by Queen Elizabeth II) and a Knighthood of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre (by Pope Pius XI). In Nick Beal his hand is firm but not heavy, and he doesn’t overplay it. Scenes move sinuously from one to the next (the black fog of the waterfront becomes the back of Foster’s suit as he steps away from the camera in his study), and the story moves with the slithery grace of a serpent.

 

Notice too the performances of minor characters — Donna’s maid, a railroad depot bartender, the grizzled denizens of the China Coast. Farrow is a director who tends to the details. After all, isn’t that where the Devil is?

 

The phrase “banality of evil” was years in the future when Alias Nick Beal came out, but the theme is on display here. The banality of evil, but also its seductiveness, and the good intentions that pave the road to Hell. Above all, its persistence. You may vanquish the Devil, but he won’t give up; he’ll be back, and he’s patient. Beal tells us as much when he and Foster overhear a sidewalk Salvation Army convert’s testimony: “Glory be! I’ve wrestled the Devil and thrown him. I’ve pinned his shoulders to the mat…” Beal turns ironically to Foster. “I wonder if he knows it’s two falls out of three.”

I ended my last post with the shadow of Jean Harlow’s name on the directory outside the star dressing rooms at the MGM studios. It was a ghostly image; the haunting is considerably more tangible in another new book, Harlow in Hollywood: The Blonde Bombshell in the Glamour Capital, 1928-1937 by Darrell Rooney and Mark A. Vieira, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Harlow’s birth (March 3, 1911). This sleekly sumptuous coffee-table volume does a great job of evoking both “H”s in the title. I can’t help comparing it to the late Ronald Haver’s David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, even at the risk of overpraising Harlow in Hollywood — at least in my own mind, since I consider Haver’s book just about the best single title ever published on Golden Age Hollywood. There never was such a visual and factual feast as that Selznick book, but Harlow in Hollywood is in the same league.

Rooney and Vieira’s text is essentially an artful paraphrase of David Stenn’s Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, which the authors acknowledge right up front as “the definitive biography” of the star. (By the way, now that I’ve checked out Bombshell‘s Amazon page and seen the prices it’s going for, I guess I’d better never let my 1993 first edition out of my sight!)

What really set the new book apart are its visuals — the cascade of pictures (there must be 400 or more) from the authors’ own collections and what they’ve garnered from other sources (duly thanked in the acknowledgments), all dazzlingly arranged by designer Hilary Lentini. The evocative beauty of Lentini’s design extends even to the whimsical endpapers, adapted from a 1937 Starland Map and dotted with “pins” marking locations that were significant in Harlow’s life and career. These endpapers go far to conjure up a cozy, sun-soaked little cluster of everybody-knows-everybody communities — Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Laurel Canyon — that’s a far cry from the cramped, smoggy, seedy melange of urban sprawl, faded glory and retro kitsch that greets visitors to the L.A. Basin today. (Of course, the map probably had more than a touch of gaga fantasy even then.)

If Harlow in Hollywood doesn’t quite match the visual splash of David O. Selznick’s Hollywood, it’s probably because it doesn’t have the Haver book’s riot of eye-popping color. Which is only fitting: Selznick was an early champion of Technicolor and used it when others told him he was a fool to waste the money; but Selznick figured color would pay off in the long run by adding shelf life to his pictures (and he was right).

Not that there isn’t color in Harlow in Hollywood — like these striking Carbro color images taken by George Hurrell in late 1935 or early ’36. These pictures are from her “brownette” period late in her career (nobody knew how late), when MGM sought to placate the Breen Office by softening the erotic edge of her platinum blonde image. It’s not as if they had much choice. Harlow’s hair really had that white-blonde sheen in childhood and adolescence (and she was only 17 when she started in pictures), but every blonde’s hair color deepens and thickens with maturity, and Harlow was no exception. Stringent efforts to retain that platinum blonde look — peroxide, ammonia, Lux flakes — had ravaged her scalp and hair to the point where she was in real danger of going bald. I suspect part of the reason for the Hurrell portraits was to prepare Harlow’s fans for her new look.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But color portraits or no, Harlow was made for black and white. She was made by black and white, too, as this portrait on the set of Bombshell shows — she’s so much more alluring and accessible here, isn’t she? Harlow in Hollywood has picture after picture like this; the authors’ point is that Harlow was endlessly fascinating, and they prove it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are pictures like this one too, more candid shots, away from the controlled atmosphere of the studio with its careful grooming and flattering lighting, its makeup artists and glamour photographers. Here she is in 1936 at the Cocoanut Grove with William Powell…

…and again in court in 1935, seeking a divorce from

her third husband, cinematographer Hal Rosson. Harlow

is still Harlow, still glamourous and photogenic — but

her eyes look sunken and baggy, at least to me. Is it just

the sad wisdom of hindsight, or does Harlow really look

 

like a woman in failing health? Did anybody notice it at

the time? Or did they just put it down to her late hours

and heavy drinking? There was plenty of both. (Sitting

with her in this picture is her mother, the real Jean Harlow

— that is, the one born with the name that 17-year-old

Harlean Carpenter adopted when she registered with

Central Casting. Was that Harlean’s awkward tribute

to the mother who had wanted to be a movie star

more than she ever did? Whatever it was, Harlean

was stuck with her mother’s maiden name

from then on.)

 

 

What would have happened to Harlow if she had lived? Might she have, as some suggest, transferred her comic talent to TV as she slipped into middle age, the way Lucille Ball (five months younger than Harlow) did? Maybe; youth enhanced Harlow’s comic charm but didn’t define it. But the fact is, it wasn’t to be, not because she died young, but because she was probably dying — or at least doomed — before she ever set foot in California. An attack of scarlet fever at 15, probably followed by an undiagnosed kidney infection, had started her on a protracted and undetected course of kidney failure that finished her off 11 years later. There were no transplants or dialysis machines in those days; when your kidneys gave out that was it, you were a goner. The pressure of work and pleasing her mother, three failed marriages (one terminated by her husband’s grisly suicide), two abortions, an appendectomy, oral surgery and alcoholism may have sapped her constitution and will to live and brought the end that much sooner, but odds are Jean Harlow was never going to make it to the Age of Television no matter what.

 

Harlow in Hollywood covers all that — you can scarcely ignore it — but it’s no scandal-wallow. If the book wallows in anything, it’s in the glamour of Harlow’s Hollywood — the movies, the premieres, the mansions, the restaurants and night clubs. With things like that it’s not wallowing, it’s luxuriance. And this is a luxuriant book, richly printed on fine glossy paper in sparkling tones of silvery black and white. But I’ll close with another color image, this one a 2009 recreation of Farewell to Earth, the portrait that Harlow’s grieving mother commissioned after her death. On her right hand you can glimpse her 85-carat star sapphire ring, a 1936 Christmas present from William Powell, the love of Harlow’s life who wouldn’t marry her. 

 

The painting embodies Mother Jean’s maudlin grief. Shunned by the industry that never liked her very much even as they adored her daughter, she made her homes a succession of shrines to her “Baby” and died in obscurity in 1958. Nobody knows what ever happened to the painting (this image was digitally colorized from a photo), or to that star sapphire ring. 

 

But the portrait also captures something of Harlow’s beauty, grace, charm and intelligence, as does the whole book. At the list price of $50 it would be a bargain. At the $31.50 Amazon is asking, no movie buff can afford to be without it.

It seems wrong not to say something about
the passing of Elizabeth Taylor, but what is
there that hasn’t already been said? There
are only a handful of performers who
managed to move from childhood stardom
to adult careers and make it stick — Dean
Stockwell, Mickey Rooney, Jackie Cooper,
Roddy McDowall (there are also Jodie
Foster and Kurt Russell, but they were
only child actors, not stars). Even in
that small company, Taylor may be
unique: she rose to the top as a kid
and stayed there to the very end;
in fact, in a way, she even redefined
what “the top” actually was.

She didn’t make much of an impression
in her first picture, There’s One Born 
Every Minute. But then, neither did
the picture itself, a piddling little Hugh
Herbert programmer for Universal
that not even Variety, who covered
just about everything, bothered to
review. Elizabeth (she hated being
called Liz, so I won’t) was no more
than ten, and vying for attention with
Hugh Herbert in three roles (the
mind boggles!). Who know, maybe
she was hoping no one would notice
her. In later life, she always had a
pretty sensitive b.s.-meter; and it
might well have been on line even
as early as that.

In any case, her second picture was another
kettle of fish — or rather, another bowl of kibble:
Lassie Come Home. I wasn’t there at the time,
but I have it on good authority that people
came out of theaters asking two questions:
Wasn’t that dog amazing? and Who on earth
is that little girl? (“A pretty moppet,” beamed
Variety.) By that time (LCH was released in
 December ’43) Elizabeth was going on
twelve. So what was different?
Was it puberty?

I think it was Technicolor. Taylor’s creamy
complexion, raven hair and (most particularly)
violet eyes came across in color as they couldn’t
in black and white. Uncredited (and unnoticed)
bits in Jane Eyre and The White Cliffs of Dover
only go to reinforce the point. Then it was back
to Technicolor for…

…National Velvet. Pauline Kael once said that this was “the high point in Elizabeth Taylor’s acting career,” and I think she’s right. At any rate, beginning with this movie, Elizabeth would never go unnoticed again.

She grew up fast at MGM, and it wasn’t long before her beauty stood out even in black and white. She’s 16 in the Clarence Sinclair Bull portrait that leads off this post…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…15 here, touching up a water color (or pretending to)

in the Hollywood Hills. By 1949, at the ripe old age

of 17, she was playing the wife of 38-year-old

Robert Taylor in Conspirator.

 

None of these, of course, are what most people

think of when they hear Elizabeth Taylor’s name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is more like it, right? Suddenly, Last Summer may not be the hot seller on Amazon or in Netflix queues that it was in 1959 theaters, but this was one of the iconic movie images of the 1950s, right up there with Carroll Baker sucking her thumb in Baby Doll, or Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity. (The fact that Catherine Holly, Taylor’s character, told psychiatrist Montgomery Clift that the bathing suit made her look “almost nude” when it got wet no doubt stoked the fantasies of millions of red-blooded American men. Did any of them see the movie over and over, hoping that this time she would really go into the water?) Elizabeth is 27 here, on the way to the third of her five Oscar nominations (she won twice), and she’s been officially grown up since she and Clift (and director George Stevens’s camera) were more intimately involved in A Place in the Sun in 1951.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For most people who remember those days, Elizabeth Taylor’s life and career tend to boil down to (1) everything before Cleopatra and (2) everything after. It’s impossible for people today, jaded by a nonstop parade of showbiz media circuses — from Madonna to Britney to Lindsay to Charlie — even to imagine what a riveting can’t-look-away spectacle that trainwreck of a production was. You just had to be there — and by “there” I mean anywhere on planet Earth from 1959 to 1963. You couldn’t get away from it. Elizabeth’s brush with death-by-pneumonia in a London hospital was only the beginning, shutting down production until the English weather, never exactly balmy, turned so crummy that everybody had to start all over from day (and dollar) one in Rome. It wasn’t hype or hysteria: Elizabeth nearly checked out then and there; her tracheotomy scar is clearly visible in this picture of her in costume and makeup, looking weary and numb waiting for director Joe Mankiewicz to call action.

 

“Everything before and after Cleopatra” really means everything before and after Richard Burton, and I’ll bet that’s how Taylor tended to think of it herself. Burton accounted for two of her eight marriages (and she for two of his five), ten years the first time and ten months the second. If Burton had lived past 1984, they might have had a third go-round (ten weeks?), and a fourth (ten days?); they were clearly the loves of each other’s lives, even if they couldn’t hold it together and often seemed to bring out the worst in each other. To people in the 1960s it looked like the love affair of the century. To me it still does, and I don’t think I’m alone.

 

 

 

Here’s another iconic picture, this one from real life, though it could almost be a scene from their movie The V.I.P.s. Judging from the faces and clothes, that year (1963) is probably about right, give or take a couple. They seem to be trying to inch their way toward some anonymous airport VIP lounge, jostled by a combination of entourage and paparazzi, a breed of “journalist” that their affair and marriage virtually (albeit unwillingly) created. She looks resigned, he looks harried. (And who’s that guy in the center background, and why is he the only one smiling?)

 

With all Taylor’s heartaches, sorrows and physical ailments (the latter beginning with a fall from a horse during National Velvet), it’s remarkable in a way that she made it to 79. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t do it, or Judy Garland. Elizabeth Taylor outlived them, and nearly all her leading men, from Roddy McDowall and Robert Taylor through Montgomery Clift and Van Johnson to Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. Did she thrive? I don’t know. But she survived, and prevailed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love this photo by Otto Dyar, and I want to close with it. It’s from the set of National Velvet, obviously. Elizabeth’s blissful love of horses permeates the picture, blesses and ennobles and exalts it. I believe that this 12-year-old child-woman looks more genuinely and serenely happy here than in any other picture I’ve ever seen of her, at any age. This is how I want to remember her.

“”Silent movies are the only art form to be discovered, embraced and discarded by a single generation.”

I wish I could claim credit for that keen insight, or failing that, could remember where I read it. (Was it in Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound? I’ll have to check.) Part of the keenness is the perception that what we now call “silent movies” (at the time nobody called them silent; they were just movies) are in fact a distinct art form. They’re not merely movies before they figured how to do the sound part, because for at least five years before The Jazz Singer, they knew how to do the sound. It’s just that nobody, including audiences, figured it was really needed — until the personality of Al Jolson showed them something ordinary movies couldn’t do. (And by the way, it wasn’t The Jazz Singer that nailed the coffin shut on the silent era, it was Jolson’s next part-talkie The Singing Fool. But that’s another story.)

I know some people are turned off by silent movies. I can’t say I have much respect for that attitude — to me it’s like refusing to watch Citizen Kane or Casablanca because they’re in black and white, or because all the sound comes out of one speaker — but I understand where it’s coming from. Silent movies demand your undivided attention; you can’t take your eyes from the screen for a nanosecond or you’ll lose the thread of a story that’s being conveyed in purely visual terms. King Vidor used to say that you couldn’t buy popcorn, soft drinks or candy at movie theaters before the coming of sound for that very reason.

The folks at the Kansas Silent Film Festival in Topeka understand and appreciate this, and they celebrate it — so I’m here to celebrate them.

In a way, the rediscovery of silent movies is a byproduct of home video. Historians like Kevin Brownlow and William K. Everson had been carrying the torch for years, with good results. But with home video, it was finally possible for anyone to watch a silent movie with an orchestral accompaniment, and without seeing it sped up from 16-18 frames per second to 24, which could make even the best silent look a little comical if you weren’t able to make allowances (and even if you were, it only added to the effort of watching). At last we could see The Big Parade or Greed or Ben-Hur exactly as audiences saw them in 1925; all that was missing was the experience of a 20- or 30-foot screen and a large audience in a 1,000-seat auditorium. Festivals like the KSFF supply that.

I’m ruefully surprised that it took me 14 years to learn about the KSFF, but now that I’ve found it I plan to be back. It’s free to the public (donations gratefully accepted), and the public responds. Not only in Topeka, but all over the country: at the banquet before Saturday night’s screening of 7th Heaven there were people who hailed from California (yours truly), Colorado, New Hampshire, New York — and those were just the ones who spoke up. Most heartening was the number of young people in the audience at all the screenings. I don’t mean just “younger than dirt,” I mean college, high school and elementary school age.