As a rule, Cinedrome doesn’t concern itself with the contemporary movie scene, or with any movie made after, say, 1964 or so (that being the year to which I more or less arbitrarily date the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age). But rules are for breaking, after all, and I last broke that one in February 2019, when I wrote that Mary Poppins Returns was manifestly the best and most enduring movie of 2018 (when I bought the Blu-ray in early ’19, I told the twenty-something Target clerk who rang it up, “It’s the only movie from last year that your great-grandchildren will know.”) I used that observation to segue into a discussion of the long shadow of Walt Disney. My original plan was to follow up with a second post about the contentious relationship between author P.L. Travers and Disney’s Bill Walsh, Don Da Gradi and the Sherman Brothers in crafting the script, with possibly a sidebar discussion of 2013’s bucket of enjoyable hogwash Saving Mr. Banks, which purported to tell the same story. But in reading up on it, I found the querulous, intransigent Ms. Travers such churlish and unpleasant company that I dropped the idea early on, and that follow-up post (“Mary Poppins: Enter the Dragon”) never materialized. 

Well, that was then, this is now, and I’m breaking that rule again to discuss another contemporary movie and another long shadow. The movie is Mank, directed by David Fincher from a script by his father Jack, and the shadow belongs to Citizen Kane (1941). The younger Fincher appears to have undertaken Mank as a tribute to his father, who died in 2003 (the movie is dedicated to his memory). Besides that, it fits into the intermittent vogue for making movies about the making of movies — that is, about the making of specific movies. It’s a sub-genre that dates back at least as far as 1980’s TV movie The Scarlett O’Hara War, in which 55-year-old Tony Curtis played the 35-year-old David O. Selznick beating the bushes to find a leading lady for Gone With the Wind. The vogue has cropped up from time to time ever since; examples include the aforementioned Saving Mr. Banks and 2012’s Hitchcock, about the making of Psycho. Even Citizen Kane‘s production has been done before, in RKO 281 (1999), with Liev Schreiber as Orson Welles and James Cromwell as William Randolph Hearst.

Mank covers ground similar to RKO 281, but concentrating not on Welles (played by Tom Burke as a drive-by cameo) but on co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman). In the spring of 1940, after hashing out with Welles a rough outline of what would become Citizen Kane, Mankiewicz was dispatched to a distraction-free exile in Victorville, in the middle of California’s Mojave Desert, to crank out a first draft. He was encased in a half-body cast after thrice-breaking his leg in September ’39 in an auto accident en route to New York. He had just been fired from MGM and was headed east to beg work from friends, having burned too many bridges in Hollywood; his convalescence put the kibosh on that, but it led to the job with Welles.

Accompanying Mankiewicz to Victorville was a German nurse (named “Fräulein Frieda” in Mank and played by Monika Grossman); an English secretary, Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), whose last name would be used for Charles Foster Kane’s second wife; and Welles’s former producer John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who had had a violent falling-out with the Boy Genius but was coaxed back for this assignment at Mankiewicz’s request. Mank covers the twelve weeks the group spent writing, editing, and (in Mankiewicz’s case) recuperating in Victorville, with flashbacks to Herman’s feckless, self-destructive career in Hollywood to that time. 

 

As luck would have it, the theatrical-and-streaming release of Mank followed close on the heels of my reading Sydney Ladensohn Stern’s definitive dual biography The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics. Ms. Stern’s subject, of course, is not only Herman J. Mankiewicz but his kid brother Joseph L., their literary ambitions and cinematic achievements. Both spent their lives hungry for the approval of their college professor father, who always seemed to feel his sons were wasting their abilities by working in movies. She makes a convincing case that Herman’s accomplishments arguably surpassed those of “Pop”, and that Joe’s undeniably surpassed them both, yet neither quite managed (if only in their own eyes) to live up to Pop’s expectations.

The Brothers Mankiewicz was published just over a year ago, much too late for Ms. Stern’s research and insights to have benefited Fincher père when he wrote Mank, or Fincher fils when he filmed it, but in plenty of time to pique our interest in their movie — at least it piqued mine — and to let us compare it with the historical record.

The impetus for this post was an email from my friend Jean in Spokane, Washington, who asked me what I thought of it. She said she had a “fairly middle of the road reaction to it overall”; she “did find it a bit long” but was fascinated by “the way it presents the characters — the Mankiewiczes, Mayer, Thalberg, Hearst et al.” and was particularly impressed by Amanda Seyfried’s performance as Marion Davies. She also spoke well of Tom Burke as Welles. I told her that no, I hadn’t seen Mank yet, but I was looking forward to it, especially now that I’d read Sydney Stern’s book — twice: once to myself, then again to my uncle.

Speaking of people playing Orson Welles in movies [I wrote her], have you by any chance seen Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008)? I urge you to give it a look; it’s a modest masterpiece. It’s based on a 2003 novel by Robert Kaplow; Zac Efron plays this high school kid in 1937 who stumbles into a sort of internship with the Mercury Theatre and works on Orson Welles’s modern-dress Fascist-themed production of Julius Caesar. Welles is played by one Christian McKay, and he’s absolutely uncanny. Should have won an Academy Award, but like most people who deserve Oscars, he wasn’t even nominated; besides, it was 2008, and that was the year they decided to give it to Heath Ledger for being dead. The movie is a brilliant portrait of Welles at a time when his career was still rocketing upward, with the sky seemingly the limit, and Welles himself was like an unstoppable force of nature, by turns inspiring and insufferable, but always Herculean and awe-inspiring. Also, it’s probably as close as we’ll ever get to feeling the impact of that Caesar (scenes from which were, I understand, painstakingly researched and recreated). It’s also brilliantly cast; McKay is actually just first among equals. This is all the more impressive in that there are only three major characters who are fictitious, played by Efron, Claire Danes and Zoe Kazan. Just about everybody else in the cast is not only historical, but familiar from countless movies – Joseph Cotten, Martin Gabel, John Houseman, John Hoyt, Norman Lloyd, George Coulouris, Les Tremayne. All of them perfect, especially a fellow named James Tupper as Joseph Cotten – I mean, how would you go about even looking for the ideal Joseph Cotten? So kudos to Lucy Bevan, the casting director (casting directors are often unsung heroes of movies, and never more so than here). (And by the way, in case you didn’t notice, dear old Norman Lloyd is still with us, bless his heart, having turned 106 exactly one month ago; continued long life to him, say I.) (UPDATE 6/20/21: Norman Lloyd passed away on May 11, 2021 at age 106.)

And so it was, with the memory of Me and Orson Welles fairly fresh in my mind, that I sat down a couple of nights later to watch Mank on Netflix. What follows it what I wrote to Jean a few days after that.

*                         *                         *

Hi Jean —

I watched Mank the other night, and I’ve spent the last couple of days mulling over what to tell you about it, and I finally decided what the hell, I might as well cut to the chase.

I detested it. I found it to be a pompous, overstuffed, bloviating gasbag of a movie, a comically dumb-ass parade of falsehoods great and small. I’ll start with the great ones – which, paradoxically, are the least important. By “great” I mean the movie as a chronicle of the writing of Citizen Kane. Bullcrap from first frame to last. I hardly know where to begin with its tin-eared idiocies, but a few more-or-less random thoughts:

Marion Davies went to her grave insisting that she never saw Citizen Kane, and while I’m not sure I believe that, it was her story and she stuck to it to the end. In any case, the idea that she would have driven out to Victorville to sit on the porch critiquing the fine points of Mankiewicz’s script before shooting even started is just plain stupid.

Also, somewhere along the line the movie goes off onto a completely irrelevant tangent about Upton Sinclair’s 1934 campaign for governor of California, and the fake newsreels MGM made to undermine him. (This may be why you found it “a bit long”; cutting this wild goose chase could have saved half an hour to 45 minutes.) Herman Mankiewicz had nothing to do with any of that, and none of that had anything to do with writing Citizen Kane. I don’t know why it was even there (honestly, by that time my attention had already begun to wander), but it appeared to me that the movie was suggesting that Mankiewicz somehow undertook Kane as revenge against Hearst for spearheading the torpedoing of Sinclair’s campaign, and for helping drive Mankiewicz’s pal Shelly Metcalf to suicide out of shame over his part in it. Bollocks, bollocks, and bollocks. To begin with, “Shelly Metcalf” never existed, and nobody in Hollywood cared that Upton Sinclair lost the election or that MGM’s “newsreels” had anything to do with it. Certainly nobody killed themselves out of guilt over it — that’s a daydream of 21st century leftists.

At one point Mankiewicz tells Marion Davies, in one of their soulful moonlight chats on the grounds at San Simeon (itself a silly invention), that L.B. Mayer loathes Sinclair because Sinclair wrote that he “took a bribe to look the other way so a rival could buy MGM.” Another crock. The movie doesn’t say who this “rival” was, but it may be a reference to William Fox, who in the late 1920s did indeed embark on a project to buy every studio in Hollywood, intending to monopolize the business. (Adolph Zukor at Paramount had tried something similar in the late 1910s, and Thomas Edison before him. Monopoly-building has always been a tempting pastime in the movie business, and such efforts continue to this day.) Fox started by aiming big and, yes, he did try to buy MGM. He came pretty close, too — but far from looking the other way, Mayer (and Thalberg) fought doggedly against the deal. Almost to no avail; Fox came very near to pulling it off. Then, in the summer of 1929, Fox was in a horrible automobile accident that damn near killed him. He was months recuperating, and just as he was getting up and around again, the stock market crashed, taking all his credit with it. Fox was overextended, creditors pounced, and when the dust cleared he was ruined. By late 1930 he was out of the movie business forever (he lived on until 1952). He didn’t buy MGM – or rather, he did, in a way, but when the chips were down he didn’t have the cash to close the deal, and Mayer’s job at the studio was saved. I don’t know what Upton Sinclair may have written (he did write a book, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, published in 1933), and Mayer, a conservative Republican, may well have loathed Sinclair. But Sinclair wrote nothing about any bribe because there wasn’t one.

There’s hardly a detail too minor for the movie to go out of its way to get wrong. Herman Mankiewicz had a mustache in 1940. Marion Davies was sweet and well-loved, but she drank too much and, having retired from the screen in 1937, she was puffy and tending to overweight by 1939; also, she stuttered. As for Rita Alexander, no Englishwoman then, or Englishman either, would have used the word “shitty” in mixed company, even if they did think aircraft carriers were “a shitty idea” (which nobody did). That word was a pure Americanism – and for that matter, even in America few women would have said it in those days. The road accident that broke Mankiewicz’s leg happened not because a letter fluttered out of his convertible with the top down, but because Tommy Phipps, who was driving, lost control of the car in the rain on Route 66. The Mankiewicz brothers never called each other “Hermie” and “Joey”, and nobody on Planet Earth was dumb enough to call William Randolph Hearst “Willie”, even behind his back in a soundproof room.

But honestly, none of that is really important; in fact, it’s all beside the point. I mean, if you want to know about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, you don’t watch John Sturges’s 1957 movie, or even John Ford’s My Darling Clementine; nor do you go to The Adventures of Robin Hood for insights about Medieval England in the reign of Richard I (or for that matter, to Shakespeare about Richard III). You certainly don’t sit through Lawrence of Arabia, your butt going permanently numb, if you want to know anything about T.E. Lawrence. So the fact that Mank falsifies the writing of Citizen Kane and the career of Herman J. Mankiewicz beyond any semblance of the actual events, is not what matters. The salient fact about Mank is simply that it’s a lousy movie.

I can’t really fault the actors, except that the roles they’re shoved into are unplayable and none of them seems to have complained about it. At a minimum, they do struggle bravely with dialogue that positively bristles with name-dropping howlers:

“Mark my words, The Wizard of Oz will sink that studio.”

 

“Well, you know most everyone here. Mr. Kaufman…” “‘George’ is fine, kid.” “…Mr. Perelman…” “Do you prefer Sidney or S.J.?”

 

“Aimee Semple McPherson says you’re a godless commie, Upton!”

 

“We all want to welcome the Thalbergs back from Irving’s long convalescence in Europe…”

 

“L.B., this is my brother Joe.” “Nice to meet you, Joseph, I’m Louis Mayer.” (As if Mayer would find it necessary to introduce himself to someone in his own office!)

 

“You all know Jo von Sternberg…”

 

“I love Lowell Thomas’s voice. I sat across from him at the Brown Derby once.”

 

“How is Marie Antoinette coming along?” “Norma is a nervous wreck.”

 

“That’s Herman Mankiewicz. He wrote one of our Lon Chaneys.”

 

“I know you, we met at John Gilbert’s birthday party; you’re Herman Mankiewicz…You fractured Wally Beery’s wrist Indian wrestling.”

There’s hardly a minute without such low-camp groaners. I’d love to go on, but you get the idea; the script is a chortler’s paradise.

The look of the movie is flat and murky. Not “evocative” or “atmospheric”, just dark and indistinct. It was shot in something called “Hi-Dynamic Range”, whatever the hell that is. Faces, even architectural details, are lost in shadows or merge into background darkness. The cinematography, credited to someone named Erik Messerschmidt, is perfectly atrocious. It’s obvious Messerschmidt didn’t light the film for black and white, he lit it for color and shot it that way, then just leached the color out, as if that’s the same thing. You light a subject differently for black and white than you do for color, a fact that they used to teach you in the first ten minutes of Photography 101. Either Mr. Messerschmidt cut class that day or he’s merely incompetent (that’s my vote). Either way, he’s in well over his head here, and I intend to remember that name.

Late in the movie, I think at the climax (such as it was), there was a long scene in the “Refectory” at San Simeon (although in Messerschmidt’s hands it just looked like a rather well-furnished cave). The scene seemed to be terribly important; anyhow, it had Gary Oldman going tooth-and-nail for his second Oscar. But by that time the movie had completely lost me and I was no longer even pretending to pay attention; I just sat there rolling my eyes and making that wrist-rotating gesture that is the universal signal for let’s-wind-this-thing-up-already. (I couldn’t help remembering something Pauline Kael wrote in one of her reviews: “Sitting in the darkened theater, I kept listening for snorts, but every time I heard one I could feel the breath on my hands.”) Somewhere in this seemingly-terribly-important scene, Mankiewicz puked and made his famous wisecrack about the white wine coming up with the fish (which actually happened at the home of Arthur Hornblow Jr.), but that’s really all I remember. I was just marking time, waiting for this ridiculous, fraudulent movie to be over. And then…finally…it was.

So for what it’s worth, that’s my reaction to Mank, a silly and terrible movie where not a scene, not a minute, not a second, not a frame has the ring of truth – plus it’s ugly to look at, and it’s more trouble trying to peer through the stygian gloom than it’s worth. It’s 131 minutes I’ll never get back, but on the whole I might well have frittered the time away on something almost as useless, so no great harm done. Still, having gotten it out of the way, I now dismiss it from my mind forever, and I intend never to give it another moment’s thought.

On the other hand, I can’t wait to watch Me and Orson Welles again. Now that’s how it’s done.

All for now; write when you can.

Jim

 

 

This isn’t the way we usually picture Olivia de Havilland — so naturally it’s one of my favorite photographs of her. This image is reproduced in Robert Matzen’s lavishly illustrated dual study Errol & Olivia: Ego & Obsession in Golden Era Hollywood. Robert’s aim in publishing this pose, along with others from the same photo session, was to refute the assertion of a 1978 biographer that Olivia was “always a lady [but] never sexy”. Well, mission accomplished, says I. “Never sexy”? Ha! Not much.

 

 

For those who may find that view of Olivia a trifle, ahem, disconcerting, here’s another one from the same sitting. She’s upright this time — less overtly wanton, more watchful and appraising. But she’s still clad in nothing but garlands of strategically-placed flowers — quite literally, la dame aux camelias.  These shots were taken by Warner Bros. staff photographer Scotty Welbourne in the summer of 1940, around the time she turned 24. She looks less like Maid Marian or Melanie Wilkes than like Dorothy Lamour in one of her South Seas sarong romances. (Thank you, Scotty Welbourne.)

Olivia left us two weeks ago at the age of 104, making her the world’s longest-lived movie star. In that, she edged out Kirk Douglas, who passed away in February, two months after turning 103. And speaking of those two — it’s odd, isn’t it, to think of Olivia de Havilland and Kirk Douglas as almost exact contemporaries. We tend to think of them as belonging to different generations — which, in point of fact, they did. Douglas got his first Oscar nomination the same year de Havilland got her last (she won, he didn’t). He made his first movie at 29 and became a star at 32; by 32 she’d been a star for fourteen years. And just to put a little cherry on top of the Odd-Isn’t-It Sundae, both of them were brought into movies by Hal B. Wallis — Olivia at Warner Bros., Kirk at Paramount. That Wallis fellow did have an eye for talent.

Strictly speaking, though, the first eye for talent to which we are indebted for Olivia de Havilland belonged to somebody else. In fact, we’re indebted to a whole series of improbable events for the fact that she didn’t live out her life as an obscure schoolteacher whom nobody but her own students had ever heard of. Born in Tokyo in 1916 to an English patent attorney and his wife, a former actress and opera singer, she was two-and-a-half when her mother persuaded her father to move the family to England for the sake of Olivia and her baby sister Joan. They got as far as San Francisco, then the family fell apart. Olivia came down with tonsillitis, Joan with pneumonia (both life-threatening afflictions in those pre-antibiotic days), and their father ran out on them all, returning to Tokyo and the Japanese housekeeper he’d been fooling around with (and whom he later married). Mother de Havilland settled permanently in California with her girls, eventually marrying George M. Fontaine, a manager for Hale Bros. Department Store in San Jose (thus providing a nom de screen for sister Joan when she followed Olivia into movies).

A precocious student with an artistic bent, Olivia caught the acting bug as a teenager, making her debut at 16 playing Lewis Carroll’s Alice for the Saratoga Community Players. Her stepfather, a real petty tyrant, disapproved, and he tried putting his foot down after she was cast in a school production of Pride and Prejudice. None of this acting nonsense, he decreed, not if she wanted to live under his roof — only to learn the lesson others would learn when they tried pushing Olivia de Havilland around: She moved in with a family friend, and the show (and Olivia) went on.

She graduated from Los Gatos High School in 1934 with a scholarship to Mills College in the fall. But first she was cast as Puck in a Saratoga Players production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And wouldn’t you know it, that same summer the great Austrian director Max Reinhardt was coming to California to stage Midsummer (his favorite play) at the Hollywood Bowl, Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, and the San Francisco Opera House. And so it was that one of Reinhardt’s assistants, surveying the turf for the Maestro and beating the bush for ensemble talent, stumbled upon 17-year-old Olivia in the hinterlands of Saratoga. Whoever he was (possibly Felix Weissberger, Reinhardt’s credited assistant on the Hollywood Bowl program), he offered her a job carrying a candle in Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding procession, and as second understudy for the role of Hermia.

Second understudy. Second. Understudy. A dead-end gig if there ever was one. No doubt she was expecting nothing more than a little excitement, a brush with the Reinhardt greatness, and some nifty memories to take with her when she started college in the fall. But wonder of wonders, just a week before opening night at the Bowl, Reinhardt’s Hermia (Gloria Stuart) and her first understudy (Jean Rouverol) both left the company. And Olivia, just turned 18, went on as Hermia, on such short notice that they didn’t even get her name straight in the program (“de Havelland”).

She never made it to Mills College (at least not until 2018, when they awarded her an honorary degree). Hal Wallis caught the Hollywood Bowl engagement of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he talked Jack Warner into approaching Reinhardt about putting it on film, Reinhardt insisted that Warners cast Olivia in the movie, and Wallis and Henry Blanke (Midsummer‘s line producer) had the good sense to offer her a five-year contract. (Olivia wavered briefly — she still had this idea she wanted to be a teacher — but the money was good for 1934, and she still had the bug, so she signed.)

 

 

It was as simple — and as quick — as that. One day, Olivia de Havilland is this kid fresh out of high school, doing one last show before knuckling down to college in the fall to become an English teacher. Then whoooooosh! — she’s starring for Max-Freakin’-Reinhardt at the Hollywood Bowl. Then whoooooosh! again — and she’s Warner Bros.’ hot new contract player. That kind of thing happens in corny showbiz movies, not in real life.

 

 

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the first movie Olivia made, but it wasn’t her first one to hit theaters. While Midsummer took shape in the cutting room and got a slow publicity build-up to an October ’35 release, Warner Bros. wasted no time getting their money’s worth out of her. They didn’t shunt her off into supporting “trainer wheel” roles, either. On the contrary, they made her a leading lady to some of the studio’s biggest stars. By age 19, she had dealt with Joe E. Brown’s incessant excuses as Alibi Ike (above), and been double-teamed by Pat O’Brien and James Cagney (below) in The Irish in Us. By the time Midsummer finally opened, she was no longer a lucky unknown promoted out of obscurity; she was an established Warner Bros. star-in-training.

 

Her next picture completed her training program. Sometimes, becoming a star is a matter of being teamed with the right co-star. No disrespect to Joe E. Brown or Pat O’Brien, but they weren’t a good match for Olivia, nor she for them, and those experiments wouldn’t be repeated. (She would be teamed once more with Cagney in 1941’s The Strawberry Blonde, to good effect.) Then seemingly out of nowhere came this son of a Tasmanian biology professor.

Unlike Olivia, Warner contract player Errol Flynn did get shunted off into trainer wheel parts — a dead body in The Case of the Curious Bride, one of Warren William’s Perry Mason mysteries; three minutes on screen and nine lines in Don’t Bet on Blondes, a screwball comedy also starring Warren William.

Then Warner Bros. decided to bring back the swashbuckler. When they saw the success that United Artists had in 1934 with the British actor Robert Donat as The Count of Monte Cristo, they decided the time was right to dust off Rafael Sabatini’s pirate novel Captain Blood, one of the properties they acquired when they absorbed the Vitagraph Company in 1925. Warners even signed Donat for the lead — but between Donat’s chronic asthma and the fact that he didn’t much like America anyway, he wound up bowing out (Monte Cristo would remain his only Hollywood picture). Jack Warner and Hal Wallis bandied names for a while: Leslie Howard, Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, Brian Aherne, Ian Hunter — and George Brent, of all people (thank God nothing came of that bright idea). Finally, based on a couple of good screen tests and a hunch (Hal Wallis’s eye for talent again), they decided to take a chance and promote Errol overnight from corpse-cum-bit-player to leading man.

And for the haughty English lady whose path crosses Peter Blood’s, with romantic and adventurous consequences for both of them, Warner and Wallis (after floating a trial balloon to W.R. Hearst for Marion Davies) decided to team Errol Flynn with Olivia de Havilland.

Now before we go on, let’s pause to consider how Captain Blood might have turned out with Robert Donat and Marion Davies. Fortunately, we were spared that. Instead of Donat and Davies, we got Captain Blood with Errol and Olivia, and it made stars of them both. In eight pictures together, they shared a reserved grace that provided a good complement each for the other. Not to mention an erotic chemistry so strong that in those few pictures where their characters don’t end up together — like The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936) and Four’s a Crowd (1938) — something seems distinctly out of whack.

Errol and Olivia reached their apotheosis in 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood — not surprising, since that was pretty much an apotheosis for everyone involved, one of the most intoxicatingly flawless movies ever made. Olivia herself didn’t know it for over twenty years; she felt no affinity for Maid Marian, and when director William Keighley was fired and replaced with Michael Curtiz — well, she felt no affinity for Curtiz either. With no confidence in Curtiz or in her own performance, she couldn’t bring herself to see the picture in 1938. Finally, one Saturday in the autumn of 1959, at a loss for some way to amuse her son Benjamin, 10, and daughter Gisèle, 3, she took them to see Robin Hood at a theater near their Paris home. It was a revelation. “I had no idea it was so good,” she recalled. “I thought, good gracious, it’s a classic, it really is a classic! When we made those films we had no idea what we were making, that we were making the best of their kind.”

By that time Olivia and Errol had been estranged for over fifteen years, for some reason that both of them seem to have taken to their graves. In that time they had seen each other only once. Depending on which account you read, it may have been at a charity ball for the costumers’ union in 1957, or maybe at the wrap party for her picture The Proud Rebel in 1958. Either she was disconcerted by this disheveled, staring stranger, or he planted a kiss on the back of her neck and she spun around and slapped him. In any case, she didn’t recognize this puffy, bleary-eyed drunk. “Do I know you?”

“It’s Errol…” She later recalled that she actually said, “Errol who?”

Now, sitting in that Paris cinema with her children, those days of their intimate friendship (which by all accounts had never been more than that) came flooding back. She and the kids sat through the picture twice, then she went home and wrote Errol: “If you haven’t seen the film recently, run it. You will be so proud of it, so glad that you were Robin Hood.” Then she had second thoughts. The letter was awfully sentimental; perhaps she shouldn’t send it. So she didn’t. A few weeks later she got a phone call from a French journalist who warned her he had “some very sad news.” Errol Flynn was dead; would she care to make a statement?

Years later, she said: “I wish I had sent that letter. It would have pleased him after all those years, but I didn’t.”

 

About the time her friendship with Flynn fell by the wayside, in the early 1940s, she was also reaching the end of her rope with Warner Bros. In 1936, in the afterglow of Captain Blood, the studio had offered her a new contract, seven years instead of five, and at a higher weekly salary. Still, it seemed as if Jack L. Warner couldn’t picture her as anything but the damsel in an Errol Flynn adventure movie. It finally began to dawn on Olivia that her best roles — or at least her most personally satisfying — had been on loan-out to other studios. First it had been to Selznick International to play Melanie in Gone With the Wind. Olivia had really wanted that one, and Selznick had really wanted her. But Jack Warner wouldn’t have it — maybe because Selznick had shot down his idea of lending Bette Davis and Errol Flynn for Scarlett and Rhett, maybe just because he enjoyed showing whose name was on the water tower. Anyhow, as all the world knows, J.L. relented in the end — but only because Olivia and his wife Ann double-teamed him. Olivia got to sink her teeth into her first death scene — and came away with her first Oscar nomination. (She lost — as the world also knows — to Hattie McDaniel.)

 

Next — two years and several damsels later — it was Hold Back the Dawn over at Paramount. Olivia played Emmy Brown, a naïve schoolteacher on a field trip to Tijuana who gets swept off her feet by Charles Boyer as a scheming Romanian refugee seeking to enter the U.S. by — well, by marrying some naïve pushover like Emmy, then dumping her once he’s inside the border. Olivia got her second Oscar nomination, and her second loss.

This one no doubt stung a bit more than losing to Hattie McDaniel in ’39. Also nominated in 1941 was sister Joan Fontaine for Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion. It was the first time acting sisters had been nominated against each other — it would happen only once more, with Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave in 1966 (both lost) — and it was the race everyone was following. Joan won.

 

What to say about Olivia and Joan? Their relationship was…complicated. Here are two views of them, as teenagers at a Saratoga garden party, and striking a sporting may-the-best-gal-win pose at the Academy Awards Banquet for 1941 (before any of the winners were announced). In the Saratoga picture they look like conjoined twins, fused at the back and fated never to look in the same direction. It’s an apt metaphor for the most notorious sibling rivalry in Hollywood history.

Surely it didn’t help that they were born only fifteen months apart, making them more like competing twins than anything else. Moreover, they seem to have grown up in a Rashomon universe. Olivia remembered playing big sister and loving it; Joan would climb into bed with her, she recalled, and “put her little head on my shoulder and ask me to tell her a story.” Joan’s recollection differed: “I remember not one act of kindness from Olivia all through my childhood.”

It does seem that Joan went out of her way to compete. She showed no interest in acting until, after living a year or two in Japan with their father and his second wife, she came home in 1934 to find Olivia appearing in Midsummer in San Francisco and on her way to Hollywood. As Olivia told it, Joan’s mantra became “I want to do what you’re doing.” Olivia urged her to finish high school, become a debutante, even a leader in San Francisco society, but Joan refused. As Olivia remembered Joan’s resolve, it was never “I want to be an actress,” or even “I want to be a movie star.” It was always “I want to do what you are doing.”

For her part, Joan remembered only her sister’s petty resentments. “I got married first, got an Academy Award first, had a child first…” True, Joan did get married first — but then, her first husband was Brian Aherne, Olivia’s ex-boyfriend. That might have stuck in Big Sister’s craw. And as for getting the Oscar first — well, Alfred Hitchcock always insisted that it was he and not Joan who created her performance in Suspicion, cobbling together reactions, thoughts, and subtexts in the cutting room that weren’t in evidence on the set. Now we all know that Joan’s talents were (to put it kindly) more modest than Olivia’s. So if Olivia got a little miffed that Joan skated to the winner’s circle on Hitch’s editing tricks while she, Olivia, had done some real acting in Hold Back the Dawn… Well, personally, I’ll cut her a little slack. And “had a child first”? Now Joan is just gloating.

Over the years the sisters — protesting a bit too much, perhaps — would sometimes pose for photos to show that things were just fine between them. They were always burying the hatchet, and always remembering where they left it. The “final schism”, as Joan phrased it, seems to have come with their mother’s terminal illness in 1975. Joan, on tour in Cactus Flower, felt slighted at being excluded from end-of-life treatment decisions; worse, she felt Olivia was dilatory in letting her know when the end was near, so she was still on the road when Mummy breathed her last. At the memorial service, Joan refused to speak to her older sister. Three years later, in her autobiography, Joan, like a volcano that would not stop, spewed sixty years’ worth of pent-up hostility — prompted, perhaps, by still-tender wounds about their mother. In an interview promoting the book she said, “You can divorce your sister as well as your husbands. I don’t see her and I don’t intend to.” In public, Olivia maintained a lofty silence; privately she took to calling Joan the Dragon Lady. Joan titled her memoir No Bed of Roses. Olivia dubbed it No Shred of Truth. 

Olivia eventually got her own Oscar, of course. Two of them, in fact, and both at Paramount, the studio that had borrowed her for Hold Back the Dawn. First, in 1946, came To Each His Own. Olivia played an unwed mother who, when her lover is killed in World War I, is forced to give up her baby to be adopted by an old frenemy, then to watch from afar as the boy grows up, thinking of her only as a fussy and rather pathetic family friend. It was, in Oscar historian Robert Osborne’s apt phrase, “a Tiffany tear-jerker”. In the movie’s final scene, when the boy, now grown to manhood, finally gets it through his head why “Aunt Jody” has always been so nice to him, and says to her, “May I have this dance…Mother?” — the look on Olivia’s face is enough to reduce a bronze statue to helpless sobs.

Then three years later came The Heiress, from the play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz based on Henry James’s novel Washington Square. As James’s timid, insecure heroine beset with, on one hand, a father whose pretended solicitude masks a withering contempt, and on the other, an ardent suitor who may only be after her money, Olivia gave perhaps her finest performance (although her turn as a mental patient in 1948’s The Snake Pit would be up there as well; she was nominated for that one too). So Joan may boast of winning her Oscar first, but Olivia matched her, and raised her one. Not only that, but Olivia (like Joan) earned her awards working for A-list directors (Mitchell Leisen on To Each His Own, William Wyler on The Heiress) — and neither of them ever said that he had to do Olivia’s acting for her.

But the truth is, even without those well-deserved Oscars, by 1946 she had already earned her place in the history books — and all because she finally had it to here with Jack L. Warner. Perhaps Warner wanted to punish her for that end run to his wife over Gone With the Wind, or maybe he was just being his usual boorish, obtuse, screw-the-talent self. Either way, Olivia found herself being offered an unvarying succession of two-dimensional ingenues; every time she turned one down she’d go on suspension. As 1942 turned into 1943, she was counting the days until her seven-year contract ran out in May. Then came a nasty shock: Warner informed her that the time she’d spent on suspension was being added to the end of her contract, another twenty-five weeks.

Any other contract star might have simply gritted her teeth and ridden out those six months, doing whatever Jack Warner threw at her just to be done with the studio, and with him. But this was one of those moments, like the showdown with George Fontaine over that high-school production of Pride and Prejudice, that showed what Olivia de Havilland was made of. In August 1943 she sued.

Jack Warner had dealt with rebellious stars before. Bette Davis had sued in British court to get out of her contract and lost; James Cagney had sued for breach of contract and — because Warners had clearly breached — fought the studio to a draw. This time J.L. wasn’t giving an inch; besides, Bette Davis and James Cagney had been (and were still) bigger stars than Olivia de Havilland.

But Olivia had a good lawyer, one Martin Gang. He found California Labor Code (CLC) Sec. 2855, which limited a personal-services contract to no more than seven years. The Hollywood studios had always interpreted that to mean seven years of actual work; Gang argued that such a limit was really no limit at all, and that the law must mean seven calendar years. Since her contract had been signed on May 5, 1936, he said, it had run out on May 5, 1943.

The Superior Court of California agreed, and so did the Court of Appeals. In February 1945 the State Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and Olivia was a free agent. She hadn’t worked in nearly two years and had run up steep legal fees, squeaking by on the occasional radio gig. Jack Warner effectively blacklisted her; as far as the studio was concerned she was still under suspension, and he wrote personally to every production company in America warning them not to hire her. But now it was over, she had won, and it was worth it. 

And not only for her. She had broken what was essentially a system of indentured servitude in which the studios had all the power and the stars had none. No more. Henceforth movie actors — indeed, anyone under contract for anything — would have much more control over their careers because Olivia de Havilland wouldn’t let Jack Warner push her around. And Hollywood seemed to respect her for it. Her first picture after the long dry spell was To Each His Own, and the Academy Award may have been as much a tribute to her legal victory as it was to her performance.

In his book Errol & Olivia, Robert Matzen suggests that the forced hiatus while her lawsuit trudged through the courts stunted Olivia’s momentum, causing her to “lose a chunk of her career as a youthful leading lady during three of Hollywood’s last good years” — and there’s something to that. Still, there were those two Oscars, plus a nomination for The Snake Pit — those three pictures probably constituting her best performances. If the shadow of Gone With the Wind loomed over the rest of her life — well, she wasn’t alone in that. And if her career turned down after 1950 — whose didn’t? She worked when she felt like it, and when she didn’t, she was happy at home in Paris, where she relocated with her second marriage to Paris Match editor Pierre Galante in 1955 (they divorced in 1979 but remained good friends, and she tended him as he lay dying of cancer in 1998).

Her last performance came in 1988, as the aunt of the future Duchess of Windsor in a TV movie about the abdication of Edward VIII; her last credit, narrating a 2009 documentary about art therapy for Alzheimer’s patients. Otherwise, it was a comfortable dowager retirement in her home near the Bois de Boulogne overlooking the Seine, sprinkled with life-achievement honors — including, at the age of 100, being made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. So be it duly noted, she died not simply Ms. de Havilland, but Dame Olivia.

Also at 100, she showed the world that there was litigation in the old girl yet. She sued FX Networks and producer Ryan Murphy over Feud: Bette and Joan, an eight-part miniseries that purported to dish the dirt on the making of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962 and the diva-rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Olivia had been a good friend of Bette’s, and she replaced Joan when she was fired from her and Bette’s follow-up teaming on Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), so Olivia was represented as a supporting character in the miniseries, and played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. As these two pictures suggest, neither Ms. Zeta-Jones, her costumer, nor her hairdresser gave much evidence of ever having seen or heard of Olivia. Neither did any of the writers, and that’s what she sued over, charging that her privacy had been invaded without her permission or input, that she had been slandered and misrepresented. True enough; Feud was sleazy stuff, despite all the A-list names, and it misrepresented pretty much everybody it mentioned. The only reason Olivia was the only plaintiff in the case is that she was the only one who was still alive.

The case got fast-tracked out of deference to Olivia’s advanced age, but nobody expected her to prevail, and she didn’t. Feud: Bette and Joan, distasteful as it was, was ruled to be protected First Amendment speech. Turns out it’s not against the law for someone to make a lousy movie, even if it’s about you, and on balance that’s no doubt a good thing; America’s prisons are crowded enough. Still, if there’s anything to karma, someday somebody will make a miniseries that does to Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alfred Molina and Judy Davis what they did to (respectively) Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, director Robert Aldrich and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. For that matter, Catherine Zeta-Jones won’t get off scot-free either.

So Olivia lost that one, but she made her point: she still didn’t like being pushed around. Besides, I wonder if she didn’t have a longer game in mind. Feud was originally pitched by Ryan Murphy as an ongoing project, with each season consisting of an eight-part miniseries dramatizing some famous celebrity feud. Bette and Joan was simply Season One; Season Two would deal with Charles and Diana. Was Olivia’s lawsuit a proactive move, a shot across Ryan Murphy’s bow warning him not to plot out any episodes for Feud: Olivia and Joan? If so, maybe she could claim a strategic victory: it’s been three years now and there are still no plans for a Season Two of Feud (though Ryan Murphy has reserved the right to reanimate the project).

Over the years, Olivia granted a reasonable number of interviews, and she always graciously answered fan mail. But she frequently turned aside specific questions by saying that she would deal with that in her memoirs. Did she really write them, I wonder, or was that just her way of dodging nosy questions from strangers? I suppose we’ll find out sooner or later. If there is a manuscript somewhere in that house in Paris, I imagine it will be complete without being laborious, honest without being cruel, dignified without being snooty, assertive without being rude, and strong without being vulgar. Pretty much the way she was in all her movies — and, as far as anyone ever knew, in real life.

 

Sunday morning began with another George O’Brien B-picture directed by David Howard. Whispering Smith Speaks (1935) was made for producer Sol Lesser, who spent nearly fifty years flitting around the margins of Hollywood, a sort of Sam Goldwyn of Poverty Row. One of Lesser’s standard practices — and I’d love to have been a fly on the wall of some of these meetings to see how he managed it — was to purchase the rights to popular literary characters, then to make cheapjack knockoffs using the titles or character names but little else. And that’s what he did here.

Readers of Frank H. Spearman’s 1906 novel Whispering Smith, about a railroad detective in the Old West, or the various movies made from it (including the one in 1948 with Alan Ladd), or the short-lived TV series with Audie Murphy, could be forgiven for expecting a western — especially with George O’Brien in the lead. Not so; Whispering Smith Speaks (the title apparently refers to the fact that this is Spearman’s hero’s first appearance during the sound era) is a modern-day (i.e., 1935) story, and the only “western” element is that it appears to take place somewhere in California. It’s actually more a romantic comedy than an action movie, with O’Brien playing the son of a railroad tycoon named Harrington who sets out to learn his dad’s business from the ground up, landing a job (under the name “Smith”) with a little podunk railroad run by winsome Irene Ware. Once there, he flirts with, romances, and wins the boss. In the process he not only saves her from an unscrupulous lawyer who plans to cheat her in a “friendly” takeover, but he proves to his own father that he’s a railroad man to reckon with, not just the owner’s pampered son. It was fun, if a bit of an anticlimax after The Marshal of Mesa City. Personally, I wouldn’t mind if Cinevent gave us two George O’Brien pictures every year from now on.

Next came His Majesty, the American (1919), an irresistible athletic comedy starring Douglas Fairbanks in his pre-swashbuckler phase. Not that the plot matters, but Doug played New Yorker William Brooks, who satisfies his hunger for thrills by tagging along with the city’s fire department (he even has a fire alarm and a pole to slide down in his home). When the city cracks down on such activities, he decamps to the town of “Murdero, Mexico” (!) in search of excitement. After a brief run-in with Pancho Villa, he is summoned to the tiny European kingdom of Alaine, where he is promised information about his own unknown roots, as well as the source of the mysterious funds that have supported him all his life. It turns out that he’s nothing less than the heir to the throne of Alaine, raised in the safety of America and in the bliss of ignorance; he has returned to his homeland in the nick of time to save it from the traitorous Minister of War, who plans to overthrow his grandfather the king. Needless to say, Prince William makes short work of the villains, straightens out Alaine’s tempestuous politics — and even learns to his delight that the girl he’s become smitten with (Marjorie Daw) is the countess who was betrothed to him in infancy. I must confess that I’m more partial to Doug’s costume pictures, but these modern-dress adventures of his have their own pleasures too, and His Majesty, The American is probably the best of the ones I’ve seen, with Fairbanks at his most intensely likeable.

After the final three chapters of Hawk of the Wilderness came The Midnight Girl (1925), This was a rather florid soap opera — an agglomeration of romantic triangles that overlap like elements in a Venn diagram — with a curiosity value it couldn’t have had in 1925. The curiosity value came from the casting of Bela Lugosi, still some years away from his fateful success as Count Dracula, as opera impresario Nicholas Harmon. As the picture opens, Harmon has had a falling out with his son Don (Gareth Hughes), who disapproves of his father’s affair with the opera singer Nina (Dolores Cassinelli). Don makes a clean break, leaving his father’s opera company for a job as bandleader in a cafe. There he meets Anna (Lila Lee), a Russian émigré with a beautiful voice who has been unable to find work. Don gets her a job in the cafe as a dancer in a production number called “The Midnight Girl”. Meanwhile, Nina’s voice is failing, and impresario Nicholas is tiring of her anyway, so he’s on the lookout for a new singer/mistress; eventually his roving eye settles on Anna. Add to this Don’s ex-girlfriend Natalie (Ruby Blaine) who is determined to get him back, plus Nina’s equal determination not to be cast off by Nicholas, and the scene is set for all those overlapping triangles.

The Midnight Girl had its pluses, including the interest of seeing Bela Lugosi as a more or less ordinary American (something possible only in a silent film). It’s chief drawback was the fact that the three women in the picture — Lila Lee, Dolores Cassinelli and Ruby Blaine — all looked exactly alike; whenever one came on the scene, we had to wait for her to do or say something to figure out who she was.

This brought us at last to the final picture of the weekend, a nifty little 65-minute murder mystery, While the Patient Slept (1935). Aline MacMahon starred as Nurse Sarah Keate, the creation of prolific mystery writer Mignon G. Eberhart, and Ms. Eberhart’s only series character. There were seven Sarah Keate novels, and five of them were filmed. This was the first, and one of the few pictures to top-bill MacMahon, one of Hollywood’s most welcome and reliable supporting players (for another one, check out the excellent Heat Lightning [’34] sometime).

In While the Patient Slept, MacMahon’s Nurse Sarah is called to the gloomy old Federie mansion to tend to patriarch Richard Federie, who has suffered a stroke after receiving some mysterious bad news. The Federie clan gathers at the old man’s bedside, then members begin dying off one  by one, and Nurse Sarah teams up with police detective Lance O’Leary (Guy Kibbee) for clue-gathering and flirty banter. Last year’s Cinevent ended on a real highlight, the marvelous Dreamboat (1952) with Clifton Webb and Ginger Rogers. This year’s finale may not have reached quite that daffy height, but it was highlight enough; you can’t really go wrong with one of those fast-paced Warner Bros. 1930s B’s, and Aline MacMahon and Guy Kibbee are hard to beat.

*                         *                         *

I don’t want to leave my survey of this year’s Cinevent without mentioning my friend Phil Capasso. Last year, at the Golden Anniversary Celebration, Phil was honored as the only person who had been to every single Cinevent since the first one back in 1969. This dedicated attendance earned him the first slice of the 50th anniversary cake that evening, not to mention the privilege of introducing Cinevent 50’s guest of honor Leonard Maltin. Needless to say, Phil was in Seventh Heaven at that party, and as happy as I’d ever seen him. Then on August 28, 2018, barely three months after I took this picture of him in Columbus, Phil passed away at his home in Carmel, Indiana, at age 82. I’m sure he was planning for his annual trek to Los Angeles for Cinecon 54 on Labor Day Weekend. And I have no doubt he was already looking forward (in his customary phrase, “if God spares”) to joining us all again in Columbus for this year’s Cinevent 51.

I met Phil through my uncle at my first Cinevent in 1998, and every year since then I looked forward to renewing our acquaintance. Some years ago he was diagnosed with leukemia, but he had been successfully coping with that ever since getting the news. His cheerfulness and high spirits never wavered, and he clearly regarded every day as a gift to be treasured and enjoyed. This year’s Cinevent was dedicated to Phil, with tributes in the program contributed by author Scott Eyman and Bob Hodge of Cinevent’s team of “Peerless Projectionists”.

So long, Phil, and thanks for the memories! You were sorely missed by many this year, and you will be for years to come.