On Wednesday, Cammie King died at age 76.  If the name doesn’t ring a bell, it’s because she’s far better known as a character she played (rather than as an actress).  At age 5, she appeared as the daughter of Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND, the little girl who dies when she falls off her pony.  King was no wind-up child actress, the kind who already has a bag of tricks to sell, and so her acting as Bonnie is charmingly amateurish instead of cloying or showbizzy.  There are few remaining surviving members of the cast of GONE WITH THE WIND, most notably 94-year-old Olivia de Havilland, the film’s radiant Melanie, and 89-year-old Ann Rutherford, Scarlett’s baby sister Careen.

The most important thing about Cammie King’s contribution to the film is the way in which Gable relates to her.  In their few scenes together, Gable is so deeply loving, so gentle and openly affectionate, that it enriches Rhett Butler beyond our expectations, showing us the man underneath his cynicism, the man who surprises himself with his capacity for fatherhood and how it joyfully changes his life.  His grieving over Bonnie is incredibly moving, and Rhett is never quite the same.  After bringing him his happiest moments, she is the cause of his most enduring pain.  Gable is superb in GONE WITH THE WIND; it’s a performance richly enhanced by those “Bonnie” scenes.  So, although Cammie King showed no signs of budding acting talent, she is nonetheless partially responsible for one of the most beloved and admired performances in screen history.  After all, another child actress may very well not have engendered the necessary emotional responses in Gable that Cammie King so obviously did.  Little Miss King did her part in helping Gable sustain his tag as the King of Hollywood, connecting these two Kings for all time.

Marge Champion turns 91 on September 2, five weeks before she’ll be our guest at the Black Bear Film Festival on October 9, 2010 in Milford, PA.  I’ve seen the wonderful new documentary short, KEEP DANCING, in which she appears with fellow dancer Donald Saddler, both of them still going strong.  Don’t be surprised if it’s an Oscar nominee next year, a genuinely inspiring and lovely film.  

I’ve been revisiting Marge’s movies in the weeks leading up to the event.  Last week, I watched LOVELY TO LOOK AT (1952), which reteamed Marge and husband Gower with their SHOW BOAT stars, Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson.  It was not the financial success that SHOW BOAT had been, even though it was another remake of an Irene Dunne hit of the 30s, in this case ROBERTA (1935), in which Marge and Gower fulfilled the dance slots taken by Fred and Ginger in Irene’s version.

LOVELY TO LOOK AT is best remembered for the madly colorful and opulent fashion-show climax staged by Vincente Minnelli.  (The rest of the film was directed by Mervyn LeRoy.)  But I prefer Marge and Gower’s earlier dance to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” on a beautiful blue floor designed to look like a never-ending star-flecked sky.  It’s very much in the Fred-and-Ginger style but also very much MGM, very 1950s, and very Marge and Gower.  And much too good for the stale, halfhearted film in which it is buried.

Carolyn Jones, who died much too young at 53 in 1983, got her share of pop-culture immortality for only two television seasons as Morticia on THE ADDAMS FAMILY (1964-66).  Prior to the series, she had been in the movies for a little over a decade, mostly paying dues, but gaining some real recognition by the end of the 1950s.  She moved into the 1960s primed for a screen career that never quite panned out.

In the early-to-middle 50s, Jones had supporting roles in many famous movies, including HOUSE OF WAX (1953), THE BIG HEAT (1953), THE TENDER TRAP (1955), THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956), and, perhaps most memorably, in the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956).  Watching Jones in these movies is like watching Bette Davis in her pre-OF HUMAN BONDAGE performances.  Both actresses had a striking, unconventional beauty, yet, more importantly, they also had striking, unconventional on-screen personalities.  Call it nerve or flash or sparkle, but Davis and Jones had the kind of magnetism that forces you to look only at them if they’re in a scene.  And their physical resemblance can be astonishing because, yes, Jones had Bette Davis eyes.  Filmmakers of the 50s really missed a bet by never finding an occasion for Davis and Jones to play mother and daughter, which would have been simply ideal (and possibly revelatory). 

Jones never got a JEZEBEL or a DARK VICTORY to move her to out-and-out Davis-sized stardom and appreciation, but her opportunities improved when she got a supporting Oscar nomination for a six-minute role in the Paddy Chayefsky-scripted drama THE BACHELOR PARTY (1957).  As a Greenwich Village “kook,” a chatty and sexy bohemian, she gives this serviceable, earnest movie a jolt of life and humor, par for the course for Jones by now.  She was back in kook mode for A HOLE IN THE HEAD (1959), again with Frank Sinatra (after TENDER TRAP) and prickly good fun as Sinatra’s bedmate, while steering clear of the film’s more sentimental flourishes.

Jones got a Davis-type bad-girl role as Alan Ladd’s unstable, slutty, blackmailing, and alcoholic wife in THE MAN IN THE NET (1959).  Though the film is a dud as a mystery-thriller, and Ladd looks puffy and glued together, it allows Jones a juicy and neurotic showcase, stealing this negligible film with her dazzling fire.  Unfortunately, she’s not long for this movie, which hinges on her murder.  In Michael Curtiz, Jones had even gotten herself a bona fide Davis director.

John Sturges’ LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL (1959) is yet another great unsung 50s western.  Filled with rich and penetrating moral dilemmas, the film pits marshal Kirk Douglas against powerful Anthony Quinn, former best friends.  Quinn’s son, Earl Holliman, is responsible for the rape and murder of Douglas’ Indian wife.  Jones is Quinn’s mistress, torn between her brutal lover and her sympathy for Douglas.  Compelling, gorgeously photographed, tightly focused, and instensely sustained, the picture’s chief acting honors once again go to Jones.  In a variation of the whore with a heart of gold, Jones is smart and sarcastic, a bruised no-nonsense woman who is likable, amusing, and deeply human.  LAST TRAIN FROM GUN HILL deserves serious reappraisal, as does Jones, an actress who had enough time to show us her talent but not enough time to give that talent its due.

The loss of Patricia Neal (at 84) this week means that another great star actress of the twentieth century is gone.  When Neal suffered those three severe strokes at age 39 in 1965, who would have guessed that she had more than half of her life ahead of her?  Despite a life and career of enormous ups and shattering downs, Neal never was out of the spotlight for long, thanks to her rare combination of stunning yet highly individualized beauty and ever-deepening reserves of sheer talent.

Her first phase in Hollywood, the Warner Brothers years, is now best remembered as the time of her great love affair with Gary Cooper, who was a quarter-century her senior.  Their King Vidor picture, THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1949), has always been my choice for the greatest bad film ever made.  Beyond terrible in many ways, it is nonetheless riveting, containing unforgettable visual sequences that are alternately campy/ridiculous and sublime/original.  Though deeply pretentious and heavy-handed, how can you dismiss a movie in which Neal, as a frigid neurotic, lustily watches a sweaty Cooper in a rock quarry as he drills at about crotch level?  Or, after he rapes her, when she tells him, a promising architect, “I wish I’d never seen…your building.”  The film ends with Neal ascending a never-ending building-site elevator to Cooper at the top, the effect being that she’s riding the biggest phallus in movie history.  

Neal fared better as the Canadian nurse in Burma in THE HASTY HEART (1949) with Ronald Reagan and the wonderful Richard Todd, a moving, heartwarming post-war army-hospital drama in which a glowing Neal displays her smarts and sensitivity.  In Michael Curtiz’s THE BREAKING POINT (1950), opposite the great John Garfield, Neal gives my favorite of her performances, as a high-class whore.  She is not only slinky, bad-girl fun in the part, but she gives this familiar “tramp” type a penetrating depth and humanity.  Plus, her chemistry with Garfield is electric.  At Fox, she appeared in the sci-fi classic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951), as a widowed secretary and mother who finds herself unforgettably involved with alien Michael Rennie and his robot Gort.

After years away from the screen, she returned for Elia Kazan’s A FACE IN THE CROWD (1957), a flop in its day but now a much-admired cautionary tale about television and its personalities, even if Kazan’s touch isn’t exactly light.  It’s Andy Griffith’s movie, in which he dazzles and terrifies as a fireball hillbilly who becomes a national treasure (while morphing into a monster).  Neal is his Dr. Frankenstein, who realizes she must destroy her out-of-control creation.  The first half is pretty close to perfect, loose and airy in its Southern locations, and building dramatically quite beautifully.  But the second half becomes preachy, obvious, hysterical, and smug.  The film is a Capra tale in reverse, in which “Mr. Deeds” turns out to be the bad guy.  But Neal shows an unapologetic sexuality with Griffith, able to suggest much more need and yearning than the censors would allow in 1957.

A problem with Neal’s career is that she is not the main focus of any of her best films, second fiddle to the male stars of THE HASTY HEART, THE BREAKING POINT, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, and A FACE IN THE CROWD.  This continued into the 1960s, although in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1961) it was Audrey Hepburn who was the main attraction.  Even so, who can forget Neal’s illicit delight as a married woman sneaking around for trysts with “kept” stud George Peppard?  Her best TIFFANY’S get-up is her black-cape coat and her red turban.  Has anyone ever enjoyed the mechanics of infidelity more?

Neal won the Best Actress Oscar for her supporting performance in HUD (1963), a solid Paul Newman vehicle.  Neal is superb as a sassy, easygoing, likable housekeeper, a barefooted divorcee who shares sexual tension with both Newman and his teen nephew Brandon de Wilde.  She provides this contemporary western with humor, warmth, and authenticity, but it’s simply not a lead performance.  

From the high-fashion glamour of her FOUNTAINHEAD and TIFFANY’S roles, to the unvarnished womanliness and sensuality of her FACE IN THE CROWD and HUD performances, Neal was a gorgeously gifted star whose handful of fascinating movies should keep her in the public eye till the earth stands still.

August 8th marks what would have been the 100th birthday of actress Sylvia Sidney, who died in 1999 at 88.  And what a career she had, beginning with stardom in the pre-Code Hollywood of the early 1930s and ending with a late-life resurgence in the sci-fi comedies of Tim Burton (BEETLEJUICE – 1988, MARS ATTACKS! – 1996, her final film).  Plus she had a distinguished career on the Broadway stage and on television. 

Sidney’s screen career blossomed with the 1-2-3 punch of three 1931 dramas directed by three of the top moviemakers in the biz:  Rouben Mamoulian’s CITY STREETS (with Gary Cooper), Josef von Sternberg’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY, and King Vidor’s STREET SCENE.  Wow!  In the von Sternberg picture, she plays the role later made famous by Shelley Winters in A PLACE IN THE SUN (1951).  STREET SCENE would appear to be the picture that solidified Bronx-born Sidney’s persona as the ultimate tenement girl.  In all three pictures, Sidney is a fresh and natural actress, delicate and soulful and lovely.  It seems remarkable that Sidney didn’t get an Oscar nomination for one of these films, after having a year like that!   

I’m very fond of her in the 1934 Preston Sturges-scripted comedy THIRTY-DAY PRINCESS (1934), opposite a young Cary Grant and completely captivating in her dual role.  But she is far more remembered for her dramatic roles, notably as the lead in William Wyler’s fine screen adaptation of DEAD END (1937), which contains Sidney’s quintessential tenement role, representing all of the “depressed” working class.  

Her late-30s career was marked by her association with German director Fritz Lang, with whom she made three movies:  FURY (1936), the best remembered of the trio, is more a Spencer Tracy vehicle than a Sidney picture;  YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937), now regarded as the best of the three, is overrated, but she and Henry Fonda play beautifully together, though again she is secondary to her leading man;  and YOU AND ME (1938), a dud then as now.

Her other 30s picture of note is Hitchcock’s SABOTAGE (1936), a British picture, skillfully done though not one of Hitch’s great English films.  Sidney is the American wife of saboteur Oscar Homolka, whom she finally stabs to death. Later Sidney roles of note include playing opposite Jimmy Cagney in BLOOD ON THE SUN (1945), as Fantine in the 1952 LES MISERABLES, and as Joanne Woodward’s mother in SUMMER WISHES, WINTER DREAMS (1973), for which Sidney received her only Oscar nomination, losing to Tatum O’Neal!  It’s a dreary movie in which Sidney, as an upper-class NYC matron, dies in the first twenty minutes.  You’re very sorry to see her go, as you are whenever Sylvia Sidney makes an exit in one of her movies.