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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To John’s readers and fans, I’d like to thank you for your support, and I look forward to bringing you John DiLeo’s next new book this October 2010–TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND COMPANY: HIS ESSENTIAL SCREEN ACTORS. It will be released as a trade paperback and as an eBook at the same time.

Best remembered for the early-50s musicals in which she appeared with husband Gower, especially the enormously popular SHOW BOAT (1951), Champion’s career in films goes back a good decade before her MGM days.  She was the model for Disney’s SNOW WHITE!  How’s that for a piece of screen immortality?  Then she had a small role in the Astaire-Rogers musical THE STORY OF VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE (1939), never suspecting that she and future husband Gower would be hailed as the Fred and Ginger of the 1950s.

You may also recall the Champions in LOVELY TO LOOK AT (1952), with its wildly colorful fashion-show climax, or in JUPITER’S DARLING (1955), the Esther Williams picture in which they danced with elephants.  The Champions were the stars of two of their MGM musicals, EVERYTHING I HAVE IS YOURS (1952) and GIVE A GIRL A BREAK (1953), the latter containing my all-time favorite Marge and Gower dance, their rooftop number.  Ms. Champion has told me that her favorite of her films is the Betty Grable musical THREE FOR THE SHOW, with its inventive and satiric choreography by Jack Cole.

I’m sure I’ll be writing much more about Marge Champion in the next few months, as the anticipation mounts, getting closer and closer to our hearing all about her “life upon the wicked stage.”

Perhaps the first great Loy performance came in THE ANIMAL KINGDOM, based on Philip Barry’s stage hit, a pre-Code talkie that now feels both terribly modern and hopelessly dated.  Though the content is adult, bohemian, and overtly sexual, the ideals are simplistic, the writing melodramatic, and the filmmaking (by Edward H. Griffith) static and stagy.  But it’s still compelling fun to watch characters in an old movie wrestle with art versus commerce, freedom versus convention, integrity versus selling out.  It’s all very lofty and high-minded, just like top-billed Ann Harding as a fashion magazine artist turned painter.  In her past, she lived with rich boy Leslie Howard, a book publisher.  Not merely sex partners, they were soulmates.  Yet they had no claims on each other, no responsibilities.  (Harding calls herself a foolish virgin, “well, foolish, anyway.”)  Howard decides to marry Myrna Loy at just about the time Harding is ready for marriage herself.

Harding was fresh from her Oscar-nominated role in the 1930 film version of Barry’s HOLIDAY (in which she’s surprisingly good in what would become the Katharine Hepburn role in 1938), but she’s the third wheel here.  The plot revolves around the women’s struggle for Howard’s soul.  Loy, in the larger and better female role, walks off with the movie.  She plays a sly manipulator, an icy goddess who uses sex to get what she wants.  But she’s never obvious or a cliche; she’s always a real person.  She has a masterful negligee-seduction scene that keeps husband Howard from attending Harding’s art opening.  Being with Loy compromises Howard, keeping him from Harding, who serves as his artistic conscience.

Harding can be smug, with hands on hips, but she’s also smart and romantic, while Howard is his usual elegant self (repeating the role he played on Broadway).  What Loy possesses that obliterates her co-stars is her subtlety, her believable cunning and potent unforced sensuality.  Loy is a tactful schemer, a quietly ruthless woman, a poised and relaxed seductress, and she’s altogether devastating.  Her confidence as an actress, at only 25, is remarkable.  Good as Harding and Howard are here, they are clearly from an old-time era in screen acting, while Loy’s work feels ageless, as natural and plausible today as it was 78 years ago.

Mrs. Hadley is a selfish, wealthy matron who finds the war a nuisance, an inconvenience, until she (and you know it’s coming) finally accepts responsibility, embraces unselfishness, and does her part. Which means of course that it’s not too late for those of us in the audience to pitch in, those of us who may not be quite as naturally inspiring as Greer Garson. The picture is a feel-good booster of the times, saying that there’s hope for all of us, and good in all of us. Its effectiveness is in no small part due to Bainter’s excellent acting and the skill with which she believably charts her transition.

George Oppenheimer’s screenplay, which lost the Best Original Screenplay Oscar to WOMAN OF THE YEAR, also featuring Bainter), is shameless in its manipulations, which is part of the fun of these wartime propaganda pictures. Mrs. Hadley’s son, played by Richard Ney (who was also a son to Mrs. Miniver, and then married Garson in real life), moves from rich-brat drunk to decorated war hero, the message being that war is the best thing that can happen to a troubled young man. When Mrs. Hadley receives a congratulatory letter from F.D.R. (whom she loathes because she is a Republican), the lesson is to put politics aside and support our leader at this crucial moment. Yes, it’s a fantasy of unification, but darn if the thing doesn’t actually make you feel good. Though pure B-movie hokum of the wartime variety, it works very well on these terms.

And, again, it is held together by Bainter, who gives a smart, understated performance. She overcomes the baldness in the script and makes Mrs. H. a plausibly thorny and difficult woman. Watching her slowly soften is most pleasing, as is watching her bring class and weight to this little movie.

Though it is nowhere near as well-known as the aforementioned atrocities, AN AMERICAN DREAM belongs right alongside them, further tainted by the fact that it was released into instant oblivion.  It is not about film or theatre stars (like the above trio), but it does center on a popular TV commentator, a crime-busting crusader who has taken on the mob and police corruption.  (Nowadays, he would have a show on Fox News or MSNBC.)  Stuart Whitman plays this role, an ex-war hero as well, and he gives an astonishingly bad performance.  He has two gears only, acting either in a comatose fashion or working himself into monumentally unconvincing frenzies of emotion.  I have often liked Whitman’s work, finding him most attractive and intelligent, but he’s embarrassing here, whether dealing with the histrionics of his boozy, nymphomaniac wife Eleanor Parker (who was also in THE OSCAR) or his former flame Janet Leigh.  How can you make a juicy piece of crap with a stiff at its center?

The first half hour is the film’s liveliest section, the portion featuring Ms. Parker in a self-consciously showy role, naked in her bed with a studly pickup while watching her hubby on television.  Parker gives you an idea what her Alexandra Del Lago might have been like had she played that role in SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH.  When Whitman later shows up to ask for a divorce, he and Parker engage in two separate brawls, the latter ending with Parker falling off her penthouse balcony, but not before hilariously throwing a large rock at Whitman’s head.  He doesn’t push her off, but he does let her fall, choosing not to save her, then regretting it instantly.  After going splat, she’s run over by a car containing the mob boss that Whitman has been taunting on the air, who just happens to be riding around with moll Janet Leigh, the girl Whitman once impregnated and hasn’t seen in a decade.  Parker may be over the top but the film becomes a tedious drag without her.

I haven’t read the Norman Mailer novel on which this film is based, but I’d venture to guess that the distance between the book and the film is about as vast as the distance between the book and film versions of MYRA BRECKINRIDGE.  Lamely directed by actor Robert Gist, AN AMERICAN DREAM qualifies as camp, especially when floozie Janet Leigh (dubbed) is singing for mobsters in a nightclub, suddenly channeling Gladys George!  Leigh tries to be bruised and hardboiled, but how can she be taken seriously with all that white eye makeup?  Speaking of camp, how about the film’s final line, Leigh’s to Whitman’s corpse after she has ratted him out:  ”What did you expect from a whore?”

There’s much yelling going on in this movie, much of it confused with acting.  Some of the worst offenders include Barry Sullivan and J.D. Cannon as policemen hoping to nab Whitman for murder.  Director Gist also allows a red neon light to flash continually inside Leigh’s apartment, yet when the sign is seen in exterior shots it doesn’t flash.  I guess that’s called “style.” 

Though Parker and Leigh never appear together here, they had been the two leading ladies in another film, a wonderful one, 1952′s SCARAMOUCHE.  That’s the one to see them in!