Thelma Ritter -- Meeting the Star of “The Mating Season”

The unstoppable Richard Orton, he of the keen eye and the passion for movie art direction, just sent me two screen-shots proving that in 1951 Paramount Studios used the same fancy set of decorative archways in two very different films. One was George Stevens’ powerful romantic tragedy, A Place in the Sun. This film starring Montgomery Clift as a young man on the make, also featured Elizabeth Taylor, Shelley Winters, and murder most foul. The other film, completely unknown to me, was a screwball romantic comedy, The Mating Season. Dick helpfully advised me that’s possible to see The Mating Season, completely free of charge, on YouTube. The film’s above-the-title stars are John Lund and the gorgeous Gene Tierney. But it was when Dick told me that The Mating Season is considered one of Thelma Ritter’s best performances that I decided to check it out.

 Thelma Ritter (1902-1969) was never anyone’s idea of a romantic lead. Diminutive, with a  gravelly voice and a strong New Yawk accent, she was born to play tart-tongued women of the working class. Making her uncredited screen debut as a frustrated shopper in 1947’s Miracle on 34^th Street, she collected her first Oscar nomination—for the supporting role of Margo Channing’s maid—in 1950’s All About Eve. The Mating Season won her a second nomination, and she went on to accumulate four more noms (for With a Song in My Heart, Pickup on South Street, Pillow Talk, and Birdman of Alcatraz): it’s a supporting-actress record that has neve been broken. Only problem: none of the nominations resulted in a gold statuette. It’s an omission I wish we could somehow rectify, because Thelma Ritter—whether appearing in wacky comedy or a tough-minded drama—was one of a kind.

 For sure, The Mating Season would be dead in the water without her. It’s the story of an eager young businessman (the blond and rather bland Lund) who falls for the sophisticated daughter of a former U.S. ambassador (Tierney). They marry, but rivals on all sides are rooting against the pairing. While Lund, trying to advance his business career, moves his bride into a swanky apartment, rivals in his firm are working against the marriage as well as his career prospects. I won’t go into all the complications that arise, but Ritter plays Lund’s salt-of-the-earth widowed mom, the good-hearted proprietor of a hamburger stand that’s in financial trouble. When she learns that her son and new daughter-in-law are trying to throw an elaborate dinner party for friends and business associates, she shows up to take over the kitchen, without ever revealing the family relationship.  Of course she triumphs, both at the stove and with the grateful new daughter-in-law who at first doesn’t realize who she is. Eventually, there evolves a showdown of sorts with a new arrival, the bitchy and self-serving snob who is Tierney’s mother. She’s played by Miriam Hopkins, once a bright Hollywood leading lady herself but by this time quite convincing as an obnoxious older woman. Remarkably, Hopkins is billed above Ritter as a supporting player, when by rights Ritter should have had star billing, in a story that clearly revolves, from beginning to end, around her funny, feisty character.   

 I’d love to convey how poignant Thelma Ritter can be, when she’s victimized in films like Sam Fuller’s noirish spy thriller, Pickup on South Street. But her acerbic wit shines through as the nurse looking after James Stewart in Rear Window, and in so many of her other roles. .Give this gal an Oscar! Too bad it’s too late for that.  

 

 

Suddenly, Last Summer, Elizabeth Taylor Goes Crazy (Or Does She?)

I well remember an early ad campaign, featuring a drawing of a young, svelte, and very beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, kneeling in a white bathing suit. She looks anxious, and the words of the ad make it clear why: “Suddenly, last summer . . .  Cathy knew she was being used for something evil.”  This was how Hollywood tried to sell an expanded film version of a lurid but poetic Tennessee Williams one-act play dealing with insanity, homosexuality, and (yes) cannibalism.

 Williams, who’d opened the play on Broadway in 1957, had no say in the making of the film. It was directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (whose credits included All About Eve) from a Gore Vidal screenplay. The central trio of actors included Elizabeth Taylor—then at the height of her dramatic powers and personal notoriety—as well as a fifty-year-old Katharine Hepburn and a very troubled Montgomery Clift. The actor was barely recovered from a serious auto crash that mangled his face and left him dependent on pills and alcohol, but Taylor, who was a close friend, insisted he keep the role. As it turns out, Clift is both the least convincing and the least interesting of the three central characters.

 The best word for the basic style of this film is “histrionic,” but I mean this as a compliment. Though there’s nothing remotely realistic about the situation at hand, there’s something gorgeously stylized about the world of this movie and its characters. Settings include a lurid  insane asylum and a Deep Southern mansion surrounded by acres of tropical plants, some of them deadly. The film opens on a lobotomy performed by Dr. John Cukrowicz (Clift), a pioneer in the field of psychosurgery who cures mental patients of what ails them by removing part of their brains. He’s summoned by a wealthy and imperious widow named Violet Venable (Hepburn), who wants to fund a major expansion of his hospital as a monument to the memory of her dead son, Sebastian. The only catch: he must first lobotomize her troubled niece (Taylor), who has been saying disturbing things ever since witnessing Sebastian’s death in a Spanish seaside town with the ominous name of Cabeza de Lobo. 

 In true Tennessee Williams style, the two female characters express themselves in long soaring monologues. Mrs. Venable talks at length about her special closeness to Sebastian, a young man of talent, strong emotions, and a disdain for anything he considers common or ugly. Given the public mores of the 1950s, there’s something the film cannot acknowledge frankly: that Sebastian was destroyed while on the prowl for homosexual love. Still, you can hardly miss the subtext. It is Taylor’s own powerful monologue, late in the film, that makes clear how his violent and intensely symbolic death came to be.

 I watched this film after reading (and blurbing) an advance copy of my colleague Matthew Kennedy’s Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide, an upcoming publication from Oxford University Press. Kennedy quotes director Mankiewicz as calling Taylor’s performance here “one of the finest pieces of acting in any motion picture ever made.” Speaking of that climactic monologue, Mankiewicz described it as “an aria from a tragic opera of madness and death.” Though Kennedy himself seems slightly less enthusiastic about this particular Taylor film role, he does praise her work in the lengthy monologue as “a wonderment of technique” by a performer who is “inherently cinematic.”  

 One of the plants in Violet Venable’s garden is a Venus flytrap, which must be fed flies on a regular schedule. What a multi-pronged visual metaphor for this exotic, unnerving film!  

 

 

 

“National Velvet”: A Girl and Her Horse

 Let’s face it: National Velvet is a fairy tale. But who doesn’t like fairy tales, on occasion, especially when they feature a beautiful young girl who positively glows with health and high spirits? I came to National Velvet (1944) after reading Matthew Kennedy’s upcoming tribute to his favorite movie star. When asked to write a blurb for the book jacket of his On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide (coming out this spring from Oxford University Press), I felt I was fairly knowledgeable about the life and career of La Liz. (After all, I’d endured such dreck as The Sandpiper, while also cheering impressive Taylor projects like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.) But Matt, who’s seen absolutely everything Taylor has filmed, aroused in me the determination to revisit some of her films and check out others for the very first time. That’s how I came to watch the twelve-year-old Elizabeth in an ersatz but tremendously lovable story that, judging by the credits, was supposed to be showcasing Hollywood veteran Mickey Rooney.

 National Velvet began life as a children’s novel by British author Enid Bagnold, about a young girl and a plucky horse who together win the grueling steeplechase known as the Grand National. British filming locations would have been appropriate, but this was 1944, and the world was still at war—though in desperate need of inspirational entertainment. That’s why the film contains a mix of  English and American actors (like the British Donald Crisp and the American Anne Revere as Taylor’s stern but loving parents). It’s also why the family’s seaside working class village is played by California’s Pebble Beach. There’s no mistaking Mickey Rooney, in the role of a young drifter who sets the plot in motion, for a down-at-the-heels British lad. But the teenaged British-born Angela Lansbury played Taylor’s eldest sister here, in the same year she broke into movies with the much more sinister Gaslight.

 Matt Kennedy’s study emphasizes how important National Velvet was in terms of the very young Taylor finding her place in the world. Already a movie veteran, featured in such Hollywood fare as 1943’s Lassie Come Home, she discovered when playing Velvet Brown the opportunity to choose her own path. As she was to say, “Riding a horse gave me a sense of freedom and abandon, because I was so controlled by my parents and the studio. When I was on a horse we could do what we wanted. Riding a horse was my way of getting away from people telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it." So it was entirely fitting that at the end of production she was given “her” horse, King Charles, as a parting gift. And she remained an animal lover for the rest of her days.

 Matt also focuses welcome attention on the supportive relationship of young Velvet and her mother. Though both of Velvet’s parents seem formal and a bit stuffy—they primly address one another as Mr. and Mrs. Brown—there’s another side to Anne Revere’s portrayal. Once a champion herself, she balances hard-nosed practicality with a deep appreciation for “a breathtaking piece of folly,” like entering the untrained horse called The Pie in a serious, competitive race. Unlike so many self-centered movie moms, Mrs. Brown has her daughter’s best interests at heart . . . and trusts her to do the right thing. It’s a lovely performance, and one that deservingly led to a Supporting Actress Oscar. We should all be so lucky to have moms like her.

 Speaking of which, it’s my own mother’s birthday today. Happy birthday, Estelle Gray, wherever you are!

 

Light and Shadow in “A Place in the Sun”

 When, as a lonely young immigrant, Mike Nichols discovered his local movie palace, the film that captivated him was George Stevens’ 1951 romantic tragedy, A Place in the Sun. When the late Charles Grodin considered his future profession, the performance that drew him in was that of Montgomery Clift, as the apex of a lethal love triangle in A Place in the Sun. In the typically bombastic style of the early 1950s, the film’s trailer proclaims: “Never before a film so moving and powerful.” While orchestral music swells, the words on the screen go on to describe the flick as “standing alone as the screen’s most memorable love story.” Hyperbole, of course. But there’s no question that A Place in the Sun has earned its reputation as one of Hollywood’s Golden Age classics. Its six Oscars (including Best Director) are hardly a surprise. More startling, in retrospect, is the fact it was beaten out for Best Picture by the charming but lightweight musical confection, An American in Paris.

 Despite its sunny title, A Place in the Sun was shot in black and white, in an era when filmmakers rotated between wide-screen full-color extravaganzas and somber chiaroscuro dramas. (One of the film’s Oscars was for Best Black-and-White Cinematography, while the camerawork of An American in Paris was honored in a separate category.) In this tale of a young man’s relationship with two very different women, one affair takes place in brilliant sunlight, while the other moves stealthily forward in the shadows. It’s not a brand-new story: Oscar-winning screenwriters had adapted it from a 1925 novel by Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser’s work—once considered a classic but not much read these days—was titled An American Tragedy. Based on an actual murder trial, it justified its title by hinting that a young man’s all-powerful desire for wealth and status (even at the expense of honorable behavior) was closely bound up with American values.

 In the film, the poor but ambitious George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) comes to town, and immediately lands a position in the factory run by his wealthy uncle. His job is to oversee a group of female workers, with whom he is sternly instructed not to fraternize. Nothing daunted, he begins a secret romance with one of the workers, the plumply pretty Alice (Shelley Winters). But a social evening at his uncle’s palatial home introduces him to a stunningly gorgeous rich girl, Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor at her most beautiful). The sunlit romance with Angela—memorably featuring a day of water-skiing on a local lake—contrasts sharply with George’s nighttime trysts in Alice’s shabby digs. And then Alice reveals she’s pregnant, relying on him to make their romance public, and legally sanctioned. What’s an ambitious young fellow to do?

 I won’t go into what happens on that lake, except to say that there’s an unexpected twist. Stevens’ long slow takes and reliance on master shots are hugely effectively, and show up years later in Mike Nichols’ direction of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and other features. And Stevens’ sharp focus on social distinctions and psychological torment make their own powerful statement. For me the classic moment is when George arrives hours late to the sad little one-on-one birthday dinner Alice has lovingly prepared in her rented room. In a long-held shot as they awkwardly converse at the table, her face and body are mostly turned away from the camera. But we can read in her posture all the sadness of a young woman too humbly placed to remain desirable to the man she loves.  

 

The Shadow of a Smile in Big Sur

 Big Sur is a heavenly spot on the California coast, a place of rugged rocks, crashing waves, and twisted cypress trees. It has always had an artistic soul, and a penchant for welcoming hippies and mystics. Naturally, the movie-making community is not immune to its charms. On a recent trip to Big Sur, which included wine, burgers, and a brilliant sunset at the legendary Nepenthe, I couldn’t help associating the natural beauty of the locale with memories of one of the worst movies I ever saw. Oddly, I watched it at Radio City Music Hall on my very first visit to New York City. The year was 1965, and the film was The Sandpiper. It starred the then-notorious Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, playing out their personal love affair in glorious Technicolor.

Here’s the plot, such as it is: Elizabeth is a free-spirited artist with a beach shack and an out-of-wedlock young son. Richard is a starchy Episcopal priest who runs a boarding school in Monterey. Some run-ins with the law mandate that her son be enrolled in his school. Sparks fly, despite the differences in belief and lifestyle, and soon Burton is pining as only Richard Burton can pine. One major problem is that he’s already married, to the saintly (of course) Eva Marie Saint. What to do?

The central act of the movie consists of lots of scenery, lots of pining among the pines, and some symbolic claptrap involving a sandpiper with a broken wing. There’s also a scene immortalized in a Mad Magazine parody I remember from back in the day: Zaftig Liz is depicted by Mad artist Mort Drucker as shrinking a pair of women’s slacks until they are doll-sized, then putting them on and walking around in them. Taylor may have had a beautiful face in 1965, but figure-wise she was hardly a woodland sylph.

Of course this sort of movie from the mid-Sixties had to end on a sad, poignant note. In this it was helped immeasurably by the film’s secret asset, its soupy, string-heavy score. The Sandpiper was nominated for, and won, a single Oscar, for the hit song, “The Shadow of Your Smile.” It was composed by Johnny Mandel, best known today for his evocative  “Suicide is Painless” theme from M*A*S*H.

Looking at The Sandpiper’s credits now, it’s depressing to see all the major showbiz names involved in this turkey. The MGM release, starring Hollywood’s most famous (and well-paid) romantic couple, was given the full-blown Golden Age treatment. The director was Vincente Minnelli, who was much better served by his work on big, bright musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, and Gigi, but also helmed his share of powerful dramas. Producer Martin Ransohoff had a distinguished career, and the estimable Dalton Trumbo apparently had a hand in the script.

Despite all my snarky comments, lovers of the lugubrious might find themselves enjoying The Sandpiper. My family and I were actually at Radio City Music Hall to see the famous Rockettes do their pre-show high kicks. When the film came on, we decided to watch for a bit—and then couldn’t tear ourselves away. A Noel Coward character once quipped, “Strange how potent cheap music is." The same thing goes for lousy movies: if they’re really, really bad, they’re sometimes irresistible.

Of course, someone who wants a completely different view of Big Sur should check out a Roger Corman psychedelic classic from 1967, The Trip. Big Sur was also the site of Roger’s famous personal experiment with LSD. But that’s a story for another day. 

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