Ronald Colman: A Durable Life

The actor Ronald Colman, known for his dapper mustache and his mellifluous speaking voice, left us in 1958. But lovers of old cinema classics still remember him fondly. I recall my parents chuckling over their memories of 1947’s The Late George Apley and my mother developing a romantic fascination with Shangri-La, thanks to a hit Colman film from 1937, Lost Horizon. I’ve also come across Carol Burnett’s rambunctious take on a 1942 Colman romantic weepy, Random Harvest. (Burnett’s version, called Rancid Harvest, has heaps of fun with the story of a British ex-soldier, suffering from amnesia, who has totally forgotten his marriage to perky Greer Garson.) 

Colman’s film career, which stretched from the silent era to 1957, gave him a wide variety of roles. He was a courtly would-be lover in Lady Windermere’s Fan, a silent adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play directed back in 1925 by the great Ernst Lubitsch. He starred as a soldier, a jewel thief, a heroic doctor, an esteemed law professor, and a painter who has gone blind.  After multiple Oscar nominations, he finally took home the golden statuette in 1948 for A Double Life, in which he played a Broadway actor so caught up in his portrayal of Othello that he nearly murders his on-stage Desdemona. 

How to take in the whole scope of Colman’s illustrious career? My exceedingly prolific colleague Carl Rollyson has written a Colman biography, published in 2024, that’s both extremely thorough and unique in its focus. He has titled it Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero. Rollyson’s book contains the elements of many classic biographies: a timeline, a photo section, several useful appendices, a list of sources, and so on. But Rollyson chooses not to start with the familiar cradle-to-grave narrative. Instead, he devotes the long first section of his book to what he calls “A Gentleman’s Work.” Starting with the classic eighteenth-century delineation of gentlemanly behavior in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, he considers Colman’s film career as a creative working out of an English gentleman’s approach to life. Not that Colman always plays an Englishman; not that he’s wholly typecast as a wealthy aristocrat. Rollyson sees in Colman’s film roles an exploration of truly gentlemanly behavior, often featuring a character who must repent of his flaws and find true nobility within  himself. (Colman’s Sydney Carton in 1935’s A Tale of Two Cities certainly rises to the occasion as he heads toward the guillotine.) A particularly interesting section focuses on Lost Horizon, in which Colman’s role as an esteemed British statesman who becomes entranced by the promise of a life of seclusion and peace becomes, in his daughter’s words, “Ronald Colman stepping into his own image.”   

After thoroughly exploring the implications of Colman’s career, Rollyson delves deeply into the life itself, helped by input from Hollywood colleagues and from Colman’s daughter Juliet, who in 1975 probed her late father’s psyche in Ronald Colman: A Very Private Person. My favorite discovery is that Colman and his second wife, English actress Benita Hume, had a long, loving, exceedingly playful relationship, one captured in their popular radio broadcast, The Halls of Ivy (1950-52). The show briefly moved to television, but radio was their favorite medium as a couple, because in their later years it gave them more time for friends and for one another. And—who would have thought it?—the pair had a ball playing themselves as supposed next-door-neighbors of the cheap and cranky Jack Benny. He featured them frequently on his own radio broadcasts, with Benny heckling a dignified but prickly Colman, and Benita desperately striving to keep the peace. 

 

Heil, Myself! Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be”

Old-school comedian Jack Benny playing Hamlet? That seems about as unlikely as a Polish theatre troupe, circa 1939, successfully impersonating Hitler and his goons to fool the Gestapo. But both of these things happen in a remarkable (and remarkably serious) comedy that emerged from Hollywood in 1942, while war raged in Europe.

 Benny, mostly known for the radio (and eventually TV) show that spoofed his tightwad image, wears tights for real as he stars as the hammiest of ham actors. His biggest concerns, as actor Joseph Tura, seem to be the adoration of his fans and the possibly roving eye of his beautiful wife, played by Carole Lombard in her final role. (Alas, Lombard died ina a plane crash at age 33, shortly before the film opened, while returning from a war bonds tour.)  But while the company is rehearsing an anti-German drama, Gestapo, the Nazis march into Warsaw and swiftly take over. Suddenly patriotism comes to the fore, and all the members of the company unite to thwart the will of  their new German overlords.

 Theatre troupes make for strange bedfellows, but in this crisis everyone pitches in wholeheartedly. The glamorous Maria Tura (Lombard) strategically cozies up to a turncoat, insinuating she’d be glad to spy for the Nazis as a way of allying herself with the winning team. The obviously Jewish spear carrier who longs to play Shylock gets his chance at a critical juncture to recite his big speech and be a key diversion—and a hero. The Polish flyboy (Robert Stack) who yearns to take Maria away from her husband uses his aviation connections to save everyone’s neck. And Jack Benny’s Joseph Tura dives into a trunkful of fake mustaches and beards to impersonate prominent Nazi leaders, befuddling the pompous Sig Ruman, who hilariously plays the local Gestapo commandant .

 It's all uproariously funny, except that the movie never forgets what the stakes are for these people, who are human beings first, actors second. With death and destruction all around them, they balance on a knife-edge between triumph and disaster. Call it the comedy of desperation. The Berlin-born Lubitsch may have been known for the worldly elegance of so many of his films (like Trouble in Paradise), but he remained at heart an immigrant, the son of a Jewish tailor who had moved to Germany from the outskirts of the Russian Empire.  In other words, Lubitsch was not entirely at home in a world where borders kept changing and tribal identities were key.  Commentators have pointed out that the one character in the film who is by no means ever comic is the Polish-born scholar with a prominent academic post in Britain but a secret commitment to the Third Reich.

 As the plot continues to thicken, it’s pretty much impossible to follow the ins and outs of a story in which the good guys impersonate the bad. My advice: just relax and enjoy the chaos, knowing that, thankfully, it will come out all right in the end.  The title phrase, To Be or Not to Be, is of course from Hamlet’s great soliloquy, but it takes on several alternative meanings in the course of the film, even signaling an upcoming assignation. There’s no question that funnyman Mel Brooks enjoyed the joke (as he did the phrase, “Heil, myself!” which later shows up in Brooks’ The Producers). In 1983, four decades after the original, Brooks shot his own version, with wife Anne Bancroft as the glamorous Maria, Charles Durning assuming a highly-ersatz German accent as the commandant, and himself chewing the scenery in the Jack Benny part.