The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (101 page)

She can still be seen, often on French TV, and elegant as always:
La Tête dans les Nuages
(88, Vecchiali);
Bille en Tête
(89, Carlo Cotti);
Le Jour des Rois
(91, Marie-Claude Treilhon);
Les Mamies
(92, Annick Lanoe);
La Vérité en Face
(93, Etienne Perier);
Jalna
(94, Philippe Monnier);
Ça Ira Mieux Demain
(00, Jeanne Labrune);
Que Restet-il …
(00, Perier);
8 Femmes
(02, François Ozon);
Nouvelle Chance
(06, Anne Fontaine).

Jane Darwell
(Patti Woodward) (1880–1967), b. Palmyra, Missouri
A bar parlor Mother Courage, or a Senate House Ma Kettle, Jane Darwell illustrates that intemperate cross between universality and hodgepodge in John Ford’s work. Her supporting actress Oscar was won for Ma Joad in
The Grapes of Wrath
(40, John Ford)—a performance and a film that I find as touching as a politician’s apology. And Darwell’s “great speech” about the Joads being the sort of people who go on forever is a slur upon actual stoicism, a piece of Ford’s bigoted optimism, based on a cliché view of working people offered to them like a meal on polling day. There is something nightmarish about all the Darwell jowls over which must run tears she has just failed to bite back. It is traditional to describe her success in “warmhearted motherly roles,” but this is devouring motherhood, complacent, sanctimonious, and self-conscious.

Darwell was a stage actress who went to Hollywood in 1914 and played a few parts, among them
The Capture of Aguinaldo
(14) and
Rose of the Rancho
(14, Cecil B. De Mille). But she returned to the stage and only really entered on a movie career in 1930, when she was fifty:
Tom Sawyer
(30, John Cromwell);
Huckleberry Finn
(31, Norman Taurog);
Back Street
(32, John M. Stahl);
Bondage
(33, Alfred Santell);
Before Dawn
(33, Irving Pichel);
Only Yesterday
(33, Stahl);
Roman Scandals
(33, Frank Tuttle);
The Firebird
(34, William Dieterle);
Heat Lightning
(34, Mervyn Le Roy);
The Scarlet Empress
(34, Josef von Sternberg);
One Night of Love
(34, Victor Schertzinger);
Journal of a Crime
(34, William Keighley);
One More Spring
(35, Henry King);
Navy Wife
(35, Allan Dwan);
Paddy O’Day
(35, Lewis Seiler);
Life Begins at Forty
(35, George Marshall);
The Country Doctor
(36, King);
Captain January
(36, David Butler);
White Fang
(36, Butler);
Ramona
(36, King);
Nancy Steele Is Missing
(37, Marshall);
Slave Ship
(37, Tay Garnett);
Love Is News
(37, Garnett);
Dangerously Yours
(37, Malcolm St. Clair);
Jesse James
(39, King);
The Rains Came
(39, Clarence Brown);
Gone With the Wind
(39, Victor Fleming);
Chad Hanna
(40, King);
Brigham Young
(40, Henry Hathaway);
All That Money Can Buy
(41, Dieterle);
All Through the Night
(42, Vincent Sherman);
The Ox-Bow Incident
(43, William Wellman);
Government Girl
(43, Dudley Nichols);
Tender Comrade
(43, Edward Dmytryk);
The Impatient Years
(44, Irving Cummings);
Sunday Dinner for a Soldier
(44, Lloyd Bacon);
My Darling Clementine
(46, Ford);
Keeper of the Bees
(47, John Sturges);
Three Godfathers
(48, Ford);
Wagonmaster
(50, Ford);
Caged
(50, John Cromwell);
The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady
(50, Butler);
Surrender
(50, Dwan);
The Lemon Drop Kid
(51, Sidney Lanfield);
Fourteen Hours
(51, Hathaway);
Journey into Light
(51, Stuart Heisler);
We’re Not Married
(52, Edmund Goulding);
The Sun Shines Bright
(53, Ford);
Affair with a Stranger
(53, Roy Rowland);
Hit the Deck
(55, Rowland);
There’s Always Tomorrow
(56, Douglas Sirk);
The Last Hurrah
(58, Ford); and
Mary Poppins
(64, Robert Stevenson).

Jules Dassin
(1911–2008) b. Middletown, Connecticut
1942:
Nazi Agent; The Affairs of Martha; Reunion in France
. 1943:
Young Ideas
. 1944:
The Canterville Ghost
. 1945:
A Letter for Evie
. 1946:
Two Smart People
. 1947:
Brute Force
. 1948:
The Naked City
. 1949:
Thieves’ Highway
. 1950:
Night and the City
. 1956:
Rififi
. 1958:
Celui qui doit Mourir/He Who Must Die; La Loi
. 1960:
Never on Sunday
. 1962:
Phaedra
. 1964:
Topkapi
. 1966:
10:30 p.m. Summer
. 1968:
Survival!; Up Tight
. 1970:
Promise at Dawn
. 1978:
A Dream of Passion
. 1980:
Circle of Two
.

The gap in Dassin’s career during the early 1950s followed his departure from America for political reasons. But in Europe he found Melina Mercouri instead. Together, they made some of the most entertainingly bad films of the sixties and seventies: pictures that outstrip their own deficiencies and end up being riotously enjoyable as one waits to see how far pretentiousness will stretch. In good company, and a little drunk,
He Who Must Die, Phaedra
, and
10:30 p.m. Summer
might cure would-be suicides. There are those who found
Never on Sunday
charming, and
Topkapi
exciting. They may have been very drunk.
Topkapi
is incoherent, while Mercouri is about as inviting as Medusa. Dassin is an unashamed gimmick director—thus his implausible European films and the irrelevant exercise in silence in
Rififi
.

It follows that the “realism” of his postwar films in America was equally peripheral. Certainly one could not think it characteristic of the maker of
Reunion in France
, an espionage story of blithe absurdity. But
Brute Force
is striking;
Naked City
still looks an innovation in its use of location and the sly glamorizing of a policeman’s day;
Thieves’ Highway
is a robust, conventional thriller; while
Night and the City
—Dassin’s best film—does show a London neglected by British directors. In those years, at least, Dassin made movies that were enjoyable because of modest, fulfilled intentions. The pleasure later came only from the grand distortion implicit in the scheme.

Factual account does not really seem appropriate, but in the mid-1930s Dassin studied drama in Europe, and in 1936 he was acting with the Yiddish Theatre and then the Group Theater (he appears, rather helplessly, as an actor in
Thieves’ Highway, Rififi
, and
Never on Sunday
). He wrote for radio and directed for the stage before serving a director’s apprenticeship making shorts on famous people (Rubinstein, Casals, etc.) at MGM. He was also an assistant on
They Knew What They Wanted
(40, Garson Kanin) and
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
(41, Alfred Hitchcock).
Survival!
was a tribute to Zionism, and
Promise at Dawn
an adaptation of Romain Gary’s memoir of his mother, with Mercouri as Mom.

Delmer Daves
(1904–77), b. San Francisco
1943:
Destination Tokyo
. 1944:
The Very Thought of You
. 1945:
Hollywood Canteen; Pride of the Marines
. 1947:
The Red House; Dark Passage
. 1948:
To the Victor
. 1949:
A Kiss in the Dark; Task Force
. 1950:
Broken Arrow
. 1951:
Bird of Paradise
. 1952:
Return of the Texan
. 1953:
Treasure of the Golden Condor; Never Let Me Go
. 1954:
Demetrius and the Gladiators; Drum Beat
. 1956: J
ubal; The Last Wagon
. 1957:
3:10 to Yuma
. 1958:
Cowboy; Kings Go Forth; The Badlanders
. 1959:
The Hanging Tree
. 1960:
A Summer Place
. 1961:
Parrish; Susan Slade
. 1962:
Lovers Must Learn
. 1963:
Spencer’s Mountain
. 1964:
Youngblood Hawke
. 1965:
The Battle of the Villa Fiorita
.

Having studied at Stanford University, Daves began as an assistant to James Cruze in 1927 and worked at MGM as a technical advisor on college movies and as an actor:
The Duke Steps Out
(29, Cruze);
The Bishop Murder Case
(30, Nick Grinde); and
Good News
(30, Grinde). It is most suitable to regard him as a grownup boy and a purveyor of nonreflective action movies. He spent most of the 1930s as a scriptwriter:
So This Is College
(29, Sam Wood);
Shipmates
(31, Harry Pollard);
Flirtation Walk
(34, Frank Borzage);
Page Miss Glory
(35, Mervyn Le Roy);
The Go-Getter
(37, Busby Berkeley);
The Singing Marine
(37, Ray Enright);
The Petrified Forest
(36, Archie Mayo);
Love Affair
(39, Leo McCarey); and
You Were Never Lovelier
(42, William A. Seiter). Writing many of his own scripts, he made his debut with a war movie.

There were two purple passages in his career—1947, with
The Red House
, an Edward G. Robinson melodrama, and
Dark Passage
, a Bogart thriller; and then in the mid-1950s with several well-characterized Westerns that made full use of Daves’s eye for dramatic landscape and crane shots:
Drum Beat; Jubal; The Last Wagon; Cowboy. 3:10 to Yuma
does not deserve its high reputation, largely because of its contrived situation and Glenn Ford’s inability to be nasty. Daves’s long association with Warners had an unhappy climax in the 1960s with a series of romances that he made with the studio’s hopeful young talent (notably Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue—doll-kids). But Daves always seemed to enjoy his own films and it would take a severe viewer to hold out entirely.

Marion Davies
(Marion Cecilia Douras) (1897–1961), b. New York
Marion Davies was
not
Susan Alexander Kane. Yet, as time goes by, it may be that only the second Mrs. Kane keeps Davies alive. Susan Alexander could not sing; she did not want to make the attempt in anything larger than the parlor; she had her disasters onstage; and she deserted the Kane who had sought to invent her. Marion Davies, on the other hand, was a genuinely funny actress who did good work. She then stayed loyal to her lover and patron, William Randolph Hearst, no matter that he had foolishly insisted on putting her in grand and serious roles.

The story of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst is sadder and funnier than Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles allowed; it’s as intricate as the picture in Peter Bogdanovich’s
The Cat’s Meow
(02). Hearst was a lumbering, softhearted fool, devoted to his young mistress and deeply hurt by the picture of her in
Kane
. Susan Alexander, Kane’s second wife, is forced into the unlikely career of opera singer, has a rowdy New York accent, and mopes in the desolate caverns of Xanadu over huge jigsaw puzzles. That last point was typical of the gratuitous cruelty in the film: Marion Davies, too, occupied herself with jigsaws at Hearst’s San Simeon mansion. It is a wonder that
Kane
did not mimic Davies’s stammer as well. (And Gore Vidal has reported that “Rosebud” was Mr. Hearst’s pet name for Marion’s clitoris. How can fact compete with such Velcro stories?) But whereas Susan Alexander is a forlorn soprano, Marion Davies had more screen potential than Hearst’s heavy care noticed. The saddest stroke of all is not that Hearst imposed his mistress on the film public, but that the industry exploited his fondness for the girl. And when a man is caught up in the heroic gesture of founding a production company to showcase his mistress, no wonder that he likes to see her looking her best in romantic parts, even if her real talent is for knockabout comedy. King Vidor tells a story about his attempts to persuade Hearst to let Marion play comedy, to be met by this woolly dignity: “King’s right. But I’m right, too—because I’m not going to let Marion be hit in the face with a pie.”

Davies was in the Ziegfeld Follies when she met Hearst. She became his mistress and remained so until the great man died in 1951. Hearst was determined to make her a star and he founded Cosmopolitan Pictures to produce her films. By 1919, her movies were being distributed by Paramount:
Getting Mary Married
(19, Allan Dwan);
The Dark Star
(19, Dwan);
April Folly
(19, Robert Z. Leonard);
The Restless Sex
(20, Leonard);
Buried Treasure
(21, George D. Baker);
Enchantment
(21, Robert Vignola);
The Bride’s Play
(22, George W. Terwilliger);
Beauty’s Worth
(22, Vignola);
The Young Diana
(22, Albert Capellani and Vignola);
When Knighthood Was in Flower
(22, Vignola); and
Adam and Eva
(23, Vignola).

Adolph Zukor was content for Cosmopolitan to move over to Goldwyn: few of the Davies films had failed to make a loss. But through Goldwyn, Marion Davies became a bargaining counter in MGM’s search for glory. Louis Mayer lavished attention and money on Davies and allowed her a magnificent bungalow on the lot. These rewards exceeded her worth, but not the value of constant MGM publicity in the Hearst papers. MGM carried Davies through eight of their headiest years, relying on a favorable press from Hearst. The economics of the deal would need careful research, but the Hearst boycott on
Kane
shows how potent his favor could be. With MGM, Davies was seldom allowed to laugh as much as her limited abilities encouraged:
Yolanda
(24, Vignola);
Janice Meredith
(24, E. Mason Hopper);
Zander the Great
(25, George Hill);
Lights of Old Broadway
(25, Monta Bell);
Beverley of Graustark
(26, Sidney Franklin);
The Red Mill
(27, Roscoe Arbuckle);
Tillie the Toiler
(27, Hobart Henley);
The Fair Co-Ed
(27, Sam Wood);
Quality Street
(27, Franklin);
The Patsy
(28, King Vidor);
The Cardboard Lover
(28, Leonard);
Show People
(28, Vidor);
Not So Dumb
(30, Vidor);
The Florodora Girl
(30, Harry Beaumont);
The Bachelor Father
(31, Leonard);
It’s a Wise Child
(31, Leonard);
Five and Ten
(31, Leonard);
Polly of the Circus
(32, Alfred Santell);
Blondie of the Follies
(32, Edmund Goulding);
Peg o’ My Heart
(33, Leonard);
Going Hollywood
(33, Raoul Walsh); and
Operator 13
(34, Richard Boleslavsky).