The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (146 page)

It is necessary to stress this early excellence to show how disappointing her career as a whole has been. She made her debut in
No More Ladies
(35, Edward H. Griffith), had a small part in
Quality Street
(37, George Stevens), and played opposite Astaire in
A Damsel in Distress
(37, Stevens). After
Gunga Din
(39, Stevens), she was in
Man of Conquest
(39, George Nicholls), and the sheep in
The Women
(39, George Cukor) before
Rebecca
. But with her Oscar, she went after stately, romantic parts, lacking the real emotional sophistication of a Lombard or a Loy, and entered into weepies without the conviction of a Joan Crawford:
This Above All
(42, Anatole Litvak);
The Constant Nymph
(43, Edmund Goulding); effective in
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson);
Frenchman’s Creek
(44, Mitchell Leisen);
The Affairs of Susan
(45, William A. Seiter);
From This Day Forward
(46, John Berry); as a poisoner in
Ivy
(47, Sam Wood); and
The Emperor Waltz
(48, Billy Wilder).

The romantic vulnerability that Hitchcock had touched on was revealed again by Max Ophuls in the beautiful
Letter From an Unknown Woman
(48) where she is exceptional in getting the youth, the vulnerability, and the romanticism of the character. Thus, twice, Fontaine was so good as to leave us baffled by her general indifference. She was at least presentable in
Born to Be Bad
(50, Nicholas Ray) and
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
(56, Fritz Lang). Otherwise, her list of films is sadly undistinguished:
You Gotta Stay Happy
(48, H. C. Potter);
September Affair
(50, William Dieterle); nicely anxious in
Darling, How Could You!
(51, Leisen);
Something to Live For
(52, Stevens);
Ivanhoe
(52, Richard Thorpe);
Decameron Nights
(53, Hugo Fregonese);
The Bigamist
(53, Ida Lupino);
Casanova’s Big Night
(54, Norman Z. McLeod);
Serenade
(56, Anthony Mann);
Island in the Sun
(57, Robert Rossen);
Until They Sail
(57, Robert Wise);
A Certain Smile
(58, Jean Negulesco);
Tender Is the Night
(61, Henry King); and
The Witches
(66, Cyril Frankel). Since then, she has appeared on television in
The Users
(78, Joseph Hardy) and
Dark Mansions
(86, Jerry London).

Bryan Forbes
(John Theobald Clarke), b. London, 1926
1961:
Whistle Down the Wind
. 1962:
The L-Shaped Room
. 1964:
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
. 1966:
King Rat; The Wrong Box
. 1967:
The Whisperers
. 1968:
Deadfall
. 1969:
The Madwoman of Chaillot
. 1971:
The Raging Moon
. 1975:
The Stepford Wives
. 1976:
The Slipper and the Rose
. 1978:
International Velvet
. 1981: an episode from
Sunday Lovers
. 1982:
Better Late Than Never
. 1983:
A King in Yellow
(TV). 1985:
The Naked Face
. 1990:
The Endless Game
.

Here is a career to illustrate the misleading storybook road to success in the British film industry. In March 1971, still only forty-five years old, Forbes resigned from one of the rare executive positions in charge of British production. For two years he had headed the EMI setup, pledged to distinguished, modest-priced movies. To its credit was the bonanza of
The Railway Children
, the eccentricity of
The Tales of Beatrix Potter
, and a string of mediocre, bloodless ventures:
Hoffmann, The Breaking of Bumbo
, and his own
The Raging Moon
. As a group, the films seemed to retract from opportunity, rather than grasp it. The fact is that as actor, writer, director, and executive he has often lacked creative confidence and character.

In his enforced rest he wrote a novel. This was a true reversal since, while still a drama student, he had begun by writing fiction. After military service he went into films as a supporting actor, as bright and callow as a midshipman:
The Small Back Room
(48, Michael Powell);
All Over the Town
(48, Derek Twist);
Dear Mr. Prohack
(49, Thornton Freeland);
The Wooden Horse
(50, Jack Lee);
Green Grow the Rushes
(51, Twist);
The World in His Arms
(52, Raoul Walsh);
Appointment in London
(52, Philip Leacock);
Sea Devils
(53, Walsh);
The Million Pound Note
(53, Ronald Neame);
An Inspector Calls
(54, Guy Hamilton);
The Colditz Story
(54, Hamilton);
Passage Home
(55, Roy Baker);
Now and Forever
(55, Mario Zampi);
The Last Man to Hang
(56, Terence Fisher);
It’s Great to Be Young
(56, Cyril Frankel);
The Key
(58, Carol Reed);
I Was Monty’s Double
(58, John Guillermin); and
Yesterday’s Enemy
(59, Val Guest).

But earnest effort got him nowhere as an actor. It was as a writer that he promoted himself, partly on the wings of the spurious realism that regenerated British cinema:
Cockleshell Heroes
(56, José Ferrer);
House of Secrets
(56, Guy Green);
I Was Monty’s Double; The Captain’s Table
(59, Lee); and
The Angry Silence
(60, Green), which he also coproduced with Richard Attenborough. The mixture of emotional melodrama and industrial setting was well intentioned but fixedly middlebrow. No doubt Forbes worked out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the complacency of British films, but instead of vigor he brought neatness, stridency, and eventually pretentiousness to them.
The League of Gentlemen
(60, Basil Dearden), in which he also acted, was polished entertainment and
Only Two Can Play
(61, Sidney Gilliat) was amusing. But his script of
Station Six Sahara
(64, Seth Holt) depended on Holt’s unstable vitality. His work on
Of Human Bondage
(64, Ken Hughes and Henry Hathaway) was simply routine.

But
The Angry Silence
had led Forbes toward direction and a recurring compromise between anodyne seriousness and popular taste. His films tend to run together, without dominant themes or personal style. All too easily they surrender to plot novelty and obvious, slick effect. The best that can be said for them is that they have won some good performances from Hayley Mills, Richard Attenborough, and Edith Evans. But their range seems insecure and the gulf between the women’s magazine romanticism of
The L-Shaped Room
and the cynicism of
King Rat
is that of a bureaucrat too harassed by his financiers to find a personality.
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
is a good subject, but taken out of Forbes’s hands by Kim Stanley’s overacting.

His last credit was on the screenplay of
Chaplin
(92, Attenborough).

Glenn Ford
(Gwyllyn Samuel Newton), (1916–2006), b. Quebec, Canada
After a few years on the stage, Ford made his movie debut in
Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence
(40, Ricardo Cortez). Before service in the marines, he had also appeared in John Cromwell’s
So Ends Our Night
(41), George Marshall’s
Texas
(41), and in two Charles Vidor movies,
The Lady in Question
(40) and
The Desperadoes
(43). After the war, he returned as a decent, pipe-smoking idealist, dealing with the two Bette Davises in Curtis Bernhardt’s
A Stolen Life
(46). But he achieved real stardom at Columbia with Rita Hayworth in Vidor’s
Gilda
(46), playing an uncommonly nasty and twisted hero, a misogynist with fond eyes on George Macready’s swordstick. I don’t think American film had offered so nasty a fellow.

Ford was generally likable onscreen and he managed to make genial, relaxed sincerity interesting. Such ease often directed him toward Westerns, to comedies, and to romantic dramas. To all these genres he brought care, authenticity, and intelligence. Thus, among a score of Westerns, he is good in Levin’s
The Man from Colorado
(48), Boetticher’s
The Man from the Alamo
(53), Russell Rouse’s
The Fastest Gun Alive
(56), and Burt Kennedy’s
The Rounders
(65), but was most beguiling as the outlaw in
3:10 to Yuma
(57, Delmer Daves), the most famous of the five. He showed a hardness beneath the calm as
Jubal
(56, Daves), as the foreman in
Cowboy
(58, Daves), and in Jerry Thorpe’s
Day of the Evil Gun
(68).

He hardly touched on comedy until Daniel Mann’s
The Teahouse of the August Moon
(56), but quickly achieved exceptional timing with jokes and an instinct for character and emotion within humor: this was made clear in George Marshall’s excellent spoof,
The Sheepman
(58), in Capra’s
Pocketful of Miracles
(61), and above all in Minnelli’s
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
(63), a film that depends upon Ford’s thoughtful portrait of a widower.

Such sympathetic good looks also made Ford ideal casting for weepies and romances, and in this category Charles Vidor’s
The Loves of Carmen
(48), Bernhardt’s
Interrupted Melody
(55), Anthony Mann’s
Cimarron
(60), Minnelli’s
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
(61), and Delbert Mann’s
Dear Heart
(64) should all be mentioned.

In a hardworking career, Ford also appeared in several adventure films:
Framed
(47, Richard Wallace);
The White Tower
(50, Ted Tetzlaff); Joseph H. Lewis’s
Undercover Man
(49);
The Green Glove
(52) and
Forbidden
(53), both for Rudolph Maté;
Terror on a Train
(53, Tetzlaff);
Plunder in the Sun
(53, John Farrow); Tourneur’s
Appointment in Honduras
(53); Maté’s
The Violent Men
(55); Blake Edwards’s
Experiment in Terror
(62); and
Fate Is the Hunter
(64, Ralph Nelson).

It is because Ford proved so durable, and because he is so close to the mainstream of entertainment movies, that in the late 1960s his career began to decline into dull Westerns:
Rage
(66, Gilberto Gazcon), made in Mexico;
The Pistoleros of Red River
(67); Karlson’s
A Time for Killing
(67) and
Heaven with a Gun
(69, Lee H. Katzin). It was a sign of the times that he turned to a TV series,
Cade’s County
, but
Santee
(72, Gary Nelson) was as good as his best. He was one of the rear admirals in
Midway
(76, Jack Smight); and he had a superb death scene in
Superman
(78, Richard Donner).

The professional thoroughness of Ford’s work is distinguished by three films: he was the teacher-hero in Richard Brooks’s
Blackboard Jungle
(55), the lover in Fritz Lang’s
Human Desire
(54), and most memorably, the detective in Lang’s
The Big Heat
(53)—one of the most intense and characteristic expressions of righteous vengeance in all of Lang’s work and one of Ford’s best studies in widower nobility.

As a veteran, he did sadly forgettable work, much of it for television:
Evening in Byzantium
(78, Jerry London);
The Sacketts
(79, Robert Totten);
Beggarman, Thief
(79, Lawrence Doheny);
The Gift
(79, Don Taylor), playing an old Irish seaman with great feeling;
Virus
(80, Kinji Fukasaku);
Happy Birthday to Me
(81, J. Lee Thompson);
Border Shootout
(90, C. J. McIntyre);
Final Verdict
(91, Jack Fisk);
Raw Nerve
(91, David A. Prior).

In hindsight, he becomes more interesting, and more drawn to sadomasochism. I suspect he was more, and worse, than the decent guy he pretended to be.

Harrison Ford
, b. Chicago, 1942
Is there an actor in the history of movies whose films have grossed more money? Harrison Ford has starred in three Indiana Jones pictures; he played Han Solo three times; he was part of
American Graffiti;
and a lead in such clear-cut hits as
Witness, Working Girl
, and
The Fugitive
. He has been a staple of the last twenty-five years, on film and video, an unquestioned hero to millions of kids all over the world. On the other hand, I have never had the feeling that Ford has won—or much wants to win—the love of the masses. There is a distance about him, a restrained, chilling patience that seems wary of going beyond his own known limits. On the few occasions of adventurousness in Ford’s career, he has revealed himself as a limited, anxious actor. If
The Mosquito Coast
(86, Peter Weir) and
Regarding Henry
(91, Mike Nichols) have been his greatest tests, then Ford has hardly dared compete. In
Mosquito Coast
, he never approached the insane, fascist charm of the character; while as
Henry
, he settled for a woefully shallow pathos.

He attended Ripon College in Wisconsin, and went straight to Hollywood and contracts at Columbia and Universal. He was a full decade in development, on TV and in small movie parts:
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round
(66, Bernard Girard);
Luv
(67, Clive Donner);
A Time for Killing
(67, Phil Karlson);
Journey to Shiloh
(68, William Hale);
The Intruders
(70, William Graham);
Getting Straight
(70, Richard Rush);
American Graffiti
(73, George Lucas), in which he was one of the least notable new faces; memorable as the gray-suit aide in
The Conversation
(74, Francis Ford Coppola).