The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (18 page)

Such a notion was underlined by Astaire’s latter-day appearance in “straight” parts. After
Silk Stockings
, in 1957, he largely gave himself up to television spectaculars and to acting. The first sour fruit of this was
On the Beach
(59, Stanley Kramer). If anyone had ever doubted Kramer’s crassness, here was final proof. For he cast Astaire as a motor-racing driver, a man essentially hidden in the shell of a car. Surely nuclear holocaust could have been as glibly dramatized by Astaire’s playing a golfer? Then at least we might have enjoyed his dainty prowling round the greens.

Yet once Astaire was asked to partake of earnest melodrama, it was a strain to watch him at all. In playacting, he is downright shifty: like a philosopher at a bingo session, there is the embarrassing and depleting sense of a man having been caught on the blind side, but gamely trying to be polite. Furthermore, drama blurred his appearance. In
On the Beach
, he is sometimes disheveled, which is heresy against the perpetual grooming of his characteristic work. This applied as much to
Finian’s Rainbow
(68, Francis Ford Coppola), a respectful and nostalgic tribute to his greatness, as to his other totally mediocre films of the 1960s:
The Pleasure of His Company
(61, George Seaton);
The Notorious Landlady
(62, Richard Quine);
The Midas Run
(69, Alf Kjellin); and
The Towering Inferno
(74, John Guillermin).

In musicals, too, Astaire is the man without character; sometimes not so far from the man without humanity. But in the musicals, this is not so much a shortcoming as an audacious emphasis on style. Astaire is preeminently the saint of 1930s sophistication, the butterfly in motion till he dies, whose enchanting light voice kids the sentimentality of his songs. (He is a great singer—no wonder all the songwriters wanted him—who treats the song with reverence.) He is the man about town, empty of personality, opinions, and warmth, but a man who carries himself matchlessly. There is something of the eighteenth-century dandy in his preference for taking nothing seriously, save for the articulation of his superb movement. Compare him with Nick Charles, the Hammett private eye as played by William Powell. Both are more polish than substance, but Powell’s Charles has an inkling of his own frivolousness and is cynical to conceal it. Astaire is utterly tranquil, hence the inane playboy figures he embodies, men who exist only to walk sweetly across lounges, to preserve rigorous trouser creases and that high, carefree tone of voice. Astaire is the supreme ideal of that gang of 1930s American misanthropes: Herman Mankiewicz, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Ben Hecht. Seeing that life was at best absurd, at worst horrifying, they opted for shining grace in tiny things and some vivid, “useless” excellence, such as Astaire’s dancing. Elsewhere, I have suggested that he could have been Jekyll to Cagney’s Hyde. Astaire was also very near to Jay Gatsby, an insignificant man, bent on easing public occasions.

I was struck by this when taking some students through an extract from
Silk Stockings
(57, Rouben Mamoulian). The excerpt we were approaching was the sequence in which Astaire and Cyd Charisse dance across several deserted film sets. It is one of the greatest of movie-dance sequences: a compendium of moving camera, wide screen, counterpointed rhythms, and the intriguing contrast of masterful Astaire and frigid Charisse. But before the dancing begins, there is a prelude. Charisse arrives by car at the studio gates and Astaire, muttering “Hallo, hallo …,” hobbles over to meet her. That movement kept us from the dance, because it was exquisite, original, and Astaire. The emotion of the moment—of lovers reunited—hardly seems to strike him. But ask him to move from A to B and he is aroused.

This touches on a vital principle: that it is often preferable to have a movie actor who moves well than one who “understands” the part. A director ought to be able to explain a part, but very few men or women can move well in front of a camera. In
The Big Sleep
, there are numerous shots of Bogart simply walking across rooms: they draw us to the resilient alertness of his screen personality as surely as the acid dialogue. Bogart’s lounging freedom captures our hopes. With Astaire this effect is far more concentrated, because it is his single asset.

His career is the story of a search for partners who could endure his glorious limitation. At first, he danced onstage with his sister, Adele: they were sensations in London and New York. But when she married (into the English aristocracy) in 1932, he dodged into films. Selznick was convinced of Astaire’s charm “in spite of his enormous ears and bad chin line.” His debut, at age thirty-four, was
Dancing Lady
(33, Robert Z. Leonard) at MGM, with Joan Crawford. But he was signed up by RKO and partnered with Ginger Rogers for nine films that are the least alloyed expression of self-sufficient movement. Above all, Ginger joined him in those intimate, but accelerating, conversational dances, where hard heels and glossy floors speak of bliss:
Flying Down to Rio
(33, Thornton Freeland);
The Gay Divorcee
(34, Mark Sandrich);
Roberta
(35, William A. Seiter);
Top Hat
(35, Sandrich);
Follow the Fleet
(36, Sandrich);
Swing Time
(36, George Stevens);
Shall We Dance?
(37, Sandrich);
Carefree
(38, Sandrich); and
The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
(39, H. C. Potter). In 1937, he had played opposite Joan Fontaine in
A Damsel in Distress
(37, Stevens) with less happy results. And it is true that in some later films he seems too refined for the company he is keeping. But he is splendid with that other virtuoso, Eleanor Powell, in
Broadway Melody of 1940
(40, Norman Taurog) and with Paulette Goddard in
Second Chorus
(40, Potter). He worked well with the lofty glamour of Rita Hayworth in
You’ll Never Get Rich
(41, Sidney Lanfield) and
You Were Never Lovelier
(42, Seiter), but had to settle for Bing Crosby as stimulus in
Holiday Inn
(42, Sandrich), and went back to RKO for
The Sky’s the Limit
(43, Edward H. Griffith), which has a marvelous late-night solo passage.

Vincente Minnelli’s sheer, visual extravagance was well suited to Astaire, and he excelled with another rather heartless dancer, Lucille Bremer, in
Ziegfeld Follies
(46) and
Yolanda and the Thief
(45). The high theatricality of the latter suits him exactly. The idea of an angel masquerading as a man is itself an insight into Astaire’s personality. After
Blue Skies
(46, Stuart Heisler), with Crosby again, he replaced the injured Gene Kelly in
Easter Parade
(48, Charles Walters) and seemed a very cold mentor to Judy Garland. He and Ginger Rogers were flatly reunited in
The Barkleys of Broadway
(49, Walters) and the next four were unimpressive: evidently shrinking from Red Skelton as a songwriting team in
Three Little Words
(50, Richard Thorpe); with Betty Hutton in
Let’s Dance
(50, Norman Z. McLeod); brilliant but showy in
Royal Wedding
(51, Stanley Donen); and
The Belle of New York
(52, Walters).

The Band Wagon
(53) is one of Minnelli’s fragmented films, but it introduced Astaire to Cyd Charisse and gave them the witty Spillane pastiche routine.
Daddy Long Legs
(55, Jean Negulesco) with Leslie Caron is dull, but Astaire ended with two of his finest films:
Funny Face
(57, Donen) and
Silk Stockings
. The first is his most successful romance, for it looks as though he was intrigued by the challenge of “musicalizing” the supposedly straight Audrey Hepburn. He choreographed
Funny Face
personally, but the ultimate authorship is due to Donen, if only for making the routines so enchantingly lyrical. Mamoulian is clear in every frame of
Silk Stockings
, but it is also the vindication of two rather frozen personalities obsessed by dance and its route to whirling rapture.

Mary Astor
(Lucille Langhanke) (1906–87), b. Quincy, Illinois
Mary Astor’s autobiography,
My Story
, published in 1959, is better written than most similar exercises and much more frank. Dotted through her more than one hundred movies, there are many signs of an intelligent woman. That those views are too rare was only one of her problems: originally, an ambitious German father had thrust her into the movies; after her affair with John Barrymore, her first husband, Kenneth Hawks, was killed in an air crash; three more marriages ended in divorce, and the second saw the scurrilous publication, in 1936, of alleged and lurid extracts from her diary, including a graphic love affair with playwright George Kaufman. She never stayed a star for more than one year at a time, and she slipped from supporting parts into alcoholism and sessions with an analyst that eventually led to the autobiography. Despite her long career, she disliked Hollywood—though whether for itself or for the way it thwarted her is an open question. Fairly early, she won a reputation for being independent, and later something stuck from the diary incident; as a result, she had her best chances playing polite bitches or demure snakes in the grass—above all Hammett’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy in
The Maltese Falcon
(41, John Huston). That picture of chronic lying did not hinder her genuine warmth as the mother in
Meet Me in St. Louis
(44, Vincente Minnelli) and
Little Women
(49, Mervyn Le Roy).

She made her debut in 1921 with
Sentimental Tommy
(John S. Robertson), and worked nomadically without ever being more than a promising newcomer:
Bought and Paid For
(22, William C. De Mille);
Second Fiddle
(22, Frank Tuttle);
Puritan Passion
(23, Tuttle);
Success
(23, Ralph Ince);
The Fighting Coward
(24, James Cruze);
Beau
Brummel
(24, Harry Beaumont);
Unguarded Woman
(24, Alan Crosland);
Inez from Hollywood
(24, Alfred E. Green);
Don Q, Son of Zorro
(24, Donald Crisp);
The Scarlet Saint
(25, George Archainbaud);
The Wise Guy
(26, Frank Lloyd); and
Don Juan
(26, Crosland). That innovatory sound film (opposite a Barrymore who would have preferred Dolores Costello to his discarded mistress) boosted her, but she rarely got good parts:
The Rough Riders
(27, Victor Fleming);
Two Arabian Knights
(27, Lewis Milestone);
No Place to Go
(27, Le Roy);
Dressed to Kill
(28, Irving Cummings); and
Dry Martini
(28, Harry d’Arrast). Despite her subsequent prowess with good dialogue, she failed a test for talkies and was briefly put out of work before
Ladies Love Brutes
(30, Rowland V. Lee);
The Runaway Bride
(30, Crisp);
Holiday
(30, Edward H. Griffith);
Other Men’s Women
(31, William Wellman);
The Sin Ship
(31, Louis Wolheim);
The Royal Bed
(31, Lowell Sherman);
Smart Woman
(31, Gregory La Cava);
Red Dust
(32, Fleming);
The World Changes
(33, Le Roy);
The Kennel Murder Case
(33, Michael Curtiz);
Easy to Love
(34, William Keighley);
I Am a Thief
(35, Robert Florey); and
Page Miss Glory
(35, Le Roy). Her career seems to have been enhanced by the diary scandal, for 1936–42 was the period of her best parts:
Dodsworth
(36, William Wyler); never more beautiful than in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(37, John Cromwell);
Hurricane
(37, John Ford);
Listen Darling
(38, Edward L. Marin);
There’s Always a Woman
(38, Alexander Hall); pregnant and hilarious during the making of
Midnight
(39, Mitchell Leisen);
Brigham Young
(40, Henry Hathaway); winning a best supporting actress Oscar and having a ball opposite Bette Davis in
The Great Lie
(41, Edmund Goulding); looking too old in
Across the Pacific
(42, Huston); and
Palm Beach Story
(42, Preston Sturges).

MGM put her under contract, but only for poor leads or good supporting parts:
Young Ideas
(43, Jules Dassin);
Thousands Cheer
(43, George Sidney);
Fiesta
(47, Richard Thorpe);
Desert Fury
(48, Lewis Allen); fine as the hooker in
Act of Violence
(49, Fred Zinnemann); and
Any Number Can Play
(49, Le Roy). Her crackup meant that she played only small parts thereafter:
So This Is Love
(53, Gordon Douglas);
A Kiss Before Dying
(56, Gerd Oswald);
The Devil’s Hairpin
(57, Cornel Wilde);
This Happy Feeling
(58, Blake Edwards);
A Stranger in My Arms
(58, Helmut Kautner);
Return to Peyton Place
(61, José Ferrer);
Youngblood Hawke
(64, Delmer Daves); and
Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte
(64, Robert Aldrich). After her autobiography, she was encouraged to go on to novels.

Alexandre Astruc
, b. Paris, 1923
1948:
Aller-Retour
(s);
Ulysse et les Mauvaises Rencontres
(s). 1952:
Le Rideau Cramoisi/The Crimson Curtain
(s). 1955:
Les Mauvaises Rencontres
. 1958:
Une Vie
. 1960:
La Proie pour l’Ombre
. 1961:
L’Education Sentimentale 61
. 1963:
Le Puits et le Pendule
(s). 1964:
Evariste Gallois
(s). 1966:
La Longue Marche
. 1968:
Flammes sur l’Adriatique
. 1976:
Sartre par Lui-même
(d).