The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (214 page)

Mr. Jones works as hard as a man with a rambling old house that needs many repairs—if it is to contain his resonant voice:
Hallelujah
(93, Charles Lane);
The Vernon Johns Story
(94, Kenneth Fink);
Confessions: Two Faces of Evil
(94, Gilbert Cates); the voice of Mufasa in
The Lion King
(94, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff);
Clear and Present Danger
(94, Phillip Noyce);
Clean Slate
(94, Mick Jackson);
Jefferson in Paris
(95, James Ivory); a voice in
Judge Dredd
(95, Danny Cannon);
Cry, the Beloved Country
(95, Darrell Roodt);
A Family Thing
(96, Richard Pearce);
Rebound
(96, Eriq La Salle);
Timepiece
(96, Marcus Cole);
What the Deaf Man Heard
(97, John Kent Harrison);
Alone
(97, Michael Lindsay-Hogg); a voice in
Primary Colors
(99, Mike Nichols);
Summer’s End
(98, Helen Shaver);
The Annihilation of Fish
(98, Charles Burnett);
Santa and Pete
(99, Duwayne Dunham);
Undercover Angel
(99, Bryan Michael Stoller);
Quest for Atlantis
(00, Kenyon Zehner);
When Willows Touch
(00, Shonde Rhimes);
Finder’s Fee
(00, Jeff Probst);
Recess Christmas: Miracle on Third Street
(01, Chuck Sheetz);
Feast of All Saints
(01, Peter Medak); in the TV series
Everwood; The Sandlot 2
(05, David M. Evans); a voice in
Star Wars III
(05, Lucas);
The Reading Room
(05, Georg Stanford Brown); the narrator on
Scary Movie 4
(06, David Zucker);
Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
(08, Malcolm D. Lee)
Jennifer Jones
(Phylis Isley), (1919–2009) b. Tulsa, Oklahoma
Of all actresses loved and promoted by producers (as opposed to directors), the case of Jennifer Jones is the most intriguing. For a fair argument can be made that David Selznick both made and nearly destroyed her career. She was an ardent young actress before she met Selznick, but it is hard now to be sure whether we would know her if his great wind had not picked her up like a leaf. He treated her like his dream; he may have driven her to neurotic illness, and worse. But Jones survived. Indeed, she has buried three husbands, all of them strong and demanding personalities.

Her father was in dusty show business in Oklahoma: he owned a few theatres and ran a touring show. As Phylis Isley, she appeared in two B movies at Republic,
New Frontier
(39, George Sherman) and
Dick Tracy’s G-Men
(39, William Whitney). In the same year, she married the young actor Robert Walker; they had two sons together. But in 1941, she auditioned at Selznick’s New York office for the role of
Claudia
(eventually taken by Dorothy McGuire), Selznick saw her, called her out to Hollywood, and put her in a one-act play by William Saroyan,
Hello Out There
, in a brief theatre festival at Santa Barbara.

He put her under contract; he ordered and paid for many lessons; he found her a new name; and an affair began. Yet at that time, Selznick had Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, and Ingrid Bergman under contract as well. Compared with those women, Jones was a novice, willing clay, obedient, adoring, and an unknown. Selznick got her the lead role at Fox in
The Song of Bernadette
(43, Henry King), for which she won the best actress Oscar. Her earnestness, her simplicity, and her wide, credulous eyes all worked for the young woman who sees visions. It was less acting than blessed casting—Jones had been educated at a Catholic school.

As their affair came to threaten his marriage, and help end hers, Selznick cast Jones as the elder daughter in
Since You Went Away
(44, John Cromwell) and loaned her to Hal Wallis for
Love Letters
(45, William Dieterle), in which she is very good as an amnesiac.

Selznick and his wife broke up in the summer of 1945, and not long thereafter he and Jennifer Jones began to be seen as a couple. His control of her, even on loan-out work, was so suffocating and detailed, and so dependent on eternal memos, that he began to earn her a bad reputation. This was increased by her own uncommon shyness and insecurity. In the years that followed, there was great love, but terrible guilt and anxiety as well as confusion and suicide attempts by Jones. She was overwhelmed by Selznick’s care, and probably grew more helpless as he made more strenuous efforts to look after her and to promote her as the greatest actress in the world. He controlled her career decisions, but began to lose his own momentum and judgment in the process.

She did
Cluny Brown
(46, Ernst Lubitsch) at Fox with great charm. But the major screen event of that time was her Pearl Chavez in
Duel in the Sun
(46, King Vidor), a lurid Western in which the strain of being a wanton half-breed and the notoriety of the sex scenes laid the groundwork for the film’s camp reputation. She was not well cast, but she tried so hard as Pearl, and she was granted the very best inflamed mood that Technicolor could manage.
Duel in the Sun
is foolish, yet moving—and it could not be so without the turmoil Selznick and Jones had made for themselves.

She had to play a child who becomes a woman in
Portrait of Jennie
(49, Dieterle), and she was loaned out for two duds
—We Were Strangers
(49, John Huston) and
Madame Bovary
(49, Vincente Minnelli), though she reaches anguish in the second half of the very lush Flaubert. She was at her peak, commercially; she had many offers; yet those two films were the best that plenty of indecision and personal chaos could manage. Most notably, there was a gap of nearly two years in which she was off the screen.

As she and Selznick were married, in 1949, she gave one of her best performances as the Shropshire lass torn between squire and parson in the Selznick-Korda
Gone to Earth
(50, Michael Powell). It was in 1951 that Robert Walker died, a disturbed man badly served by doctors, and a further spur to Jones’s guilt.

She was at her best, seemingly inspired and supported by Olivier, in
Carrie
(52, William Wyler), and she did a kind of remake of
Duel in the Sun—Ruby Gentry
(52, Vidor). She was funny, maybe without knowing why, in
Beat the Devil
(54, Huston) and helpless in
Indiscretion of an American Wife
(54, Vittorio De Sica). Selznick’s dominance faltered, and it may not be coincidental that
Love Is a Many Splendored Thing
(55, King) proved her first boxoffice hit in years. She aged considerably in the feeble
Good Morning, Miss Dove
(55, Henry Koster), but she began to show her age in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(56, Nunnally Johnson), and she was a very vague Elizabeth Barrett Browning in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
(57, Sidney Franklin).

She was plainly too mature and sedate for the Selznick production of
A Farewell to Arms
(57, Charles Vidor), the making of which was a succession of problems. The film flopped and effectively closed Selznick’s career as a producer. He insisted on casting her as Nicole—much too young, far too disturbed—in
Tender Is the Night
(62, King), a project that he prepared but could take no direct credit on.

When Selznick died, in 1965, she was left with much debt, their young daughter, a broken career, and the emotional wreckage that a great wind leaves behind. It did not all go well. Their daughter, Mary Jennifer, killed herself. Jones’s film career turned to
The Idol
(66, Daniel Petrie);
Angel, Angel, Down We Go
(69, Robert Thom); and
The Towering Inferno
(74, John Guillermin and Irwin Allen). But she married again—to the millionaire art collector Norton Simon—and she became not just his attendant in a paralyzing illness, but a surrogate in his business affairs after his death.

Selznick’s unquestioned adoration often meant that she was miscast: for her true range was narrow; her looks went quite early; and her own agonies, mixed with her husband’s interference, lost her many good opportunities. But who else has survived such travails? Who knows how far she understood what was going on, or the effect she was having? She was an actress who caused a huge stir, on and off the screen. And she was such a creature of the 1940s, it seems odd in hindsight that her dark looks and her real experience as femme fatale and harassed woman never graced a film noir—though
Laura
was one of the projects Selznick deemed unworthy of her.

L.Q. Jones
(Justus McQueen), b. Beaumont, Texas, 1927
Ace is in his office running the whole show at the Tangiers, in
Casino
(95, Martin Scorsese), when he gets a visit from Pat Webb. Ace is Robert De Niro in one of his most neurotic roles and Webb is L.Q Jones with all the time in the world so that he lets his drawl and his lazy thoughts really expand. He might finish a sentence tomorrow. Anyway, Ace has had to fire a lunkhead from the casino because he is so stupid. And Pat is not disagreeing with that decision, even if he has a distant family relationship with the cretin. It’s just, he implies, that here in Nevada we don’t fire our lunkheads—we keep them on as part of the informal welfare system. It is a scene that could go on forever, with the melodious smalltalk of Jones crushing the air conditioning itself until at long last the ridiculously efficient Ace realizes that in Nevada you are up against the desert.

If I tell you that Mr. Jones has also done distinguished service in
Men in War
(57, Anthony Mann); in
The Wild Bunch
(69, Sam Peckinpah), where his T.C. is a rival in unhindered reptilian behavior with Strother Martin’s Coffer; or in
Hell Is for Heroes
(62, Don Siegel), you can see that his persistence is remarkable. In all, he has over 150 acting credits to his name—most of them gathered in just about every Western series TV has ever mounted. It is not even that he has ever played what you might call supporting roles. He specializes in cameos, one-sceners, or even uncredited stroll-ons. Never mind, I believe every connoisseur of American acting has his Pat Webb lodged in their heart—and it comes as no surprise a little later, as Ace is humiliated and thrown out of court, to see that Webb is sitting there in his cowboy hat and his boots letting his mustache grow with the wisdom that has seen so much in Nevada come and go.

In addition, of course, in 1975 and from out of nowhere, L.Q. directed
A Boy and His Dog
(from the Harlan Ellison story) in a picture that looks as if he had been directing all his life. I am not going to list the television credits, just the best of the films he has accumulated over the years and the assurance that he has given me more pleasure than a number of star actors:
Battle Cry
(55, Raoul Walsh);
An Annapolis Story
(55, Siegel);
Target Zero
(55, Harmon Jones);
Toward the Unknown
(56, Mervyn LeRoy);
Between Heaven and Hell
(56, Richard Fleischer);
Love Me Tender
(56, Robert D. Webb);
Operation Mad Ball
(57, Richard Quine);
Buchanan Rides Alone
(58, Budd Boetticher);
The Naked and the Dead
(58, Walsh);
Battle of the Coral Sea
(59, Paul Wendkos);
Flaming Star
(60, Siegel);
Cimarron
(60, Mann);
Ride the High Country
(62, Peckinpah);
Major Dundee
(65, Peckinpah);
Hang ’Em High
(68, Ted Post);
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
(70, Peckinpah);
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
(73, Peckinpah);
White Line Fever
(75, Jonathan Kaplan);
The Edge
(97, Lee Tamahori);
The Patriot
(98, Dean Semler); and passing away most elegantly in
A Prairie Home Companion
(06, Robert Altman).

Tommy Lee Jones
, b. San Saba, Texas, 1946
For twenty years, Jones had kicked around in bad movies, generally playing gloomy villains or taciturn friends. He never let rip, and so he seemed depressed. But in the same period, he had three remarkable TV movies in which he proved himself to everyone (except Hollywood): a very clever take on the unease within
The Amazing Howard Hughes
(77, William A. Graham); winning an Emmy for his disturbed but very insecure Gary Gilmore in
The Executioner’s Song
(82, Lawrence Schiller), looking like a hood, but moving like a nerd; and as a classic cowboy in
Lonesome Dove
(89, Simon Wincer). Note that in all three, he was inhabiting the wild spaces of the West—Jones lives resolutely still, in Texas.

From a Dallas prep school he went to Harvard, where he studied English and played football and was part of a group of actors that included James Woods and Stockard Channing. He made his debut as Tom Lee Jones in
Love Story
(70, Arthur Hiller); and followed it with
Jackson County Jail
(76, Michael Miller);
Rolling Thunder
(77, John Flynn);
The Betsy
(78, Daniel Petrie);
The Eyes of Laura Mars
(78, Irvin Kershner); the husband in
Coal Miner’s Daughter
(80, Michael Apted); with Sally Field in
Back Roads
(81, Martin Ritt); going piratical in
Nate and Hayes
(83, Ferdinand Fairfax); very good as the ex-con in scenes with a daughter (Martha Plimpton) in
The River Rat
(84, Tom Rickman, the writer of
Coal Miner’s Daughter); Black Moon Rising
(86, Harley Cokliss);
The Big Town
(87, Ben Bolt);
Stormy Monday
(88, Mike Figgis);
The Package
(89, Andrew Davis);
Firebirds
(90, David Green).