The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (236 page)

The later work does not relax.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
is the proof of a savage theorem, despite a low budget. The Indian films are an enjoyable return to the world of
Die Spinnen
. They are children’s stories, but made with an authority that could not be bettered as a model for students. If you wish to see how demanding and how simple filmmaking is, then study Lang. But be warned: he is an austere pessimist and only the glory of images put together to such damning effect can counter the implications of that effect. Lang’s adult stories are too concentrated for today’s standards.

Walter Lang
(1898–1972), b. Memphis, Tennessee
1925:
Red Kimono
. 1926:
The Earth Woman; The Golden Web; Money to Burn
. 1927:
By Whose Hand?; The College Hero; The Ladybird; Sally in Our Alley; The Satin Woman
. 1928:
The Desert Bride; The Night Flyer
. 1929:
The Spirit of Youth
. 1930:
The Big Fight; Brothers; Cock o’ the Walk
(codirected with R. William Neill);
The Costello Case; Hello Sister
. 1931:
Hellbound; The Command Performance; Women Go On For Ever
. 1932:
No More Orchids
. 1933:
The Warrior’s Husband; Meet the Baron
. 1934:
The Mighty Barnum; Whom the Gods Destroy
. 1935:
Carnival; Hooray for Love
. 1936:
Love Before Breakfast
. 1937:
Wife, Doctor and Nurse; Second Honeymoon
. 1938:
The Baroness and the Butler; I’ll Give a Million
. 1939:
The Little Princess
. 1940:
The Blue Bird; Star Dust; Tin Pan Alley; The Great Profile
. 1941:
Moon Over Miami; Weekend in Havana
. 1942:
Song of
the Islands; The Magnificent Dope
. 1943:
Coney Island
. 1944:
Greenwich Village
. 1945:
State Fair
. 1946:
Sentimental Journey; Claudia and David
. 1947:
Mother Wore Tights
. 1948:
Sitting Pretty; When My Baby Smiles at Me
. 1949:
You’re My Everything
. 1950:
Cheaper by the Dozen; The Jackpot
. 1951:
On the Riviera
. 1952:
With a Song in My Heart
. 1953:
Call Me Madam
. 1954:
There’s No Business Like Show Business
. 1956:
The King and I
. 1957:
The Desk Set
. 1959:
But Not for Me
. 1960:
Can-Can; The Marriage-Go-Round
. 1961:
Snow White and the Three Stooges
.

Lang served in France during the First World War and then graduated from the University of Tennessee. He was given his chance to direct by Mrs. Wallace Reid, who subsequently appeared in
The Satin Woman
. Lang worked for Columbia and James Cruze, but by the mid-1930s he found his proper place at Fox, where he stayed for the rest of his career. As well as making a few comedies and romances, including a John Barrymore spoof,
The Great Profile
, and two Shirley Temple pictures
—The Little Princess
and
The Blue Bird
—Lang worked largely on musicals, whipping up the enthusiasm of Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Don Ameche, Carmen Miranda, and Dan Dailey. It need only be emphasized that the Fox product pales beside the MGM musicals.

In the 1950s, survival ensured that Lang was put in charge of a few major Fox musicals.
The King and I
was a great popular success, and
With a Song in My Heart
encouraged the full-blooded emotion of Susan Hayward. But the films as a whole are crude, listless, and ugly. Nikita Khrushchev frowned upon the vulgarity of
Can-Can
. Cold War observers feared deeper motives behind this disapproval—perhaps the Russian only knew his Renoir.

Harry Langdon
(1884–1944), b. Council Bluffs, Iowa
The Picturegoer’s Who’s Who
for 1933 had no entry for Langdon, so complete had been his downfall. Nothing that he could do in his last eleven years restored him to his former glory. But the fact that he lived on so haplessly has by now become part of the Langdon legend, the glum postscript to yet another career blighted by Hollywood’s callousness.

However, people should be given credit for bad films and mistakes as much as for their successes. Langdon handled his affairs unwisely and, more important, he had an insecure grasp of why he was funny. Whether we think of comedians as instinctive, good-natured clowns or as disenchanted men who make us laugh to stop themselves from crying, neither interpretation fits well with the comedian himself as a professional technician. There seems to be, intrinsically, a gulf between actorly intelligence and the screen’s image of guileless innocence at the center of comic disaster. Audiences tend to be less inquisitive about the manufacture of comedy than about the resources of drama. And the men who have run the industry have sometimes treated comedians with such brutality that they might be acting on the assumption that no comedian was really in charge of his or her career. The dramatic reversal in Harry Langdon’s fortunes may even stem from his attempt to step outside the baby-faced, baggy-trousered simpleton that he played so well if in so few films. But if in so few, was the creation Langdon’s or a light that fell briefly on him, but in which he never saw himself?

Langdon had knocked around so much before he got into movies that it was a wonder he still seemed vulnerable. He was part of a Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show, a juggler, a circus clown, and a newspaper cartoonist before he entered vaudeville. He stayed there some twenty years without getting anywhere near the top. In 1923, Mack Sennett recruited him, probably on the advice of gagman Frank Capra. Langdon’s moony daydreamer was evolved in a series of two-reelers, and guided by director Harry Edwards and gagmen, Capra and Arthur Ripley. Langdon had a small part in the Colleen Moore
Ella Cinders
(26, Alfred E. Green), but left Sennett for Warners and formed the Harry Langdon Corporation for his first feature,
Tramp, Tramp, Tramp
(26, Edwards), with six credited gagmen, including Capra. Sennett then released an earlier feature,
His First Flame
, also directed by Edwards, and with the assistance of Capra and Ripley.

There is no question about the success of the team: in
Tramp …
and the next few films, Langdon is a most beguiling dope. Yet it could be that this is only a very skillful manipulation of Langdon’s dullness. There are moments when he seems casual or indifferent, as if not fully aware of what is going on around him—imagine Laurel without Hardy, imagine Laurel preoccupied with the loss, and you are surprisingly close to Harry Langdon, not just in looks but in the self-absorbed dismay.

Nevertheless, Langdon was now immensely popular. His next film was his best,
The Strong Man
(26, Frank Capra). Why Capra took over is not clear, nor can the extra sharpness be proved as coming from him. But the group was splitting.
Long Pants
(27, Capra) was made with Capra, Ripley, and Langdon quarreling, and when it was finished, Capra was fired. Capra reacted fiercely in a letter to the press that charged Langdon with vain and harmful interference. Talented people often fight, but how much of this is the disparity between the real Langdon and the figure Capra had helped invent? The Langdon Corporation persevered and Langdon himself directed his next three films:
Three’s a Crowd
(27), which has a new and unwelcome gravity;
The Chaser
(28); and
Heart Trouble
(28). They are inferior films and their returns fell away.

Warners let him go and he was out of work. Then Hal Roach made a series of shorts with him, and in 1930 Universal teamed him with Slim Summerville in
See America Thirst
(30, William James Craft). He went back to Warners for
A Soldier’s Plaything
(30, Michael Curtiz), but next year he was bankrupt.

Thus, two years later, the removal from reference books. Sound only underlined the lack of personality. On and off during the 1930s, he made more comedy shorts and appeared in a few features. They were, generally, minor works and nothing Langdon did suggested he was worthier of better things:
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum
(33, Lewis Milestone);
My Weakness
(33, David Butler);
There Goes My Heart
(38, Norman Z. McLeod); with Oliver Hardy in
Zenobia
(39, Gordon Douglas);
All-American Co-Ed
(41, LeRoy Prinz);
Spotlight Scandals
(43, William Beaudine);
Block Busters
(44, Wallace Fox); and
Swingin’ on a Rainbow
(45, Beaudine). He also helped to write the Laurel and Hardy picture,
A Chump at Oxford
(40, Alfred Goulding).

Jessica Lange
, b. Cloquet, Minnesota, 1949
In the early 1980s, it was easy to make a case for Jessica Lange as the most exciting and dangerous young actress in America. (Debra Winger was her closest rival, which may be a way of seeing how harsh America is on threatening young women.) In one year, Lange won the best supporting actress Oscar for
Tootsie
(82, Sydney Pollack) and a best actress nomination for
Frances
(82, Graeme Clifford). Moreover, having had a child by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Lange was in the process of winning away Sam Shepard from wife and family. There was such ability and authority, yet still she had the wild-eyed, untidy manner of a young hitchhiker in Arkansas or Oklahoma. It was possible to believe in her unusual upbringing: intense devotion to the northern Midwest; time in Paris as a musician and dancer, before modeling in New York, and then the stunning aplomb that pulled off
King Kong
(76, John Guillermin) and supplied the comedy of that unfairly berated remake.

She had gone on to be the angel of death in
All That Jazz
(79, Bob Fosse) and part of the team in
How to Beat the High Cost of Living
(80, Robert Scheerer). Her breakthrough had come as a Cora worthy of James M. Cain in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(81, Bob Rafelson), where she easily handled the neediness, the spite, and the lunging desperation of a woman who deserved more than roadside kitchens. This is still, arguably, her most complete and disturbing performance.

Her work in
Tootsie
was clever, gracious, and appealing—no more than a dozen others could have managed.
Frances
was an untidy film, filled with bravura set pieces, but never enough to persuade us that Frances Farmer had been less than ill or a pain in the neck. Moreover, for all her own loveliness, Lange just lacked that wide-browed, bright-eyed élan of the real Farmer.

Since then, in child-bearing partnership with Sam Shepard, she has grown older and less arresting.
Country
(84, Richard Pearce) was a decent, sensitive examination of rural life and the farming community, yet it felt like marking time and seemed to slight the actress’s urge to identify herself with a simpler, if not Simple, Life. She was good, on TV, as Maggie in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(84, Jack Y. Hofsiss), but somehow the danger of the original was gone. She made a convincing Patsy Cline in
Sweet Dreams
(85, Karel Reisz), yet the film had no sense of necessity.
Crimes of the Heart
(86, Bruce Beresford) was equally lacking in urgency.
Everybody’s All-American
(88, Taylor Hackford) was her first unequivocal stooge female lead part, and
Far North
(88, Shepard) was too much
Country
revisited.

In
Music Box
(89, Costa-Gavras), she had a large part in a Big, Stanley Kramerish picture. She carried it off superbly and gave the predictable plot a chance of seeming like life. But there was something middle-aged about the film.
Men Don’t Leave
(90, Paul Brickman), a delicate, small romance, secure in its family reality, showed how alert she could be still. But in the unpleasant
Cape Fear
(91, Martin Scorsese), she was a stock figure from melodrama, letting the cruel action have its way with her.

In 1992, in a Broadway revival, she played Blanche in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. That big event never quite came to life and reviewers observed Lange’s lack of stage presence. She was much improved, on TV again, in a version of Willa Cather’s
O Pioneers!
(91, Glenn Jordan), which Lange herself produced. But she was just “the woman” in
Night and the City
(92, Irwin Winkler).

She then won her Oscar as the forlorn, disorderly wife in
Blue Sky
(94, Tony Richardson); she was horribly abused in
Rob Roy
(95, Michael Caton-Jones);
Losing Isaiah
(95, Stephen Gyllenhaal); as Blanche for the screen (95, Glenn Jordan); very sly in
Cousin Bette
(97, Des McAnuff);
A Thousand Acres
(97, Jocelyn Moorhouse);
Hush
(98, Jonathan Darby); horribly abusive in
Titus
(99, Julie Taymor). It’s odd that she seems less impressed by movies than, say, Michelle Pfeiffer, yet far more powerful on screen.

She is in
Normal
(03, Jane Anderson);
Masked and Anonymous
(03, Larry Charles):
Big Fish
(03, Tim Burton); the long-delayed
Prozac Nation
(05, Erik Skjoldbjaerg);
Don’t Come Knockin’
(04, Wim Wenders); in
Never was
(05, Joshua Michael Stern), which never was released;
Bonneville
(06, Christopher N. Rowley);
Sybil
(07, Joseph Sargent); and winning an Emmy in
Grey Gardens
(09, Michael Sucsy).

Frank Langella
, b. Bayonne, New Jersey, 1938
There was a lengthy period in which Langella flourished on the American stage but seemed uneasy in movies. He was handsome, but there was a loftiness or a disdain that killed any hope of charm. So his films were undistinguished (or worse) and his career never seemed to gather speed. But then, when he was well past sixty, he seemed to relax or to give up caring. The disdain turned to impeccable authority, and he was transformed. His Nixon in
Frost/Nixon
(08, Ron Howard) is one of the great, mysterious performances of modern times, not an attempt to imitate the president but a profound commentary on him nonetheless. One has to hope that the picture business can continue to find great parts for an actor who is a virtuoso.