The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (238 page)

In the sixties, she had a great personal success on stage in
Mame
, but the movies could find no way of using her beyond
Death on the Nile
(78, John Guillermin) and Miss Froy in
The Lady Vanishes
(79, Anthony Page).

For Lansbury, the eighties meant Jessica Fletcher in
Murder, She Wrote
, a hit series since its launch in 1984, a way station for semiretired players, and—let it be said—a waste of Miss Lansbury. She does comfortable sugar as decently as anyone, but she is a real actress who is more interesting with a touch of lemon juice, or acid. I would trade all the Jessica Fletchers for her wife in Stephen Sondheim’s
Sweeney Todd
.

She has made a few more films, mostly for TV:
The Mirror Crack’d
(80, Guy Hamilton); excellent again as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in
Little Gloria—Happy at Last
(82, Waris Hussein);
The Pirates of Penzance
(82, Wilford Leach);
The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story
(83, Delbert Mann);
Lace
(84, Billy Hall);
The Company of Wolves
(85, Neil Jordan); as an Italian in
Rage of Angels: The Story Continues
(86, Paul Wendkos);
Shootdown
(88, Michael Pressman);
The Shell Seekers
(89, Hussein); and
The Love She Sought
(90, Joseph Sargent).

Then she won a new generation of fans by being the sweet singing voice of the housekeeper teapot in
Beauty and the Beast
(91, Garry Trousdale and Kirk Wise). In 1999, for TV, she was
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax
(Anthony Pullen Shaw). And then
Nanny McPhee
(05, Kirk Jones).

Mario Lanza
(Alfred Arnold Cocozza) (1921–1959), b. Philadelphia
Maybe it was all a dream. Did a corpulent Mamma’s boy from Philadelphia named Alfred grow up to be a remarkable tenor, to perform with Koussevitsky at the Tanglewood Festival, to break into the movies at the age of twenty-eight and make eight films in ten years, to sell tens of millions of records, to die at the age of thirty-eight, and to go on being famous and adored, or famous and derided (or famous and loathed—he had a bizarre habit of urinating in public, on the set, in plain view of Kathryn Grayson) decades after his death?

First was
That Midnight Kiss
(49, Norman Taurog), in which Mario as a singing truck driver gives us “Celeste Aida,” Kathryn Grayson gives us “Caro Nome,” and J. Carroll Naish gives us “Santa Lucia.” Next, in
The Toast of New Orleans
(50, Taurog) he’s a singing
fisherman
and what he catches is Grayson, and a two-million seller, “Be My Love.” Then, the climax of his career and a tremendous hit,
The Great Caruso
(51, Richard Thorpe), with twenty-two songs, Ann Blyth, and a number-one album that convinced some of his doting fans that he was greater than Caruso.

Because You’re Mine
(52, Alexander Hall) featured the title song and Doretta Morrow;
The Student Prince
(54, Thorpe) ended up with Mario’s face on the cutting-room floor (actually, he was never filmed; after contractual and overweight problems, he was replaced onscreen by Edmund Purdom before shooting began), but with his voice as strong as ever on the soundtrack; a tame version of James M. Cain’s
Serenade
in 1956, with Joan Fontaine, and purportedly directed by Anthony Mann, but surely that’s a dream, too. A “comeback” in 1958 with
The Seven Hills of Rome
(58, Roy Rowland), in which he impersonates various other singers, including (won’t somebody wake me up?) Louis Armstrong. And, finally,
For the First Time
(59, Rudolph Maté), in which he’s an opera singer in love with a deaf girl. He died that year, in Italy, under somewhat mysterious circumstances, though clearly in terrible health from his extravagant living. But he remains a larger-than-life figure—a weird mixture of Nelson Eddy, John Travolta, and John Gotti, a man with a big musical gift but no taste, restraint, or discipline; a pampered little boy pretending to be a ladies’ man; a truck driver pretending to be an opera star.

In the winter of 1994, the great Spanish tenor José Carreras gave a Mario Lanza Memorial Concert at Radio City Music Hall. The dream goes on.

Jesse L. Lasky
(1880–1958), b. San Francisco
In the American Film Institute catalog of feature films for the years 1921–30, Jesse Lasky fills five columns and is credited with over 350 pictures. But his role as “presenter” stops at the end of 1928, after which most Paramount films carry the name of Adolph Zukor on the title credit. It is a puzzle that such authority could cease so suddenly, and it raises the question as to whether studio executives exercised creative power or merely tied their names to more products than any man could comprehend. There can be little doubt that in the early 1920s any observer would have listed Lasky among the handful of most powerful men in Hollywood. But after 1932, when his association with Paramount ended, he revealed himself as a man of no particular character or impact.

Moguls, emperors, and pharaohs leave only their names or portraits of themselves. Look as long as you like—Tutankhamen, Louis XIV, or Jesse Lasky—and you will never get the measure of a man. But an artist, a poet, or a director leaves us with the imprint of his mind. Perhaps moguls are led into exaggerated arbitrariness because they foresee that oblivion.

Lasky was of German descent. As a young man, he was a cornet player, assistant at a medicine show, and hopeful participant in the Yukon gold rush. The cornet took him into vaudeville, while his sister, Blanche, lips puckered from the same instrument, married Samuel Goldfish. In 1913, Lasky, Goldfish, and Cecil B. De Mille founded Lasky Feature Plays. In 1916, they merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, thus providing the basis for the future Paramount. De Mille was always more intent on making films, but Lasky, Goldfish, and Zukor engaged in an immediate struggle for power. Goldfish resented for many years the way his brother-in-law Lasky had taken Zukor’s side, and stalked off into independence.

Famous Players Lasky settled with Zukor as president, and Lasky as vice-president in charge of production. Zukor, of course, is the weird survivor of the movie world. Born in Ricse, Hungary, in 1873, he celebrated his one hundredth birthday, still “chairman emeritus” of Paramount, itself a subsidiary of Gulf and Western. Such longevity may owe itself to Zukor’s apparent indifference to the product. He was essentially an East Coast man who took little part in production after the partnership with Lasky, but raised money on Wall Street and enlarged the distribution and exhibition arms of Paramount.

In theory, at least, Lasky was in charge of production—in Hollywood and New York—from 1916 to 1932. By then, Paramount was in dire trouble, the result of the Depression and Zukor’s mistakes. The Paramount product was more consistent and as satisfying as any other company’s. It is the period in which Paramount recruited Valentino from Metro; made
The Covered Wagon
and the early Schoedsack-Cooper films; hired Lubitsch, von Sternberg, Dietrich, and Gary Cooper; handled most of De Mille’s movies; enlisted the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Mary Pickford, Claudette Colbert, and Maurice Chevalier. But precise evidence of Lasky’s role is scarce. From 1923 onward, he had to share the “presented by” tag with Zukor and that may indicate growing New York interference. Von Sternberg speaks of his own arrival at Paramount, meeting Lasky and exchanging pleasantries, whereupon Lasky said, “Don’t forget, I said it first,” as if anxious to be associated with success.

The slump hit Lasky hard and wiped out the larger part of his stock holding. He joined Fox and produced there for a few years:
Berkeley Square
(33, Frank Lloyd);
I Am Suzanne
(34, Rowland V. Lee);
Springtime for Henry
(34, Frank Tuttle);
Helldorado
(35, James Cruze);
Redheads on Parade
(35, Norman Z. McLeod); and
The Gay Deception
(35, William Wyler). A modest list. In 1935, Fox merged with Twentieth Century and Darryl Zanuck was the natural executive in charge of production for the new major. Lasky moved on to a brief partnership with Mary Pickford at United Artists:
One Rainy Afternoon
(36, Lee) and
The Gay Desperado
(36, Rouben Mamoulian). Then on to RKO, for a year, after which he worked for radio and was once again nearly broke.

But in 1941, Howard Hawks and Gary Cooper came to Lasky’s aid by taking up his
Sergeant York
project and selling it to Warners. According to Hawks, again, he did all the work and let Lasky count the profit. But
Sergeant York
is not the most Hawksian of films; its patriotism and sentimentality suggest Lasky’s hand. He stayed on at Warners and produced a few more films:
The Adventures of Mark Twain
(44, Irving Rapper) and
Rhapsody in Blue
(45, Rapper). Then he moved back to RKO for
Without Reservations
(46, Mervyn Le Roy) and
The Miracle of the Bells
(48, Irving Pichel). It was a sad procession of posts, completed by his moving to MGM in 1950, and back to Paramount in 1957. By then he owed the tax man so much that he was attempting to set up another project.

Alberto Lattuada
(1914–2005), b. Milan, Italy
1942:
Giacomo l’Idealista
. 1944:
La Freccia nel Fianco; La Nostra Guerra
. 1946:
Il Bandito
. 1947:
Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo
. 1948:
Senza Pieta
. 1949:
Il Mulino del Po
. 1950:
Luci del Varieta/Lights of Variety
(codirected with Federico Fellini). 1951:
Anna
. 1952:
Il Cappotto
. 1953:
La Lupa;
“Gli Italiani si Voltano,” episode from
Amore in Citta
. 1954:
La Spiaggia
. 1955:
Scuola Elementare
. 1957:
Guendalina; La Tempesta/ Tempest
. 1960:
I Dolci Inganni; Lettere di una Novizia
. 1961:
L’Imprevisto
. 1962:
La Steppa; Il Mafioso
. 1965:
La Mandragola
. 1966:
Matchless
. 1967:
Don Giovanni in Sicilia
. 1968:
Fraulein Doktor
. 1969:
L’Amica
. 1970:
Venga a Prendero il Caffe da Noi
. 1973:
Sono State Io!
. 1975:
Le Faro Da Padre
. 1976:
Oh, Serafina!; Cosi Come Sei
. 1980:
La Cicala
. 1981:
Nudo di Donna
. 1985:
Una Spina nel Cuore
. 1988:
Fratelli
(TV). 1998: “Genoa,” episode from
12 Registi per 12 Città
.

The son of the Italian composer Felice Lattuada, Alberto was a writer and qualified architect before the war swept him into cinema. It was while writing for the review,
Corrente
, in 1940, that Lattuada, Luigi Comencini, and Mario Ferrari set up the beginnings of an Italian Archive and organized film shows of an anti-Fascist nature. After that, Lattuada began to work as a writer and assistant director:
Piccolo Mondo Antico
(40, Mario Soldati).

That film established Lattuada’s early style: period atmosphere, good acting, and care with sets and costumes. Used amid harsh political realities, it was a style that sometimes seemed as innocuously pretty as the Carné of
Les Visiteurs du Soir
. In any event, Lattuada has revealed the versatility of a director with no pressing character of his own. But he has remained highly proficient and successful.
Il Bandito
was in the neorealist strain, about a prisoner of war who returns to find his life so changed that he takes to crime. It starred Amedeo Nazzari and Anna Magnani.

But Lattuada was more comfortable in adapting novels with a firm narrative basis that lent themselves to romantic “literary” shape.
Giacomo l’Idealista
is from a novel by Emilio de Marchi about an affair between a chambermaid and a young man of higher class.
Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo
was adapted from a novel by Gabriele d’Annunzio. Lattuada’s richest period came as neorealism was declining.
Senza Pieta
is a melodrama about an American Negro soldier and a prostitute, coscripted by Fellini, and starring Giulietta Masina. It neatly combines the qualities of realism and theatricality that were to obsess Fellini, as does
Luci del Varieta
, Fellini’s debut as a director. Not only its gallery of shabby traveling players, but the melancholy conclusion seem to derive more from Fellini than from Lattuada, who followed with
Anna
, a big boxoffice success, made for Dino de Laurentiis and starring Silvana Mangano. His next film is his best:
Il Cappotto
, an adaptation of Gogol’s
The Overcoat
, with Renato Rascel as the bureaucrat. Since then, Lattuada has become a conventional figure, following whatever fashion held at the time, as witness the empty spectacle of
La Tempesta
.

Charles Laughton
(1899–1962), b. Scarborough, England
Laughton’s is one of the most interesting and troubled careers in the cinema. Possessed by unbridled rhetorical vitality, he was responsible for some of the most recklessly flamboyant characterizations the screen has seen. At other times, his doubts crippled him. Recognized in the 1930s as the screen’s principal creator of larger-than-life characters, his career declined into inconsequential movies. All too easily, he mocked the parts he was playing, thus acquiring a reputation for being unmanageable.

He was an artist with deep, volatile feelings who only occasionally found work in which he could believe. Thus there is an almost brutal contrast in his films between careful invention and unchallenged ham. Like so many large, ugly actors, he was sometimes incapable of escaping the grossly malicious man he often played. Though happily married to Elsa Lanchester (they were good company), he was a homosexual, tortured by the need to be secret and truly guilt-ridden because of it. So he came to see his own looks as a merited rebuke: he was his own hunchback.