The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (270 page)

He then made the ultra-naïve
The Princess Diaries
. In 2001. Not 1901. Very funny, you hope. But Anne Hathawayism spurred a sequel and launched a career. The hopes for honest absurdity have nearly vanished.

George Marshall
(1891–1975), b. Chicago
1919:
The Adventures of Ruth
. 1920:
Prairie Trails
. 1921:
After Your Own Heart; Hands Off; The Jolt; The Lady from Longacre; A Ridin’ Romeo; Why Trust Your Husband?
. 1922:
Smiles Are Trumps
. 1923:
Don Quickshot of the Rio Grande; Men in the Raw; Where Is the West?
. 1926:
A Trip to Chinatown
. 1927:
The Gay Retreat
. 1932:
Pack Up Your Troubles
(codirected with Raymond McCarey);
Their First Mistake
(s). 1934:
Ever Since Eve; Wild Gold; She Learned About Sailors; He Learned About Women; 365 Nights in Hollywood
. 1935:
Life Begins at Forty; Ten Dollar Raise; In Old Kentucky; Show Them No Mercy; Music Is Magic
. 1936:
A Message to Garcia; Crime of Dr. Forbes; Can This Be Dixie?
. 1937:
Nancy Steele Is Missing; Love Under Fire
. 1938:
The Goldwyn Follies; Battle of Broadway; Hold That Co-Ed
. 1939:
You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man; Destry Rides Again
. 1940:
The Ghost Breakers; When the Daltons Rode
. 1941:
Pot o’ Gold; Texas
. 1942:
Valley of the Sun; The Forest Rangers; Star-Spangled Rhythm
. 1943:
True to Life; Riding High
. 1944:
And the Angels Sing
. 1945:
Murder He Says; Incendiary Blonde; Hold That Blonde
. 1946:
The Blue Dahlia; Monsieur Beaucaire
. 1947:
The Perils of Pauline; Variety Girl
. 1948:
Hazard; Tap Roots
. 1949:
My Friend Irma
. 1950:
Fancy Pants; Never a Dull Moment
. 1951:
A Millionaire for Christy
. 1952:
The Savage
. 1953:
Off Limits/Military Policeman; Scared Stiff; Houdini; Money from Home
. 1954:
Red Garters; Duel in the Jungle; Destry
. 1955:
The Second Greatest Sex
. 1956:
Pillars of the Sky
. 1957:
Guns of Fort Petticoat; Beyond Mombasa; The Sad Sack
. 1958:
The Sheepman; Imitation General
. 1959:
The Mating Game; It Started With a Kiss; The Gazebo
. 1960:
Cry for Happy
. 1962:
The Happy Thieves; How the West Was Won
(codirected);
Papa’s Delicate Condition
. 1964:
Dark Purpose
(codirected with Vittorio Sala);
Advance to the Rear/Company of Cowards
. 1966:
Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number!
. 1967:
Eight on the Lam
. 1969:
Hook, Line and Sinker
.

Marshall had few equals for labor and survival. In 1912 he was an extra, and by 1914 he was acting in Universal shorts and serials. He was a director by 1917, on Ruth Roland serials, Harry Carey Westerns, and even Bobby Jones golf shorts. His output of silent features was, in fact, considerably larger than his list of sound films. Only in the sixties did the pace begin to tell. Marshall seemed to have consented to retirement, and his last three movies were disappointing. But until the early 1960s he was an able director of most forms of comedy. Indeed, he had directed not only Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields (You
Can’t Cheat an Honest
Man
), Bob Hope (in
Fancy Pants
and
Monsieur Beaucaire
, as well as the two duds in 1967), Martin and Lewis (in their first film
My Friend Irma
and in
Scared Stiff
), but the droll Western,
The Sheepman
. That film, coaxing out the gentle humor of Glenn Ford, is one of his most engaging and characteristic pictures.

Longevity persuaded some commentators into the belief that Marshall had worked in all possible genres. This is not true: he disliked real violence, and hardly touched the crime film, the horror film, or the serious war picture, though
Advance to the Rear
relates to that genre as
The Sheepman
does to the Western. His happiest forte was mild, satirical comedy
—The Sheepman
is in much the same vein as
Destry Rides Again
, that inspired pairing of Dietrich and James Stewart. He had made straight Westerns, but with less success. Equally,
The Ghost Breakers
(remade as
Scared Stiff
) is a comic approach to horror. Among musicals, the stylized
Red Garters
was years ahead of its time (Marshall replaced Mitchell Leisen on that film).
The Blue Dahlia
is an excellent Alan Ladd/Veronica Lake romantic thriller. Marshall had also shown a taste for glamorous, scarcely accurate biopics and
Incendiary Blonde
(Betty Hutton as Texas Guinan),
The Perils of Pauline
(Hutton as Pearl White), and
Houdini
(Tony Curtis) are enjoyable hokum.

Herbert Marshall
(1890–1966), b. London
Marshall was forty before becoming seriously involved with the cinema. By then, he had twenty years’ stage experience in England and America, lost a leg in the First World War, but never quite shed the sobriety of early years spent apprenticed to a chartered accountant. Paramount planned to make him a great lover, but Marshall needed to move carefully in case his limp showed, and his good manners eventually reduced him to character parts. He was always thoughtful, able enough for the most intelligent comedy, and seldom out of place: it is tempting in retrospect to think of him as Paramount house servant in tales of overheated emotion—discreet and detached. With age, his work became exaggerated, but he could still rise to worthwhile material.

Mumsie
(27, Herbert Wilcox) was his debut, in England, but he came to the fore opposite Jeanne Eagels in America in
The Letter
(29, Jean de Limur). However, for the next few years he divided his time between Hollywood and England, where his then-wife Edna Best worked. In 1930 he made his first talking picture, Hitchcock’s
Murder
, and in 1931 he made
Michael and Mary
(Victor Saville) and went back to America to be opposite Claudette Colbert in
Secrets of a Secretary
(George Abbott). He followed this success with
Blonde Venus
(32, Josef von Sternberg) and, one of his best, immaculate but amoral in
Trouble in Paradise
(32, Ernst Lubitsch). Back in England, he made
The Solitaire Man
(33, Jack Conway) and
I Was a Spy
(33, Saville), but when his marriage ended he concentrated on American films:
Four Frightened People
(34, Cecil B. De Mille);
Riptide
(34, Edmund Goulding);
Outcast Lady
(34, Robert Z. Leonard);
The Painted Veil
(34, Richard Boleslavsky);
The Good Fairy
(35, William Wyler);
The Flame Within
(35, Goulding); and
The Dark Angel
(35, Sidney Franklin).

Marshall was slipping into character parts, but he was excellent in
The Lady Consents
(36, Stephen Roberts) and
Forgotten Faces
(36, E. A. Dupont), and as the deceived husband in
Angel
(37, Lubitsch). He had to engage in many dull films, where his expression sometimes suggested that his other leg had gone numb, but he usually made the most of good parts:
Zaza
(39, George Cukor); the husband in
The Letter
(40, Wyler); a suave paternal villain in
Foreign Correspondent
(40, Hitchcock); opposite Bette Davis in
The Little Foxes
(41, Wyler); in
When Ladies Meet
(41, Leonard); as the Maugham narrator in
The Moon and Sixpence
(42, Albert Lewin); in Jules Dassin’s
Young Ideas
(43);
The Enchanted Cottage
(45, John Cromwell); Maugham again in
The Razor’s Edge
(46, Goulding); the father in
Duel in the Sun
(46, King Vidor). He kept working, if a little less earnestly, until his death:
Ivy
(47, Sam Wood);
The High Wall
(48, Curtis Bernhardt);
The Secret Garden
(49, Fred M. Wilcox);
The Underworld Story
(50, Cy Endfield);
Anne of the Indies
(51, Jacques Tourneur);
Something to Live For
(52, George Stevens); the weak father in
Angel Face
(52, Otto Preminger);
The Black Shield of Falworth
(54, Rudolph Maté);
The Virgin Queen
(55, Henry Koster);
Stage Struck
(58, Sidney Lumet);
Midnight Lace
(60, David Miller); and
The Third Day
(65, Jack Smight).

Penny Marshall
, b. Bronx, New York, 1942
1986:
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
. 1988:
Big
. 1990:
Awakenings
. 1992:
A League of Their Own
. 1994:
Renaissance Man
. 1996:
The Preacher’s Wife
. 2001:
Riding in Cars with Boys
.

The sister of Garry Marshall (who wrote for
The Dick Van Dyke Show
and produced
Happy Days
) and the ex-wife of Rob Reiner (of
All in the Family
), Penny Marshall would seem a child of TV even without her years as Laverne (1976–83), with Cindy Williams, in
Laverne and Shirley
(also produced by Garry). But she directed several episodes of that hit series, and by the middle 1980s she made her debut on the big screen. She is competent and impersonal—like a TV director—and as such could become a workhorse director for mainstream movies.
Awakenings
was Hollywood’s idea of a prestige production: there is nothing so respectable as the pathos of the handicapped, or as slick as the way clever tour-de-force acting gets away with being called truthful realism.

Rob Marshall
, b. Madison, Wisconsin, 1960
1999:
Annie
(TV). 2002:
Chicago
. 2005:
Memoirs of a Geisha
. 2006:
Tony Bennett: An American Classic
(TV). 2009:
Nine
.

Rob Marshall was raised as a Broadway choreographer, streamlined and razzle-dazzle where Bob Fosse had been staccato but intimate. He collected six Tony nominations—for
Kiss of the Spider Woman
(93),
Damn Yankees
(94),
She Loves Me
(94), two for a revival of
Cabaret
(98) and
Little Me
(99). In the same year as
Little Me
he did a very popular TV version of
Annie
as a directing debut. But it was the movie of
Chicago
that was his great hit and that won the Best Picture Oscar. It was clever in that it used several good actors as musical figures and it seems to be Marshall’s strength that he can draw out the story values in a musical very well. On the other hand, every number is at socko, high-volume control. At the time,
Chicago
was heralded as the return of the musical, but we’re still waiting.

After that,
Memoirs of a Geisha
—a project that had been passed around—was awful and syrupy sweet. But nothing was as bad as the Tony Bennett celebration, a TV film that managed to locate and hammer home its subject’s charm problems at every turn.

So it was a huge relief to find that
Nine
was a classy, dramatic musical. The numbers were still too repetitive, but the screenplay (by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella) and the major performances (especially by Day-Lewis, Dench, Cotillard, and Cruz) were outstanding.
Nine
proved to be a very clever enrichment of
8½
as well as a movie that had thought through the limitations of the Fellini original. But it never found an audience and must have left Marshall wondering whether enough people care about the musical coming back.

Dean Martin
(Dino Paul Crocetti) (1917–95), b. Steubenville, Ohio
Nick Tosches’s
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams
is one of the great showbiz biographies. Its research is not just thorough, but lunatic and perverse—for, plainly, Dean Martin had led a life indifferent or averse to recollection, accuracy, or fact.
Dino
is brilliant on the Lewis-Martin association, and inspired in its evocation of the drift, the haze, and at last, the numbing futility of being Dino, or being alive.

It was in 1946 that, as a straight-man singer, Dean Martin joined Jerry Lewis. They flourished in night clubs before a film debut in
My Friend Irma
(49, George Marshall). Together, they made sixteen films (mainly with Norman Taurog), in which Martin had only to sing the songs, kiss the female leads, and generally edge away from Lewis, as if next to an idiot in a line:
At War With the Army
(51);
That’s My Boy
(52);
The Caddy
(52);
Scared Stiff
(53);
Living It Up
(54);
Artists and Models
(55);
Pardners
(56); and
Hollywood or Bust
(56).

When they parted, Martin was torn between being a singer—
Ten Thousand Bedrooms
(57, Richard Thorpe)—and a serious actor—
The Young Lions
(58, Edward Dmytryk). In fact, he was both, as his Dude in Hawks’s
Rio Bravo
(59) demonstrated. His reforming drunk in that movie, perfectly adept at all the crosscurrents of dialogue, should be borne in mind whenever he assumes the haze of stupor. He was also good as the gambler in Minnelli’s
Some Came Running
(59), and in the same director’s musical,
Bells Are Ringing
(60).