The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (277 page)

One could easily list most early Laurel and Hardy films under McCarey’s name in that he effectively supervised everything they did from 1926 to 1929. Supervision, at that time and place, meant: “writing the story, cutting it, stringing the gags together, coordinating everything, screening the rushes, working on the editing, sending out the prints, working on the second editing when the preview reactions weren’t good enough and even, from time to time, shooting sequences over again.” Thus McCarey is a useful warning that in early American films we often need to look beyond published credits to discover actual authorship.

Laurel and Hardy refined McCarey’s intuition of comedy in disaster, and his use of the “slow burn,” which runs all through his best work, even the much more sophisticated
The Awful Truth
. That film was made at Columbia as proof that the studio could manage without Frank Capra. It is an exuberant, tender comedy of feelings thrusting aside the proprieties of an imminent divorce. In Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, McCarey found the right balance of warmth and comedy technique. And as always with McCarey, it is our ability to see the joke coming and then watch the small improvement on expectation that constitutes the real impact. The “slow burn” is the deliciously delayed reaction to disaster on the part of a clown. It works because the audience responds to this superb intellectual disdain of the quantity of custard hanging from the comic’s face. McCarey is best with the audience in the palm of his hand, encouraged to improvise by that confidence, but never betraying the characters in his story. His warmth consists of liking virtually everyone in his films, often against expectations. Even
Rally Round the Flag, Boys
!—an uneven movie—has moments of absolute glee, and it is typical of McCarey that he should make Paul Newman the straight man and Joan Collins so tipsily funny.

Beneath that, however, there was too wide and coarse a vein of sentiment that produced movies such as the Grant character in
The Awful Truth
might have flinched at. That bizarre wartime interlude with Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as a Roman Catholic double act was carried off with skill, but they remain appalling projects.
Good Sam
and
My Son John
, equally, hardly seem the work of the man who established Laurel and Hardy. As with Capra, another gagman, there were ominous signs of solemnly pondered balderdash.
My Son John
, made at the time of McCarthy, is an obnoxious endorsement of patriotic and familial loyalty—the blunt doctrine of those playful priests.

The closer one looks at McCarey’s career, and his own memories of it, the more contradictions appear. For instance, McCarey reported that he was overwhelmed by the Marx Brothers on
Duck Soup
, and that he was a little sorry to have to fall back on Groucho’s verbal jokes. Whereas
Duck Soup
is the most audacious of Marx Brothers films, with a war sequence that shows how deeply their surrealism could penetrate the real world. And although Groucho was a dispenser of verbal jokes, it is lopsided to see him as nothing else. On the other hand, in
Ruggles of Red Gap
McCarey drew out the comedian in Charles Laughton more subtly than anyone else. Even in the potentially crazy plot of
Satan Never Sleeps
, he manages to find the comedy—and find it in the tight anxiety of William Holden. Against that, he was clearly devoted to the adroit romantic comedy of
Love Affair
—remade as
An Affair to Remember
—and faintly regretted that Grant’s irony in the remake had offset the “beauty” of the original.
Make Way for Tomorrow
is his most serious and touching work, an uncommonly fond look at old age.

Joel McCrea
(1905–90), b. Pasadena, California
McCrea was a sweet, modest man, not in the least starry. The one flaw in
Sullivan’s Travels
may be that McCrea’s movie director is, from the outset, someone you might trust and go to a ball game with. But just because he seemed so grateful for a long career in which he felt lucky at all the good roles, good directors, and actresses he had known, it was easy to miss how much McCrea himself offered. He was not comic, like a Cary Grant. And he seemed rather shy about his own sierralike handsomeness. But he had a rare gentleness, a great way of listening to women (like an umbrella he was sharing with them), and a knack of underplaying key moments. Consider
The More the Merrier:
all through that film, he has an absentminded gruffness or stillness, as if amid the romantic overcrowding he’s heard what the war will be like. It becomes more intriguing as the film lasts, an audacious offhandedness—maybe he was just doing director George Stevens. Still, it is proof that McCrea repays close attention.

After being the only boy at the Hollywood School for Girls, he was educated at Pomona University, worked on the stage, and had a bit part in
A Self-Made Failure
(24, William Beaudine) several years before his proper debut in
The Jazz Age
(29, Lynn Shores). After a spell at MGM, where he made
The Single Standard
(29, John S. Robertson), De Mille cast him in
Dynamite
(29), and he went to Fox for the Will Rogers movie
Lightnin’
(30, Henry King). But he settled at RKO for
The Silver Horde
(30, George Archainbaud) and
Kept Husbands
(31, Lloyd Bacon). He made several romances with Constance Bennett and, on loan to Paramount,
Girls About Town
(31, George Cukor). He then earned his pay as a robust, athletic adventurer in
The Lost Squadron
(32, Archainbaud); pursuing Dolores del Rio in
Bird of Paradise
(32, King Vidor); pursued by Leslie Banks in
The Most Dangerous Game
(32, Irving Pichel and Ernest Schoedsack).

Although McCrea was genially unpretentious and generally ignored by critics, he accumulated a highly creditable list of films, and a surprising variety of parts:
Business and Pleasure
(32, David Butler);
Rockabye
(32, Cukor);
The Silver Cord
(33, John Cromwell);
Bed of Roses
(33, Gregory La Cava);
Chance at Heaven
(33, William A. Seiter);
Gambling Lady
(34, Archie Mayo); and
Private Worlds
(35, La Cava). Most of these were romances, but Goldwyn saw McCrea as a fit hero for rougher work: thus Howard Hawks’s
Barbary Coast
(35), as well as the conventional
Splendor
(35, Elliott Nugent) and
These Three
(36, William Wyler). This mixture of parts continued, although McCrea seemed to thrive best out-of-doors: slapping his wife, Frances Dee, in
Come and Get It
(36, Hawks and Wyler);
Banjo On My Knee
(36, Cromwell);
Dead End
(37, Wyler);
Wells Fargo
(37, Frank Lloyd); with Barbara Stanwyck in
Union Pacific
(39, De Mille). He then made
Espionage Agent
(39, Bacon);
He Married His Wife
(40, Roy del Ruth);
Primrose Path
(40, La Cava); rather “too easygoing,” as Hitchcock thought, in
Foreign Correspondent
(40);
Reaching for the Sun
(41, William Wellman); as the movie director in
Sullivan’s Travels
(41, Preston Sturges);
The Great Man’s Lady
(42, Wellman); the pursuing husband in
The Palm Beach Story
(42, Sturges);
The More the Merrier
(43, George Stevens); as
Buffalo Bill
(44, Wellman); and as the Boston dentist in
The Great Moment
(44, Sturges)—a consistently enjoyable body of work.

After the war, McCrea settled into conventional Westerns and he worked steadily for the next fifteen years, weathering well and never losing his relaxed sense of the genre. The most notable of these autumnal movies are:
Ramrod
(47, André de Toth);
South of St. Louis
(49, Ray Enright);
Colorado Territory
(49, Raoul Walsh);
Saddle Tramp
(50, Hugo Fregonese);
Frenchie
(50, Louis King); very good, with Dean Stockwell, in
Stars in My Crown
(50, Jacques Tourneur);
Stranger on Horseback
(55, Tourneur); as Wyatt Earp in
Wichita
(55, Tourneur); as Sam Houston in
The First Texan
(56, Byron Haskin);
Fort Massacre
(58, Joseph Newman); and
The Gunfight at Dodge City
(59, Newman).

It was fitting that near the end McCrea should make Sam Peckinpah’s nostalgic tribute to the orthodox Western: in respectful but lethal rivalry with Randolph Scott in
Ride the High Country
(62). After that, he did
Cry Blood, Apache
(70, Jack Starrett) and
Mustang Country
(76, John Champion).

Hattie McDaniel
(1895–1952), b. Wichita, Kansas
Hattie McDaniel was the first black person to win an Oscar—as supporting actress in
Gone With the Wind
(39, Victor Fleming). Is it a good performance? Is it better than Olivia de Havilland’s Melanie from the same film, or Geraldine Fitzgerald in
Wuthering Heights
, or Edna May Oliver in
Drums Along the Mohawk
, or Maria Ouspenskaya in
Love Affair?
How does one begin to make such measurements, or extricate McDaniel’s performance from all the preconceptions in the minds of Margaret Mitchell, David Selznick, or Ms. McDaniel herself? When she accepted the Oscar, her speech of thanks—written by the Selznick organization—hoped she had been a credit to her race. She said that line—she was an actress, used to reading the scripts put in front of her.

Her Mammy is a record of the great difficulty America was having in dealing with blacks. Here are others: when
Gone With the Wind
was set to premiere in Atlanta, the city authorities let Selznick know that it would be preferable if Hattie McDaniel did not make the journey. Selznick was angry, but he consented. At the Academy dinner to mark the Oscars, Hattie McDaniel was invited—but not to the big Selznick table. She sat in a corner with her partner at a small table for two.

That said, she is of great historical importance (along with her colleague Butterfly McQueen), and she is one of the stalwarts at playing domestic help in the thirties and forties. A singer first, she went into radio and played the lead in the popular series
Beulah
. Her major movies are as follows:
The Golden West
(32, David Howard);
Blonde Venus
(32, Josef von Sternberg);
I’m No Angel
(33, Wesley Ruggles);
Babbitt
(34, William Keighley);
Imitation of Life
(34, John M. Stahl);
Judge Priest
(34, John Ford);
The Little Colonel
(35, David Butler);
China Seas
(35, Tay Garnett);
Alice Adams
(35, George Stevens);
Libeled Lady
(36, Jack Conway);
Show Boat
(36, James Whale);
Valiant Is the Word for Carrie
(36, Ruggles);
Reunion
(36, Norman Taurog);
Saratoga
(37, Conway);
Nothing Sacred
(37, William Wellman);
The Shopworn Angel
(38, H. C. Potter);
Carefree
(38, Mark Sandrich);
Maryland
(40, Henry King);
The Great Lie
(41, Edmund Goulding);
The Male Animal
(42, Elliott Nugent);
In This Our Life
(42, John Huston);
Johnny Come Lately
(43, William K. Howard);
Since You Went Away
(44, John Cromwell);
Margie
(46, King);
Never Say Goodbye
(46, James V. Kern);
Song of the South
(46, Harve Foster);
The Flame
(47, John H. Auer);
Mickey
(48, Ralph Murphy);
Family Honeymoon
(48, Claude Binyon).

In 1950, when ABC began
Beulah
as a TV series, McDaniel was set to replace Ethel Waters but then fell ill and was replaced by Louise Beavers.

Frances McDormand
, b. Chicago, 1957
With pancake vowels and a look that gazed on malefactors as if to ask, “Who’s got a poopy diaper, then?” Frances McDormand entered folklore as Marge, the conscientious cop of the northern prairie. And when she had to throw up, that natural gesture was equally a tribute to her life force and her poker-faced shock at the kinds of wicked things people do.
Fargo
(96, Joel Coen) may not be as profound as its reputation, but in its lead actress it had a chance to be better than anyone else in the film seemed to know. The sad eyes of Ms. McDormand may be as humane a measure of inquiry at the end of the century as any other. And while she stays narrowly loyal to husband and brother-in-law, someone ought at least to raise the question: do they make the best of her?

A preacher’s daughter, she attended the Yale School of Drama and had a success in New York playing Stella in a revival of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. She began with the Coen brothers in 1984, as they began, and she has since married Joel:
Blood Simple
(84, Coen);
Raising Arizona
(87, Coen); nominated for an Oscar in
Mississippi Burning
(88, Alan Parker);
Chattahoochee
(90, Mick Jackson); to Northern Ireland for
Hidden Agenda
(90, Ken Loach), which caught her implacable seriousness; just walking across an office floor so as to show all her humor in
Miller’s Crossing
(90, Coen);
Darkman
(90, Sam Raimi);
The Butcher’s Wife
(91, Terry Hughes);
Crazy in Love
(92, Martha Coolidge);
Passed Away
(92, Charlie Peters);
Short Cuts
(93, Robert Altman); wasted in
Beyond Rangoon
(95, John Boorman); the Oscar for
Fargo; Palookaville
(96, Alan Taylor); the psychiatrist in
Primal Fear
(96, Gregory Hoblit); as a German doctor in
Paradise Road
(97, Bruce Beresford); as Miss Clavel in
Madeline
(98, Daisy von Scherler Mayer);
Talk of Angels
(98, Nick Hamm);
Wonder Boys
(00, Curtis Hanson); lovely as the mother in
Almost Famous
(00, Cameron Crowe); neglected in
The Man Who Wasn’t There
(01, Coen); narrating
State of Grace
on TV (01, Melanie Mayron); with De Niro in
City by the Sea
(02, Michael Caton-Jones);
Laurel Canyon
(03, Lisa Cholodenko); and crying out for more screen time in
Something’s Gotta Give
(03, Nancy Meyers).