The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (280 page)

It was in that last film that she met Bill Travers. In 1954—for just a few months—she had been married to Denholm Elliott. But when she married Travers, that led to a whole new career: After
Passionate Summer
(58, Rudolph Cartier);
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
(59, Michael Anderson), and
Two Living, One Dead
(61, Anthony Asquith), she and Travers made
Born Free
(66, James Hill), a communion with lion cubs, not just a great hit but a lifelong cause. The interest in animals led to
An Elephant Called Slowly
(69, Hill) and
Ring of Bright Water
(69, Jack Couffer), a celebration of otters.

McKenna did not stop acting—she was in a London stage revival of
The King and I
(with Yul Brynner) in the late 1970s. But her attention had gone: as the Duchess of Richmond in
Waterloo
(70, Sergei Bondarchuk);
Swallows and Amazons
(74, Claude Watham); doing
The Deep Blue Sea
(74, Cartier) for
BBC Play of the Month
and Mrs. Darling in
Peter Pan
(76, Dwight Hemion), with Mia Farrow as Peter, for Hallmark Hall of Fame; very good, with Robert Stephens, in
Puccini
(84, Tony Palmer);
Sliding Doors
(98, Peter Howitt).

Victor McLaglen
(1886–1959), b. Tunbridge Wells, England
Of all the screen’s tough guys, McLaglen could have claimed the most authentic grounding in personal experience. Fatherly care kept the teenager out of the Boer War, but nothing stopped McLaglen from becoming a notable boxer (he had a no decision against Jack Johnson in 1909), a vaudeville performer, a gold miner in Australia, and a soldier in the First World War. The instinct to fight never deserted him or his great bulk. Even so, muscle and a rather whining heartiness made him a swaggeringly implausible actor forever doing his “turn.” Self-pity and barroom Irish bravado were the keys to his work, and the fact that so much of it was done for John Ford only exposes the maudlin bullying in Ford’s poetic vision.

McLaglen was taken from the boxing ring to the movies in England in 1920 and he was a successful roughneck for several years:
The Call of the Road
(20, A. E. Coleby);
Carnival
(21, Harley Knoles);
Corinthian Jack
(21, Walter Rowden);
The Sport of Kings
(21, Arthur Rooke);
The Glorious Adventure
(22, J. Stuart Blackton);
A Romance of Old Bagdad
(22, Kenelm Foss);
The Romany
(23, F. Martin Thornton);
M’Lord of the White Road
(23, Rooke); and
The Gay Corinthian
(25, Rooke).

He escaped a slump in British films by going to America for
The Beloved Brute
(25, Blackton) and soon became established:
Winds of Chance
(25, Frank Lloyd);
The Fighting Heart
(25, John Ford);
Beau Geste
(26, Herbert Brenon);
What Price Glory?
(26, Raoul Walsh); opposite Dolores del Rio in
The Loves of Carmen
(27, Walsh);
Mother Machree
(28, Ford); with Louise Brooks in
A Girl in Every Port
(28, Howard Hawks);
Hangman’s House
(28, Ford);
Strong Boy
(29, Ford); and
The Black Watch
(29, Ford and Lumsden Hare). Then he repeated the part of Captain Flagg (opposite Edmund Lowe’s Sergeant Quirk) from
What Price Glory?
in Raoul Walsh’s
The CockEyed World
(29), and later in
Women of All Nations
(31, Walsh).

At this time, McLaglen was a top star at Fox, and he appeared in
Hot for Paris
(29, Walsh);
A Devil With Women
(30, Irving Cummings); surprisingly at ease in
Dishonored
(31, Josef von Sternberg);
Annabelle’s Affairs
(31, Alfred Werker);
Wicked
(31, Allan Dwan); and
While Paris Sleeps
(32, Dwan). But Fox dropped him, and he was forced back to England to make
Dick Turpin
(33, W. Victor Hanbury).

Ford restored him to American stardom in
The Lost Patrol
(34), and after
The Wharf Angel
(34, William Cameron Menzies and George Somnes),
Murder at the Vanities
(34, Mitchell Leisen),
The Captain Hates the Sea
(34, Lewis Milestone), and
Under Pressure
(35, Walsh), McLaglen won the best actor Oscar as Gypo in
The Informer
(35, Ford). It is a hard film to endure, and symptomatic of Ford’s Irish willingness to see brutality inflated into religion and patriotism by drink. This performance was so far outside American traditions of economy, the Academy persuaded themselves that it was noble acting.

He followed this with
Professional Soldier
(35, Tay Garnett);
Klondike Annie
(36, Walsh), with Mae West;
Under Two Flags
(36, Frank Lloyd);
The Magnificent Brute
(36, John Blystone);
Sea Devils
(37, Ben Stoloff);
Nancy Steele Is Missing
(37, George Marshall); with Shirley Temple in
Wee Willie Winkie
(37, Ford), and both in skirts, since McLaglen played a kilted NCO.

He then went trundling downhill:
Let Freedom Ring
(39, Jack Conway);
Gunga Din
(39, George Stevens);
Full Confession
(39, John Farrow);
Captain Fury
(39, Hal Roach);
Rio
(39, John Brahm);
The Big Guy
(40, Arthur Lubin);
China Girl
(42, Henry Hathaway);
The Princess and the Pirate
(44, David Butler);
Roger Touhy, Gangster
(44, Robert Florey);
Calendar Girl
(47, Dwan); and
The Foxes of Harrow
(47, John M. Stahl).

He was saved from extinction by Sergeants Mulcahy and Quincannon in Ford’s cavalry trilogy:
Fort Apache
(48);
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(49); and
Rio Grande
(50), a punch-drunk clown, bursting out of his uniform and calling everyone “darlin’.” Ford then pursued his private world to the point of burlesque—and made one of his most entertaining films,
The Quiet Man
(52), which involved McLaglen in windmill fisticuffs with John Wayne and so actually travestied violence that fighting reverted to slapstick. The draught of so many punches unsteadied him, and in his last years he tottered from one silliness to another:
Fair Wind to Java
(53, Joseph Kane);
Prince Valiant
(54, Hathaway);
Trouble in the Glen
(54, Herbert Wilcox);
Lady Godiva
(55, Lubin);
Bengazi
(55, Brahm);
The Abductors
(57, Andrew V. McLaglen, his son); and
Sea Fury
(58, Cy Endfield).

Norman Z. McLeod
(1898–1964), b. Grayling, Michigan
1928:
Taking a Chance
. 1930:
Along Came Youth
(codirected with Lloyd Corrigan). 1931:
Monkey Business; Finn and Hattie
(codirected with Norman Taurog);
Touchdown
. 1932:
The Miracle Man; Horse Feathers;
“The Forger,” episode from
If I Had a Million
. 1933:
Mama Loves Papa; Alice in Wonderland; A Lady’s Profession
. 1934:
Many Happy Returns; A Melody in Spring
. 1935:
Here Comes Cookie; Redheads on Parade
. 1936:
Pennies from Heaven; Early to Bed; Mind Your Own Business
. 1937:
Topper
. 1938:
Merrily We Live; There Goes My Heart
. 1939:
Topper Takes a Trip; Remember?
. 1940:
Little Men
. 1941:
The Trial of Mary Dugan; Lady Be Good; Jackass Mail
. 1942:
Panama Hattie; The Powers Girl
. 1943:
Swing Shift Maisie
. 1946:
The Kid from Brooklyn
. 1947:
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty; Road to Rio
. 1948:
The Paleface; Isn’t It Romantic?
. 1950:
Let’s Dance
. 1951:
My Favorite Spy
. 1953:
Never Wave at a WAC
. 1954:
Casanova’s Big Night
. 1957:
Public Pigeon No. 1
. 1959:
Alias Jesse James
.

With his name on several perennial comedies, McLeod is better known than his record deserves. Between the Marx Brothers, Danny Kaye, and Bob Hope there are doldrums enough to convince us that McLeod merely conducted these comics to the screen. The Marx Brothers were beyond the control of more decisive directors; Danny Kaye was a self-indulgent sentimentalist, so indulged by Goldwyn that no director could restrain him.
The Paleface
is probably the film in which McLeod was most successful, though dependent on Frank Tashlin’s inventive script. McLeod studied as a gagwriter and animator during the 1920s, but it was his First World War service as a fighter pilot that allowed him to script
The Air Circus
(28, Howard Hawks and Lewis Seiler) and work as assistant director on
Wings
(29, William Wellman). That led him into work as a director at Paramount, but generally earthbound. He roamed around—from MGM, to Hal Roach, Goldwyn, and back to Paramount—but seldom set his character on a film. Still, he brought
Topper
to the screen with exactly the right touch.

Steve McQueen
(Terrence Steven McQueen) (1930–80), b. Beech Grove, Indiana
McQueen did too much routine work in which his famed, if not dogmatic, impassivity grew monotonous. Even in his years of stardom—and he was immensely popular, with men and women, in the late sixties and early seventies—he was inclined to be more interested in machines, or a boyish, incommunicable honor, than in other people. But as time passes, his remorseless honesty becomes more affecting. He may be brutal, or brutish, at times—but when is he fake? He made too few good films, and his range was severely limited. But as he grew older, sadder—and sicker?—something like grace arose in his battered, tense face.

He was a difficult child, but he had less than ideal parents. Raised in Slater, Missouri, by a grandmother, he did two years in a school for wayward boys, and three years in the marines—he had a drilled look, and an unquestioning commitment. Then he went to New York for drama training. He replaced Ben Gazzara in the lead for
A Hatful of Rain
in 1956, and from 1958 to 1961 he was in the TV series,
Wanted: Dead or Alive
. He had small parts in
Somebody Up There Likes Me
(56, Robert Wise) and
Never Love a Stranger
(58, Robert Stevens). He won more attention in
The Blob
(58, Irvin S. Yeaworth);
The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery
(58, Charles Guggenheim and John Stix); and
Never So Few
(59, John Sturges). Then Sturges gave him a key role in
The Magnificent Seven
(60), which established him as a laconic loner in action.

After the dismal
The Honeymoon Machine
(61, Richard Thorpe), he was very good as the psychopathic soldier in
Hell Is for Heroes
(62, Don Siegel)—the first hint of a death wish in McQueen. He worked hard in
The War Lover
(62, Philip Leacock), and he exulted in his duet with motorbike in
The Great Escape
(63, Sturges).

Then four films in a row took him indoors, and into emotional difficulties with women. He was valiant every time, even if some of these seemed to call for more conscience than he had, or was willing to show:
Love With the Proper Stranger
(63, Robert Mulligan);
Soldier in the Rain
(63, Ralph Nelson);
Baby, the Rain Must Fall
(65, Mulligan); and
The Cincinnati Kid
(65, Norman Jewison), where his poker-faced lack of animation suffers beside Edward G. Robinson, Tuesday Weld, and Joan Blondell. Nor was
Nevada Smith
(66, Henry Hathaway) or
The Sand Pebbles
(66, Wise) an advance.

But in 1968, he delivered two quite different but very successful pictures: as the suave mastermind in
The Thomas Crown Affair
(Jewison), and as the rough, surly cop (preferably in a car) in
Bullitt
(68, Peter Yates), a San Franciscan rebel, and a pioneer for Dirty Harry—McQueen’s style helped shape Eastwood. He ventured into Faulkner country for
The Reivers
(69, Mark Rydell) and then used his new power for the dire
Le Mans
(71, Lee H. Katzin), fatal proof that he preferred playing with cars to making movies.

He next fell in with Sam Peckinpah and showed a puzzled calf’s charm as the feckless rodeo cowboy,
Junior Bonner
(72). He brought a kind of exhausted presence to
The Getaway
(72), but his violent inwardness was enough to woo costar Ali MacGraw, who became his second wife.
Papillon
(73, Franklin J. Schaffner) is not that good a film, but McQueen is very touching as the man who defies solitary confinement, madness, and aging and becomes a wistful genius of survival. In the last hour of that film, he has moments of inspired, heroic craziness—and he makes Dustin Hoffman look like an artful actor.

In
The Towering Inferno
(74, John Guillermin), he presided over a worthless all-star project. Then years passed and he was unrecognizable in a version of Ibsen’s
An Enemy of the People
(78, George Schaefer). He was trying to beat cancer; he married again; and he made two last films—patient unto death as
Tom Horn
(80, William Wiard), and going through the motions for
The Hunter
(80, Buzz Kulik).

Since his death, several books (one by his first wife, Neile Adams, and another by Penina Spiegel) have addressed McQueen’s darker side and his abusive ways with women. But he has become something of a hero, as witness Kevin Costner’s crewcut tribute in
The Bodyguard
(92, Mick Jackson), a project that might have burned more dangerously with McQueen’s grimly suppressed sexuality.