The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (308 page)

A stage actor, he had played with the Mercury Theater before his debut in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(39, William Dieterle). He made a few more films and then went into the service. But on emerging he soon became a regular character actor:
Winged Victory
(44, George Cukor); the investigator in
The Killers
(46, Robert Siodmak);
The Web
(47, Michael Gordon);
A Double Life
(47, Cukor);
Another Part of the Forest
(48, Gordon);
Fighter Squadron
(48, Raoul Walsh);
An Act of Murder
(48, Gordon); the plant in
White Heat
(49, Walsh);
711 Ocean Drive
(50, Joseph M. Newman);
Between Midnight and Dawn
(50, Gordon Douglas);
Warpath
(51, Byron Haskin);
Silver City
(51, Haskin);
Two of a Kind
(51, Henry Levin);
Denver & Rio Grande
(52, Haskin);
The Turning Point
(52, Dieterle); as Casca in
Julius Caesar
(53, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
The Hitchhiker
(53, Ida Lupino);
The Bigamist
(53, Lupino);
Broken Lance
(54, Edward Dmytryk); winning the supporting actor Oscar as the press agent in
The Barefoot Contessa
(54, Mankiewicz);
Pete Kelly’s Blues
(55, Jack Webb); as Winston Smith in
1984
(56, Michael Anderson);
A Cry in the Night
(56, Frank Tuttle);
The Girl Can’t Help It
(56, Frank Tashlin);
The Big Land
(57, Douglas);
The Third Voice
(59, Hubert Cornfield);
Up Periscope
(59, Douglas);
The Last Voyage
(60, Andrew Stone);
The Great Imposter
(60, Robert Mulligan);
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(62, John Ford);
Birdman of Alcatraz
(62, John Frankenheimer);
Seven Days in May
(64, Frankenheimer);
Rio Conchos
(64, Douglas);
The Hanged Man
(64, Don Siegel);
Sylvia
(65, Douglas);
Synanon
(65, Richard Quine);
Peau d’Espion
(66, Edouard Molinaro);
Fantastic Voyage
(66, Richard Fleischer); an elderly survivor in
The Wild Bunch
(69, Sam Peckinpah);
Lucky Luciano
(73, Francisco Rosi); and
99 44/100% Dead
(74, Frankenheimer).

Margaret O’Brien
, b. Los Angeles, 1937
Downstairs at the Smith house in a suburb of St Louis, circa 1904, there is a teenage party. The two younger children of the house creep out of bed and watch from the stairs. But they are noticed and called down by their tolerant elders. No party was ever more fruitfully interrupted. For one of those children, “Tootie,” was played by Margaret O’Brien, and with her sister, Esther, played by Judy Garland, she performs a gorgeous front-parlor cakewalk to the tune “Under the Bamboo Tree.” We need not be too surprised that a seven-year-old could carry that off without disrupting the marvelous grace of Vincente Minnelli’s camera in
Meet Me in St. Louis
(44). More subtle is the discretion and intimacy of the number, for
Meet Me in St. Louis
is a family story that happens to be illustrated by songs. The cakewalk sequence never loses sight of Tootie’s moment of glory nor the light of nostalgia that warms the entire film. The spectacle is allowed to rest with character and plausibility. Add to that her full-blooded conviction in the Halloween sequence and you can see what an extraordinary young actress Margaret O’Brien was. The droll overplaying in, for instance,
Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
(45, Roy Rowland) is a great comic achievement, so that one regrets the number of times she was restricted to the sentimental stereotype of children.

She made her debut at the age of four and had ten good years at MGM:
Babes on Broadway
(41, Busby Berkeley);
Journey for Margaret
(42, W. S. Van Dyke);
Dr. Gillespie’s Criminal Case
(43, Willis Goldbeck); singing “In a Little Spanish Town” in
Thousands Cheer
(43, George Sidney);
Lost Angel
(43, Rowland);
Madame Curie
(43, Mervyn Le Roy);
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson);
The Canterville Ghost
(44, Jules Dassin);
Music for Millions
(44, Henry Koster);
The Unfinished Dance
(47, Koster);
Tenth Avenue Angel
(48, Rowland);
Big City
(48, Norman Taurog); as Beth in
Little Women
(49, Le Roy);
The Secret Garden
(49, Fred M. Wilcox), her finest performance, a study in the rigid dignity of an orphan quelling panic; and
Her First Romance
(51, Seymour Friedman).

She made only two films as a young adult: the horsy
Glory
(55, David Butler) and
Heller in Pink Tights
(60, George Cukor) when, as the inept daughter, her talent for comedy still seemed real. But perhaps she had been formed by an earlier age and style. When she auditioned for the Natalie Wood part in
Rebel Without a Cause
she lost the role because “she answered all the questions by professing love for parents and teachers.” The mood and pace of a cakewalk can last a lifetime.

She was seen in
Amy
(81, Vincent McEveety).

Pat O’Brien
(1899–1983), b. Milwaukee, Wisconsin
When Warner Brothers were industriously covering the wrong side of the tracks in the 1930s, Pat O’Brien was their resident apologist for the social order, either as cop or priest. Always retaining a hint of his Irish origins, O’Brien brought a welcome astringency to several parts that could have been horribly pious. His partnership with James Cagney—like Guinness and bootleg hootch—was especially successful.

It had been thought that O’Brien’s movie debut was as Hildy Johnson, the reporter—a part he had played on the stage—in
The Front Page
(31, Lewis Milestone). But there is a Pat O’Brien who played in three earlier, and very cheap films:
Shadows of the West
(21, Paul Hurst);
The Freckled Rascal
(29, Louis King); and
Fury of the Wild
(29, Leon d’Usseau).

After
The Front Page
, he was an established player:
Air Mail
(32, John Ford);
Virtue
(32, Edward Buzzell);
American Madness
(32, Frank Capra);
Laughter in Hell
(33, Edward L. Cahn);
Destination Unknown
(33, Tay Garnett);
Bombshell
(33, Victor Fleming);
Oil for the Lamps of China
(33, Mervyn Le Roy);
Flirtation Walk
(34, Frank Borzage);
Twenty Million Sweethearts
(34, Ray Enright); with Cagney in
Here Comes the Navy
(34, Lloyd Bacon);
Stars Over Broadway
(35, William Keighley);
Devil Dogs of the Air
(35, Bacon);
In Caliente
(35, Bacon); with Cagney again in
The Irish in Us
(35, Bacon) and
Ceiling Zero
(36, Howard Hawks); as
The Great O’Malley
(37, William Dieterle); as the priest watching over Cagney in
Angels With Dirty Faces
(38, Michael Curtiz);
Boy Meets Girl
(38, Bacon);
Till We Meet Again
(40, Edmund Goulding);
Knute Rockne: All-American
(40, Bacon);
The Fighting 69th
(40, Keighley);
Escape to Glory
(41, John Brahm);
Broadway
(42, William A. Seiter);
His Butler’s Sister
(43, Borzage);
Having Wonderful Crime
(45, Edward Sutherland);
Man Alive
(45, Enright);
CrackUp
(46, Irving Reis);
Riff Raff
(47, Ted Tetzlaff);
Fighting Father Dunne
(48, Tetzlaff); as Gramps in
The Boy with Green Hair
(48, Joseph Losey);
Johnny One-Eye
(50, Robert Florey);
The People Against O’Hara
(51, John Sturges);
Ring of Fear
(54, James Edward Grant);
Inside Detroit
(56, Fred F. Sears);
The Last Hurrah
(58, Ford); effortlessly knowing when raiding the speakeasy in
Some Like It Hot
(59, Billy Wilder);
Town Tamer
(65, Lesley Selander);
The End
(78, Burt Reynolds);
Scout’s Honor
(80, Henry Levin); and
Ragtime
(81, Milos Forman).

Willis H. O’Brien
(1886–1962), b. Oakland, California
“O’Brien was a genius,” said Merian C. Cooper,
“Kong
is as much his picture as it is mine. There was never anybody in his class as far as special effects went, there never was and there probably never will be.” Well, special effects have undergone another revolution since Cooper spoke—that of computer assistance. But O’Brien’s place is still unquestioned, just as his role in that great testament to collaboration, serendipity, and blind chance—the making of
King Kong
—has been made clear by the film’s several scholars. And there is more still to O’Brien’s story.

As a boy, he was a clever drawer and an experimenter with models. That led to work as a sculptor and as a cartoonist for the
San Francisco Daily News
. To that end he made a series of toy dinosaurs and then experimented with stop motion—frame-by-frame advancing of the action—on a movie camera. Two months’ work led to a five-minute film,
The Dinosaur and the Missing Link
(14). Edison purchased it and advanced O’Brien the money to make ten more films. That in turn led to
The Ghost of Slumber Mountain
(19), which was a great hit.

O’Brien was developing all his processes toward greater sophistication, as shown in
The Lost World
(25, Harry Hoyt). That was the picture that intrigued Merian Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack in the halting development of
King Kong
. By then, O’Brien had gone over to rubber models, and he had found several different versions of matte work and miniature projection that could marry the model work and the live action.

Pedantic schoolchildren are sometimes heard to complain that you can see (and feel) the flickering trickery in
King Kong
. Well, yes, you can; it’s the trembling poetry of the magic. For myself, I think
Kong
is still one of the most compelling special effects movies, in large part because it is not perfect, and because the seams that show (so to speak) are the friction of one reality against another.

The story of
King Kong’s
production is of struggle and battles (with Cooper generally having the clearest sense of where they were going), but O’Brien—or Obie—was the boffin who answered all the impossible problems. He worked just as hard on
Son of Kong
(33, Schoedsack), and just before that film opened his estranged wife murdered their two sons.

He was deeply dismayed, and he put aside or forgot many favorite projects. But there were other credits:
The Last Days of Pompeii
(35, Schoedsack);
Mighty Joe Young
(49, Schoedsack)—after which O’Brien was awarded an honorary Oscar. The story for
The Beast of Hollow Mountain
(56, Edward Nassour and Ismael Rodríguez);
The Animal World
(56, Irwin Allen), with Ray Harryhausen as his assistant;
The Black Scorpion
(57, Edward Ludwig);
The Giant Behemoth
(59, Eugène Lourié);
The Lost World
(60, Allen);
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
(63, Stanley Kramer).

Clifford Odets
(1906–63), b. Philadelphia
Well, yes, you’re right, Clifford Odets was a playwright, and the great, radical hope of the 1930s. He was intensely associated with the Group Theatre and with leftist themes—as witness
Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!
, and
Paradise Lost
. Elia Kazan observed how Odets became “the most sought-after celebrity in town”: “Everyone wanted to meet him, look him over, ask him questions, listen to what he had to say—and fuck him.”

And now we come close to why Odets is in this book, for the fuckability of the writer, or the artist, is close to the mysterious heart of Hollywood. Odets was never a beauty, but everyone who met him was entranced: he was magnetic, a great talker, funny, with burning eyes, and that forlorn attractiveness of a natural actor (he had acted professionally) who had never got big parts. But along the way, and among others, he had Frances Farmer as a mistress, Luise Rainer as a wife, and then Betty Grayson, another actress. What can we say of guys who fuck only actresses? Not just that they’re obsessed with the art and the business, but that they are committed to self-dramatization (still the essential wellness for getting on in Hollywood).

Then we come to the way in which being in reach of celebrated women, and large fees for rewriting bad screenplays, got in the way of Odets as the white hope of the theatre. For he moved—physically and temperamentally—to Los Angeles, and he began devoting himself to causes that could not compare with the satisfaction of plays. This is a model of selling out, which Odets did with fiery humor, comic self-deprecation, and actorly panache. But it meant that in the rest of his life his plays were “only”
Golden Boy
(1937), a treatise on selling out;
Rocket to the Moon
(1938);
Night Music
(1940);
Clash by Night
(1941)—which would become a Fritz Lang film;
The Big Knife
(1941)—a scabrous account of Hollywood and selling out; the fascinating
The Country Girl
(1950), on how a woman can sap a creative man’s juices; and
The Flowering Peach
(1954).