The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (408 page)

Norma Talmadge
(1897–1957), b. Niagara Falls, New York
There may have been Hollywood veterans who winced at the blithe malice with which, at the end of
Singin’ in the Rain
, Gene Kelly hauls up the curtain to show Debbie Reynolds singing the words that had seemed to be emerging from Jean Hagen’s mouth. For Hagen’s grinding Bronx accent and the eighteenth-century French setting of the film within
Singin in the Rain
have a cruel relevance to the sudden retirement from movies of Norma Talmadge. She was the oldest of the three Talmadge sisters (the others were Natalie and Constance) and the most successful; but sound proved the incongruity of salon prettiness and tenement voice and made
Du Barry, Woman of Paris
(30, Sam Taylor) her last film. Only thirty-three years old, she had been in the movies since 1911 and was one of the most popular of silent screen actresses. Not without merit. She was as animated as all the sisters, able to play romance and comedy. Clarence Brown thought her “the greatest pantomimist that ever drew breath. She was a natural-born comic; you could turn on a scene with her and she’d go on for five minutes without stopping or repeating herself.”

In fact, her specialty was to be “a brave, tragic, and sacrificing heroine,” as well as a clotheshorse. Adela Rogers St. Johns called her “our one and only great actress.”

By her late teens she was already an experienced actress with Vitagraph and had been in over a hundred shorts: a one-reel
A Tale of Two Cities
(11, William Humphrey);
Under the Daisies
(13, Van Dyke Brooke);
Goodbye Summer
(14, Brooke);
The Criminal
(15, Brooke). It was in 1917 that she, Allan Dwan, and Joseph Schenck formed a company to make
Panthea
. At that stage, Norma was under contract to Lewis Selznick. During the filming, however, Talmadge and Schenck were married and Dwan complained of having to direct against “pillow talk” interpretations. The Norma Talmadge Production Company was formed with Schenck personally supervising the majority of her films:
The Forbidden City
(18, Sidney Franklin);
Probation Wife
(19, Franklin);
The Branded Woman
(20, Albert Parker);
Love’s Redemption
(21, Parker);
The Passion Flower
(21, Herbert Brenon);
The Sign on the Door
(21, Brenon);
The Wonderful Thing
(21, Brenon); as the Duchesse de Langeais in
The Eternal Flame
(22, Frank Lloyd);
Smilin’ Through
(22, Franklin);
Ashes of Vengeance
(23, Lloyd);
The Song of Love
(23, Chester Franklin and Frances Marion);
The Voice from the Minaret
(23, Lloyd);
Within the Law
(23, Lloyd);
The Only Woman
(24, Sidney Olcott);
Secrets
(24, Frank Borzage);
Graustark
(25, Dmitri Buchowetzki);
The Lady
(25, Borzage);
Kiki
(26, Brown);
Camille
(27, Fred Niblo);
The Dove
(27, Roland West);
The Woman Disputed
(28, Henry King and Sam Taylor); and
New York Nights
(29, Lewis Milestone).

Norma called Schenck “Daddy.” He controlled her in alliance with “Ma” Talmadge and, in the early 1920s, used Norma’s boxoffice power to buy himself into United Artists. The Schencks parted in 1930, the year of
Du Barry
. As if to show how far movies were now a matter of harmony between sound and image, Norma took her maligned voice into radio and later married George Jessel, but she never made another film. In 1934, in
Tender Is the Night
, Scott Fitzgerald referred to her as the epitome of late 1920s glamour who “must be a fine, noble woman beyond her loveliness.”

Lee Tamahori
, b. Wellington, New Zealand, 1950
1989:
Thunderbox
. 1994:
Once Were Warriors
. 1996:
Mulholland Falls
. 1997:
The Edge
. 2001:
Along Came a Spider
. 2002:
Die Another Day
. 2005:
xXx: State of the Union
. 2007:
Next
.

If only Lee Tamahori’s films were getting better. For just consider:
Once Were Warriors
is a blazing look at a strange world—Maori life in New Zealand—with unforgettable scenes of love, boozing, and domestic violence. It’s always credible, often frightening, and very moving, and the main performances—by Rena Owen and Temuera Morrison—are painfully real. After that? Well,
Mulholland Falls
is a very entertaining film on a subject that might have made a masterpiece, but Tamahori was content to go along with too much 1940s nostalgia. As for
The Edge
and
Along Came a Spider
, they show a very smart talent going in ever more artificial circles.

Tamahori was a boom operator and then an assistant director for years, notably on
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
(83, Nagisa Oshima);
Utu
(83, Geoff Murphy);
The Quiet Earth
(85, Murphy):
Bridge to Nowhere
(86, Ian Mune). So, it’s a long journey to Hollywood, and England—where he made the next Bond film (that pinhead circle, with inane wonders flying round it). Since then, his novelty has receded, and his material has become trashy. If you look at
Once Were Warriors, Mulholland Falls
, or even
The Edge
again now you feel empty.

Akim Tamiroff
(1899–1972), b. Baku, Russia
Tamiroff was a squat, scuttling rogue, ready to sell you a fake icon or a filthy picture; his face slipped as readily into a gloating smile or a contemptuous sneer; he could never escape a hint of sweat and bad breath or the idea of some shabby lodgings from which he emerged every day with implausible spruceness. And yet he managed to be one of the most beguiling men in movies, a connoisseur of the crazy paving life of the supporting actor.

He was called to the devious art of acting at a time when earnestness was the new Russian vogue. In 1920, he joined the Moscow Arts Theatre, then led by Stanislavsky. He waited until the Theatre took Chekhov and Gorky to America in 1923, and got dropped off somewhere along the way, opting for the character of the perpetual refugee. It was ten years before he entered movies: time to learn English, and then decorate it with that accent that moved within a word from whine to growl.

The 1930s was an age for supporting players: they worked on several films at a time, an Anatolian hashish merchant at Paramount this week; next week, at Warners, a slippery middleman in the white slave trade. Directors relied on men like Tamiroff to invent their own characters, and he was allowed great freedom for as long as he was content with lurid and monotonous villainy. But the Hollywood system never took villains seriously; it seldom allowed them to be brave, intelligent, witty, tender, or imaginative—all those qualities that make real-life villains so interesting. Tamiroff recognized that handicap and created a unique cowardly villain, so inefficient a liar and cheat that raw helplessness shone through: a dumpy little man with an insecure scowl and an anxious snarl, alarmed by anything other than immediate submission from his victims.

Tamiroff’s films come round now after respectable people have gone to bed. There is barely a dull one among them, or one that does not come to life for the twenty minutes in which he flourishes:
Okay America
(32, Tay Garnett);
Gabriel Over the White House
(33, Gregory La Cava);
Storm at Daybreak
(33, Richard Boleslavsky);
Queen Christina
(33, Rouben Mamoulian);
Sadie McKee
(34, Clarence Brown);
The Merry Widow
(34, Ernst Lubitsch);
The Captain Hates the Sea
(34, Lewis Milestone, fellow Russian exile who used Tamiroff six times);
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
(35, Henry Hathaway);
China Seas
(35, Garnett);
The Story of Louis Pasteur
(35, William Dieterle);
Anthony Adverse
(36, Mervyn Le Roy);
The General Died at Dawn
(36, Milestone), as a Chinese;
Desire
(36, Frank Borzage);
King of Gamblers
(37, Robert Florey);
The Great Gambini
(37, Charles Vidor);
High, Wide and Handsome
(37, Mamoulian);
Dangerous to Know
(38, Florey);
The Buccaneer
(38, Cecil B. De Mille);
Spawn of the North
(38, Hathaway); playing two roles—banana republic president and masquerader—in
The Magnificent Fraud
(39, Florey);
King of Chinatown
(39, Nick Grinde);
Union Pacific
(39, De Mille);
Disputed Passage
(39, Borzage);
North West Mounted Police
(40, De Mille);
The Great McGinty
(40, Preston Sturges);
The Corsican Brothers
(41, Gregory Ratoff);
Tortilla Flat
(42, Victor Fleming);
Five Graves to Cairo
(43, Billy Wilder);
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(43, Sam Wood);
His Butler’s Sister
(43, Borzage);
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(44, Rowland V. Lee);
Dragon Seed
(44, Jack Conway); as stooge to George Sanders’s Vidocq in
A Scandal in Paris
(46, Douglas Sirk);
Fiesta
(47, Richard Thorpe);
My Girl Tisa
(48, Elliott Nugent);
Outpost in Morocco
(49, Florey);
Black Magic
(49, Ratoff), his first film with Orson Welles;
Desert Legion
(53, Joseph Pevney);
They Who Dare
(54, Milestone);
The Widow
(55, Milestone);
Anastasia
(56, Anatole Litvak);
The Black Sleep
(56, Reginald Le Borg); as a Chinese officer in
Yangtse Incident
(57, Michael Anderson);
Me and the Colonel
(58, Peter Glenville);
Ocean’s 11
(60, Milestone);
Romanoff and Juliet
(61, Peter Ustinov);
Il Giudizio Universale
(61, Vittorio de Sica); as “Monsignor Cupido,” with Gina Lollobrigida—like a beetle on her switchback curves—in
Le Bambole
(64, Mauro Bolognini);
Topkapi
(64, Jules Dassin);
Lord Jim
(65, Richard Brooks);
Marie-Chantal Contre le Docteur Kha
(65, Claude Chabrol);
After the Fox
(66, de Sica);
Great Catherine
(68, Gordon Flemyng); and
Then Came Bronson
(70, William A. Graham).

His dainty servility and guile were made for the mountainous self-glorification of Welles. In three films together, they presented the same spectacle of doubled-up Akim hiding fearfully beneath the Sultan’s great belly. In
Confidential Report
(55), Tamiroff was Jakob Zouk, a companion-in-crime eliminated by Welles. In
Touch of Evil
(58), he breathed garlic anxiety into Uncle Joe Grandi, the petulant border-town crook so flustered and jumpy that when he moved too quickly his wig slipped. Once again, he was murdered, throttled by Welles’s corrupt police chief. And in
The Trial
(63), he was Bloch, the hopeless client to Welles’s indifferent advocate, humiliated but still dependent. By then, Kafka must have seemed to him almost a documentary writer.

The Trial
was made all over Europe, as money and opportunity coincided; in much the same way, since 1957 Tamiroff had been playing Sancho Panza in Welles’s movie of
Don Quixote
. But once supporting-part movies drained away, Tamiroff wandered from one bizarre venture to another. One film caught the plight of the outcast exactly: Jean-Luc Godard’s
Alphaville
(65), in which he played Henri Dickson, a worn-out private eye, dying in a squalid hotel in some wintry suburb of the computer city. His end comes in that film as he attempts to revive passion in the cold arms of a “second-class seductress.” He recalls a lofty past, not too far from that of a Moscow Arts actor who preferred the draughty and impermanent sound stages of the world: “Thank you, Madame Pompadour … Ah, Madame Bovary … Marie Antoinette … that’s love … l’amour … and I know it in Russian too … ah, darling.”

Kinuyo Tanaka
(1909–77), b. Shimonoseki, Japan
Garbo and Dietrich were central to the movies for a dozen or so years; Crawford and Davis for perhaps twenty-five; Gish and Pickford for fifteen. Kinuyo Tanaka—their equal or superior as an actress—was a major force in Japanese film for most of her fifty-year career (Katharine Hepburn, I suppose, is her only peer). She appeared in nearly 250 films, many of them very successful, very fine, or both.

Tanaka wasn’t an obvious beauty—she wasn’t really a beauty at all—but one comes to treasure her face: slightly plump, small piercing eyes, and thin lips that can express anything with the slightest tightening or the merest smile. In the fifty or so films that have been shown in the West, we have seen her play shy innocents, tough working girls, crooks, tragic victims, romantic heroines, man-eaters, suffering mothers, cruel stepmothers, aristocrats, peasants, formidable actresses, dying crones. She makes even Stanwyck’s range seem narrow.

She was born poor in a remote part of Japan, joined a music troupe at eleven, and slid quickly into the emerging Japanese film industry. Among her early films were seven silents for Ozu, the most interesting of which is
Dragnet Girl
(33), in which she is a bad girl who goes good, reforming her boyfriend along the way. Well before that she had starred in Japan’s first talkie,
The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine
(31, Heinosuke Gosho). During the thirties she acted for Naruse, Gosho, Yasujiro Shimazu, Hiroshi Shimizu (her husband for a while), and Hiromasa Nomura, whose
Yearning Laurel
(38) was probably her most popular film at a time when she was Japan’s most popular star.
Yearning Laurel
is a quintessential Japanese weepie—Tanaka plays a young, sacrificing mother whose true love only runs smooth when she enters a song contest and wins both contest and man. (She’s also a dedicated nurse.) Despite her early success, her greatest period came in the early fifties at the height of her association with Mizoguchi. They had worked together on seven films in the forties, including
Utamaro and His Five Women
(46) and
Women of the Night
(48), a blistering attack on prostitution; but
The Life of Oharu
(52),
Ugetsu
(53), and
Sansho the Bailiff
(54) would alone guarantee her screen immortality. Her performance as the potter’s wife in
Ugetsu
, and her reappearance in the last dream, are among the finest things in world film.