19. Olivia de Havilland in 'To Each His Own' (1946)

  

Plot Intro

It’s World War II and middle-aged fire wardens Jody Norris (Olivia de Havilland) and Lord Desham (Roland Culver) are reminiscing about their lives. When Jody discovers that an American pilot named Gregory Pierson is coming to London on leave, she reveals that the man is her son but he does not know it. Excited about seeing him again, she remembers and recounts the events of her life, and explains why she has had no contact with him for so long…

Paul says...

Oh Olivia. If she had lived just a few months more she would have been our first Best Actress winner to be still alive. As it is, she finally shuffled off the proverbial coil in July 2020 at the whopping old age of 104 although Luise Rainer remains the longest-lived Best Actress winner when she died just 13 days shy of 105. Olivia died with a substantial career under her name and two Best Actress Oscars. 

We’ve already written about her younger actress sister, Joan Fontaine who, by this point, had won her only Best Actress Oscar in 1941. Their early lives were relatively similar. Like Joan, Olivia was born in Tokyo and both girls were pushed into the performing arts world by their stage actress mother, Lillian Fontaine. Their parents divorced due to their father’s infidelities and they disliked their later stepfather for his strict child-rearing ways. Olivia performed in theatre in Japan to begin with but she was noticed by Hollywood people and made her film debut as Hermia in 1934’s famous movie production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Her career remained in historical dramas and adventures, her most famous (and the film that projected her to stardom) being The Adventures of Robin Hood alongside Errol Flynn in 1938, one of the most iconic and influential action-adventure movies ever made.

This then led to probably her most famous role as Melanie Hamilton in the most financially successful film of all time, Gone With the Wind. Although she lost her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination to her co-star Hattie McDaniels (who thoroughly deserved it), this is a cracking good performance. Melanie is, on the surface, unassertive, passive, frustratingly accepting of Scarlett O’Hara’s acts of immorality. But, there is an underlining strength and stoicism that keeps you on her side and Olivia exudes that beautifully. One famous scene (of many, many famous scenes) is when Scarlett arrives at a party hosted by Melanie just after she was discovered trying to shack up with Melanie’s husband, Ashley. The audience is fully expecting Melanie, after all this time, to claw Scarlett’s eyes out. But Melanie welcomes her in, a power move like no other that cements the character as more secure, more socially accepted and more stable than Scarlett.

I digress, however. Post-Gone With the Wind, Olivia developed a difficult relationship with her employer, Warner Brothers. She often rejected scripts if she wasn’t receiving a high-enough billing (amongst other reasons) and this led to a couple of suspensions of her contract. Olivia wanted meatier roles than simply the fawning heroine to the Errol Flynn-esque hero. In fact, Flynn and Olivia had a big falling out about this when she was in talks to star with him in historical epic, They Died With Their Boots On, but they reunited when Flynn told the studio he would only do the movie with her in it and it proved to be a big hit. The two collaborated together a few times and seem to have had a strong relationship. 

In the early '40s, Warner Bros tried to add 6 months to Olivia’s contract to make up for her time on suspension. In a landmark case, Olivia fought against it and won, winning great respect from her peers and helped diminish the power of the studios over the actors’ lives and contracts.

To Each His Own, was her first film after these legal proceedings had been concluded. Olivia had some influence on the choice of director, a wise thing to have considering she had to age about 30 years during the film’s events. My favourite parts of the film are the segments at the start and end where we see Olivia playing an “older” woman (I think she’s meant to be in her 50s). Olivia displays mannerisms and facial expressions that put the audience directly on the side of someone who has been pushed and pulled about a bit but managed to survive it all. In fact, she’s so good that it makes the flashback (which composes about 80% of the whole story) pretty run-of-the-mill in comparison. I was far more engaged with the character when she was anxiously awaiting the arrival of her estranged son and gradually plucking up the courage to reveal all to him, rather than when she was demurely falling in love with the boy’s father. When she does try and win the boy back from his adoptive mother during the flashback, we see some tremendous overacting from Mary Anderson (who also had a small role in Gone With the Wind) and the whole thing turns into mawkish, unrealistic melodrama. A poor man’s Mildred Pierce. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed the relationship between older Olivia and her friend, the posh but perceptive Lord Desham played brilliantly by Roland Culver. Their relationship is neither romantic nor particularly sentimental, but it is fraught with honest, catty one-liners similar to a gay man and his best female friend. My favourite moment was when Desham turns up at a distraught Olivia’s flat and she looks at him with the line “Oh, I’d forgotten about YOU”. Desham also proves to be the hero of the piece, urging and even forcing (in a good way) Olivia to reveal her true identity to her son. It’s a very sweet pairing and I wish the film had been built more around that.

To Each His Own proved to be a successful gamble for Olivia. She semi-method acted the part, using different perfumes for each stage of her character’s life and gradually lowering the pitch of her voice as the character ages and it helped re-establish her career after the turgid drama of her legal trouble with Warner Bros.

There, we will leave her for a few weeks until she wins her second Best Actress Oscar in 1949. On that blog post we will deal more with her difficult relationship with her sister, particularly during their mother’s death.

Highlight

The final 10 minutes are outstandingly sweet and concludes the story after nearly two hours of relative boredom.

Lowlight

The flashback scenes are packed with lengthy platitudinous dialogue about love and shit. The one that made me laugh the most was when Olivia and her amour manage to have one whilst sitting high up in the sky in an open-air fighter plane with not one gust of wind blowing her hair or drowning out her voice.

Mark

5/10

Doug says...

Olivia de Havilland passing away in 2020 seems bitterly unfair. At the ripe age of 104, having survived many trials and tribulations (see above for Paul’s potted history), she gets wiped out during a pandemic. 

Our last real link to the ‘golden age’, she was an extraordinary presence and her focus and verve as an actress meant she Got It Done - whether it was taking on a studio in court, or delivering excellent performances. As Melly in Gone with the Wind she’s exceptional - making a potentially preachy role somehow accessible and strong. Vivien Leigh is the storm of the film, but Olivia’s subtle, weighted performance anchors it. The two of them together are the reason for its success. 

But here we have a very different performance. While the film itself is pretty weak, Olivia’s working hard. During the current day scenes, she is so expertly made up and acting as if she was in her early fifties that I genuinely thought she was older that she was. There’s no vanity, she’s committed to making you see the older, slightly gnarled woman. And as a result, these scenes are the most compelling. 

Then we cut back to her as a young woman for the majority of the film. It’s not a good move as the plot is uninteresting and while de Havilland does an accomplished job, it doesn’t particularly stand out as better than any other actress could do. In that sense, it feels a little paint-by-numbers (gasp in this scene, look distraught into the camera in this scene etc. etc.) 

It’s only in the framing moments, as an older woman, that de Havilland impresses. She captures the feeling beautifully, looking on desperately as her son - who does not know she is his mother - bounds around, dating women, joining the air force and being a Bright Young Thing. The desire for him to know that she is his mother emanates through these scenes and I’m pretty sure it’s what won her the Oscar. 

But ultimately this film could be so much better. Casting an older actress actually in her fifties, and ditching the flashbacks, it could be a story where the audience discover the truth along with her friend - who as Paul says - provides great witty repartee and emotional support. Not one of the best films, but certainly a lot of promise. 

Highlight

A scene when older de Havilland is rushing around her flat trying to make it nice for her son to stay sticks in the mind. It’s full of energy, de Havilland exuding nerves and excitement, and the nice counter-balance of a monotonous maid. 

Lowlight

The flashbacks are unimpressive and largely quite dull. 

Mark

3/10

Best of the Rest: Marlene Dietrich in 'Shanghai Express' (1932)

 

Plot Intro

China, in the middle of the civil war. A country rife with unrest, corruption and fighting. A group of people board a train bound for Shanghai. There’s two mysterious femme fatale-like women (Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong), a terribly British captain (Clive Brook), a Christian missionary (Lawrence Grant), prim keeper of a boarding house (Louise Closser Hale) and a Eurasian man with secrets (Warner Oland), amongst others. Will they survive the 3-day journey?

Paul says...

Hollywood actresses don’t come more unique than this. Dietrich’s idiosyncratically gender-bending look, her sultry European accent, her graceful feline movements all made her one of the biggest stars of not only movies but in the sexy, rebellious world of cabaret too. Remarkably, she only received one Oscar nomination throughout her whole life (for a film called Morocco) but she is evidence that Oscar recognition matters not because she is a household name, she is placed ninth on the AFI’s best actresses ever, and she’s even been imitated successfully on RuPaul’s Drag Race (a sure sign of an everlasting legend).

Born in Berlin in 1901, her stage name “Marlene” is a combo of her actual first two names, Marie and Magdalene. She practised various performing arts from childhood and had a substantial career in musicals throughout the '20s. Her big break was in 1930 in The Blue Angel. It was directed by Josef von Sternberg who would make five more successful films with Marlene up to 1935, making it one of the most prolific director-actor partnerships in Hollywood history (until Tim Burton over-exposed Johnny Depp to us). It was Von Sternberg who lit her for some of her most iconic shots and stills and therefore he is often credited with discovering her and accelerating her fame. 

Shanghai Express is one of those movies and although it sets itself up to be quite an adventure, it’s a bit of a let-down. It’s exemplary of Marlene’s acting and the characters she usually plays, but the plot moves forward in a lacklustre way when we realise who on board the train is a bad guy, then it climaxes about three-quarters of the way through, then limply carries on to the finish line. It doesn’t have quite the impetus and climactic confrontations of that year’s Best Picture winner, Grand Hotel, or a very similar film of the time, Stagecoach. In hindsight, I would have rather watched Morocco or Blue Angel but Shanghai Express had the more interesting-sounding plot. Nonetheless, Marlene’s great to watch and I do enjoy (even on a superficial level) these big-budget ensemble adventure movies that you get in the '30s. 

It’s also (and this is no surprise) pretty racist. The Chinese characters have lines and action in the plot, admittedly, but they are still lumbered with the stereotypical “mysterious and secretive Asian” archetype. There is no reason why Anna May Wong and Marlene couldn’t have swapped roles other than white people putting themselves into the Hollywood limelight. 

The late '30s, however, were less kind to Marlene and she was eventually named “Box Office Poison” along with virtually all other actresses in Hollywood. 

But the war years are the most interesting of Marlene’s long life. She was extremely active in performing for soldiers on the front lines (sometimes accompanied by Patton himself), and selling war bonds for the American war effort. During her act, she sometimes did a mind-reading trick, claiming to be able to explain the thoughts of any soldier who came up to her. When they did, she pretended to read their minds and say something like “Oh I couldn’t possibly talk about THAT!” Most interestingly of all, after the war she reunited with her only sister, and her sister’s husband and child and helped them escape being accused of being Nazi collaborators. But after that, she omitted any mention of them from her life and claimed to be an only child, suggesting that her sister was exactly what Marlene despised. She eventually received the Medal of Freedom in 1947.

Marlene did a handful of films throughout the '50s and early '60s, some of which achieved success such as Billy Wilder’s Agatha Christie adaptation Witness for the Prosecution and the Oscar-winning Judgement at Nuremberg. But it was during this time that she became best known for cabaret for which she was paid well and achieved great success. She would often perform the first half in body-hugging dresses, and the second half in her famous top-hat-and-tails look. She became very adept at lifting her face with tape and using make-up, wigs and stage lighting to disguise her ageing. 

She remained, however, a controversial figure amongst some groups of West Germans who felt she betrayed her homeland by hiding in America during the war. Her cabaret tour there, though financially and critically successful, was nonetheless met with protests. East Germany and also Israel were more accommodating. 

Throughout her life she had a wide range of overlapping affairs with all sorts of actors, writers, and artists both male and female. But she did marry once to a man called Rudolf Sieber and they remained married from the '20s to his death in 1976, producing one daughter, Maria Riva who is still alive today. Although we do not know for sure, it seems like their marriage was a loving and potentially polyamorous one (it seems impossible to me at least that Rudolf spent all those years not knowing about Marlene’s extensive relationships). 

She worked hard up until 1975, when, after surviving cervical cancer and fracturing a couple of bones, she decided that 74 years old was a bit too old to be doing this. She lived the rest of her life in Paris away from public eye until her death in 1992 aged 90. Her funeral was an almost state-funeral affair, with large numbers of mourners in both Paris and Berlin (where her body was flown to be buried on her wishes). 

Highlight

This was my first exposure to Marlene’s acting and I was pretty captivated by her. She oozes charisma and I can see why she did so well playing heroic but dangerous women. It was an archetype that had huge popularity in a decade where rebels against society and rebuilding of moral codes were all the rage post-Wall Street crash.  

Lowlight

The presentation of Chinese characters is problematic. Anna May Wong is very good and admittedly she gets action in the plot (which is more than I expected) but it’s a one-note, stereotypical character and she deserved better. See our write-up of 1937’s The Good Earth to find out more info about her.

Mark

4/10

Doug says...

Yay Marlene! Granted I only really know about her from Sasha Velour’s exceptional Snatch Game imitation and Jessica Lange’s ‘influenced by’ role in American Horror Story: Freakshow. But she’s such a name that when she appears in La Vie En Rose, the actress playing her is given real screen priority for what is a thirty second cameo. 

This was quite a dull film to be honest, I found myself not very engaged from the beginning, with a plot that seems to give up half way and a bunch of interesting characters who never really get utilised. A shame! 

But for me it was a chance to see not only Dietrich but also Anna May Wong, who famously was shafted to play the lead role in The Good Earth by Luise Rainer who excruciatingly did yellow-face and won the Oscar. Hollywood, y’all fucked up. 

Wong and Dietrich are women travelling alone and aren’t really given much to work with here. Dietrich is all sensual softness, delivering speeches to the man she’s still in love with as if she were a purring cat, or leaning against walls while a soft focus camera slowly zooms into her face. She’s very elegant but I have to admit I was left slightly underwhelmed. I think Dietrich played this role of sensuality well, but I wasn’t very engaged at any point. 

It was sadly the same with Anna May Wong, who seemed to be doing silent acting in a talkie film. Lots of dramatic looks, and a moment when she kills a man was almost laughable as she pounced about in the shadows. I imagine this is mostly the fault of the script and director but the desire to ‘other’ her seems to have been prevalent as she’s not given any real chance to emote or be an actual character. 

Shanghai Express certainly didn’t deserve any awards, but neither do the two leading actresses who deliver very template performances. But I can’t bring myself to dismiss either of them, knowing what we do about their careers. It may well be that we do not have any films left of Wong acting to her full ability, but that’s Hollywood’s fault for not even letting her have films she was made for (re: The Good Earth). 

Marlene on the other hand, I think was more an icon for her general mystery and glamour. And she gives us that here, but there’s nothing more. And I think nowadays we want our best actors and actresses to have real acting ability (see Olivia Colman or Cate Blanchett or Octavia Spencer) rather than just an air of something else. 

Highlight

I liked the train scene when Dietrich and her ex-lover sit dramatically on an outside terrace as they trundle through China, before launching into a very overdone snog. It was ridiculous and I enjoyed it. 

Lowlight

Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich don’t really seem to shine and it all feels a bit B-movie to me. 

Mark

2/10

18. Joan Crawford in 'Mildred Pierce' (1945)

 

Plot Intro

At a California beach house, a man is murdered. This man is Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), second husband of restaurant owner Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford). When Mildred is informed of the murder, she is taken to the police station for questioning where she discovers that her first husband, Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) has been accused. Doubting the veracity of this, Mildred tells the police her full life story to prove his innocence, dissecting her two marriages, her business, her financial troubles and her stormy relationship with her daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth), and who truly murdered Monte Beragon and why…

Paul says...

In 1962, Joan Crawford starred with her alleged nemesis, Bette Davis, in melodramatic thriller Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Bette was Oscar nominated for Best Actress while Joan was not. So Joan decided to contact all the other nominees and persuaded them to let her accept the Oscar on their behalf if they could not attend. When the absent Anne Bancroft won the award, it was Joan who took to the stage to give the speech, much to Bette’s absolute fury.

In 1968, Joan’s adoptive daughter Christina was in a play but had to pull out due to illness. The character was 28 years old while Joan was in her 60s but Joan managed to persuade the producers to let her fill in for her daughter despite the huge age gap.

These are just two stories that demonstrate the tenacity and drive that Joan had. Sadly this was her only Oscar so I’m going to have to pack her eventful life into one blog post. As such, I’m going to jump over her childhood and early career, and focus more on Mildred Pierce before getting to the good stuff.

Like Bette Davis in All About Eve, Mildred Pierce was Joan’s big comeback after about 7 years of box-office flops. She was supposed to be playing a dowdy, downtrodden housewife who becomes embroiled in the machinations of her daughter and second husband. But Joan, true to form, plays the role with a full face of expensive make-up and even had her outfits adapted to look more like a Vogue model which infuriated the director. 

But weirdly, it all works, and Joan plays the role with a soft-spoken vulnerability that fits the character. This is melodrama at its finest. It has a genuinely intriguing mystery, a fast-paced story that surprises and grips, and despite its preposterousness, it’s totally convincing. It’s arguably one of Crawford’s best movies and performances, but any of her thriller-melodramas from the '40s and '50s are worth watching. Even some of the lesser-regarded ones are good fun. 

Joan is also helped along by two fabulous performances from the other women in the cast. Eve Arden, known primarily as a comedy actress, delivers some superb one-liners as Mildred’s sassy colleague and Ann Blyth (who is truly outstanding) has a dead-pan menace as Mildred’s conniving daughter. Both were nominated for Best Supporting Actress but sadly lost out.  

Joan didn’t attend the ceremony at which she won the Oscar because she was so afraid of losing, so she pretended to be ill. When her name was announced, she hurriedly threw on make-up and filmed an acceptance speech from her alleged sick-bed. Her career afterwards stayed steady for sometime, but insecurities over her age and her mental health spilled over into her family life…

You may have heard of the movie or the book Mommie Dearest, written by the most famous of Joan’s four children, Christina Crawford. The book, published just a couple of years after Crawford’s death, paints Crawford as a mentally unstable, abusive, and extremely mercurial individual. The movie version, with Faye Dunaway as Joan, exacerbates this prevailing image. You may have seen the famous scene in which Dunaway finds out that her children’s dresses are hanging on wire hangers, to which she reacts with sweeping cries of “NO WIRE HANGERS EVER”. 

The exact veracity of the book is very much under debate. While some co-stars and associates have backed up Christina’s claims and have said to be victims of Joan’s alleged mania, others have disputed them, including Mildred Pierce co-star Ann Blyth who said that Crawford was a friend and mentor for her.

My personal theory is that Joan was a pretty damaged person. Probably suffering from bi-polar disorder which would have gone undiagnosed or at least untreated, traumatised by a series of failed marriages, a stressful career and even some alleged abuse in her childhood from her stepfather, which naturally spilled over into her status as mother. Mommie Dearest as a film is campy fun and Faye Dunaway does a great impersonation of Crawford (although she was apparently livid that she didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it and won’t discuss the role in interviews), Jessica Lange’s wonderful depiction in the Ryan Murphy series, Feud, dissects Joan’s career and mental health with more nuance and empathy. In fact, the final episode had me in tears. 

In her final years, Joan became increasingly reclusive and in bad health, although she gave up drinking in 1974. She died in 1977 aged somewhere between 73 and 77 (conflicting sources obscure her birth year). In her will, she left nothing to Christina, explicitly disinheriting her and her brother Christopher although both challenged the will and received a settlement. While her personal life and rumours may have overshadowed her work and accolades, Joan Crawford remains one of the most well-known, most notorious and most important names from Old Hollywood.  

Highlight

Ann Blyth’s performance as Veda is spectacular stuff. Impassive, cruel, and with just a smidgeon of spoiled brattishness.  

Lowlight

The climax feels a little rushed, but it’s succinct and comprehensible.

Mark

9.5/10

Doug says...

I first watched this in the cinema and was utterly bemused, but entertained. My first understanding of this film was that it was an iconic Joan Crawford film, but where was the shrieking, violent harridan of legend? After some more education, I’ve come to learn that this is actually - potentially - the result of a spectacularly meta moment. My opinion of Joan Crawford is simply that of Fay Dunaway playing her in Mommie Dearest, a performance that is camp as anything and lacks nuance, truth or detail. ‘No wire hangers, ever’ is a line you’ll heard screamed by drag queens more than anyone else and that alone should tell you how it’s seen. 

I’m reliably informed that while this was Crawford’s big win, it’s not an essential film of hers. She often played bitchy, melodramatic women (see The Women where she is the main villain) who flirt with men and - in one famous moment - commit suicide by glamorously walking into the sea wearing a full face of make up. 

Mildred Pierce therefore is actually somewhat of a remove for Crawford, and although she found ways to glamorise it a little through tailoring her own costume, she does understand that it is a role that requires a little drabness and day to day monotony. It’s beautifully performed, you notice that she is constantly doing something in the house: folding linen, making cakes, tidying, sweeping - she’s rarely still, and this energy then carries on through into the scenes at the restaurant where she skilfully learns the trade of a waitress (which I can tell you first hand is no mean feat) and goes from success to success. 

And while Crawford is holding the centre, in her excessively shoulder-padded coats, Ann Blyth is doing sterling work as the evil Veda. She is a clear predecessor to Anne Bancroft’s dead eyed Eve in All About Eve, conveying cruelty and selfishness without even moving a muscle. Crawford and Blyth are backed up by the superb Eve Arden in a smaller role, cracking jokes with a timing and wit that transcends seventy five years and had both Paul and me outright laughing. 

The plot is full on melodrama and grips just enough to stop it from seeming silly. I would recommend it to anyone but I would say to go in with an open mind as you could easily start to poke holes in it, but if you just go with the flow and enjoy the suitably gothic filming, the excellent performances and the satisfying denouement (which was still toned down from the much more sexual novel), you’ll see why Crawford finally nabbed the Oscar she so ardently craved for this movie. 

Highlight

I really do enjoy Crawford’s padded shoulders. In fact it’s the lasting memory I have - her looking like she’s accidentally left the coat hanger in as she descends the stairs. 

Lowlight

 It’s a bit silly really. But good fun. 

Mark

8/10