Battle Royale #12: Battle of the Foxy Flappers

Welcome to the twelfth Battle Royale here at The Most Beautiful Fraud in the World.   It is an ongoing series that will pit two classic cinematic greats against each other - and you can vote for who is the greater by clicking your choice over in the poll at the top of the sidebar.

For the twelfth installment of Battle Royale, we are heading back to those halcyon pre-code days of the late silent era and the early sound era - back to that Jazz Age where the booze ran freely (though in supposed hush hush, of course) and the women ran even more so - and how (and not so hush hush).  Yessiree, we are heading back to the days of the flapper.  The days of the bootlegger and the Bronx cheer.  The days of the hood and the hooch and the horsefeathers.  Back to the days when sex sold, and we weren't afraid to say so.  And what two better flappers, what two foxier flappers can you think of, than Miss Louise Brooks and Miss Clara Bow.  Yep, that's right kiddies, it's Lulu versus the It Girl.  Time to get your vote on.  But first, in case you are woefully unfamiliar with these two cinematic beauties - and yes, everyone should be acquainted with them, it has been eighty-some years since either one could be considered relevant in the film industry - please allow me to expand your knowledge base just a bit.

Mary Louise Brooks, a Kansas girl from way back, was just on the verge of superstardom when sound came around, but due to not wanting to be controlled by the studios, or more specifically, Adolph Zukor and Paramount Pictures, the actress with the distinctive bob haircut (she started a trend ya know) and the nickname of Lulu, packed her bags and went off to Germany, becoming the muse for German auteur Georg Wilhelm Pabst, probably second only to Fritz Lang in popularity at the time in theses pre-Hitler days.  Brooks would make just two films with Pabst, but both of them, Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl, both released in 1929, are still considered masterpieces to this day.  After returning to Hollywood, Brooks' career was stunted, as, thanks to Zukor's unofficial blacklisting of the actress, she was only able to get small parts in mediocre movies, or big parts in terrible movies.  She would retire from acting in 1938, and would eventually, after years of alcohol abuse, become a writer, specializing in the cinema of her youth.  

Meanwhile, Clara Bow, easily the bigger star of the two at the time, was known as the It Girl, and would become the epitome of the flapper on film (though don't let that sway your vote here).  Starring in many flapper films of the age, as well as a role in Wings, the very first Best Picture Oscar winner, Bow was a shining star at Paramount, but her private life left more than a bit of uproar.  Much like the aforementioned Miss Brooks, Bow was a rather boisterous person, and indeed, quite the partier.  Of course, many in Hollywood were quite rambunctious in those days, but Bow took such a life to extremes.  After getting married, retiring from acting in 1933, and moving onto ranch life in the wilds of Nevada, Bow said of her career, "My life in Hollywood contained plenty of uproar. I'm sorry for a lot of it but not awfully sorry. I never did anything to hurt anyone else. I made a place for myself on the screen and you can't do that by being Mrs. Alcott's idea of a Little Women."

All you need do is to go on over to the poll, found conveniently near the top of the sidebar of this very same site, and click on who you think is the greater of these two long lost legends of the screen - these two foxy flappers.  And remember, you can comment all you wish (and please do comment - we can never have too many of those) but in order for your vote to be counted, you must vote in the actual poll.  After doing that, then you can come back over here and leave all the comments your heart desires.  Who knows, maybe we will get some sort of lively cinematic discussion going.  And also please remember to tell everyone you know to get out the vote as well.  I would like to see us reach triple digits this time around.  Voting will go until midnight, EST, the night of Friday, April 5th (just over two weeks from the starting gate).  The results will be announced that weekend.  So get out there and vote vote vote.

The Lost and Forgotten Legacy of Helen Twelvetrees

The following is my contribution to the Gone Too Soon Blogathon at Comet Over Hollywood.

Simply for having such an unforgettable name, one would think Helen Twelvetrees' memory would live on long after the actress herself did.  Granted, she was never in what one could honestly call a hit movie, and her film career faded away long before she did, but still, back in the pre-code days of Hollywood, the woman born Helen Marie Jurgens, was always just a film or two away from becoming the breakout star that RKO contemporary Katharine Hepburn would become right before the actress's jaded eyes.  Sadly for her, and for those of us who have seen her films (the few that fit such a demographic), this breakout would never come.

Our story begins with the birth of Helen Jurgens in Brooklyn on Christmas day 1908, but since little is known about her childhood, let us jump ahead just a bit.  Helen would go on to graduate from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where incidentally she would meet her first husband, Clark Twelvetrees, and begin a career on the stage.  As the silent era came to an end and many Hollywood stars could not or would not make the transition to sound films, the studios hit the live theaters and would restock their stable of stars with stage actors.  Among those signing contracts with Fox, was nineteen year old Mrs. Twelvetrees.  She would make her screen debut starring in the studio's second talkie, The Ghost Talks, and would fake a lisp during filming (apparently in order to help show off the new sound technology) that was so successful that a rumour went around town claiming the actress had a speech impediment.

After this, Twelvetrees would star in one of the earliest musicals, Words and Music, a relatively forgettable film that is mostly noteworthy for being the first film in which John Wayne received billing (as Duke Morrison).  Following a split with Fox, after just three films, Twelvetrees would sign with Pathé, which would soon be taken over by RKO.  At her new studio, the actress would make several respectable but ultimately failed films.  Her most notable (and my personal favourite) is a film called Millie, where Twelvetrees plays a jaded goldigging woman who must deal with her wanton life.  This film, with its sexually blatant - at least for the time - storyline, and its somewhat closer-to-the-ground moral code, is a perfect example of the pre-code era in Hollywood.

Twelvetrees, along with other RKO players like Constance Bennett, would become the face of the pre-code era, but Twelvetrees days at RKO were limited - and she knew it.  Upon the arrival of Katharine Hepburn at the studio, Twelvetrees knew her days were up and would go freelance hereafter.  Twelvetrees would make another two dozen films throughout the 1930's, but  relegated to small parts in B-Pictures, she would never become the breakout star some thought she would, and in 1939 she would announce her retirement from Hollywood, and go back to the stage she loved so much - but even this would prove mostly unsuccessful, and she would retire from acting all together, save for a well-received return as Blanche Dubois in a 1951 production of Streetcar, in the 1940's.

Twelvetrees' personal life was just as tumultuous as her zig-zag career, which helped klead to a breakdown in her career.  Divorcing her first husband in 1931 (though keeping his name) and marrying her second, stuntman Frank Woody shortly thereafter.  Between drunken feuds and public panning, Twelvetrees and Woody would divorce in 1936.  Twelvetrees would fade into obscurity after her retirement, and would commit suicide in 1958, at the age of 49, and is interred in an unmarked grave in Middletown, Pennsylvania.  The connection between Twelvetrees' death in Harrisburg, PA, and this being my hometown (for a year or so, I even lived just down the street from the very cemetery the actress now inhabits), brought this look at this mostly forgotten actress to cyber-fruition.  On a high note in this sad tale of the lady with the sad eyes, there is currently a movement to get a headstone placed on Twelvetrees' grave.  One can contribute to the fund here.  This will hopefully become a done deal before Summer hits.

Now granted, Twelvetrees was perhaps not the greatest of actresses.  Her fear of competing for roles with a young Hepburn is proof that she too knew this.  Of course, Twelvetrees' talents were never fully explored so perhaps one day, under better circumstances, she could have grown into a great actress.  In the few films I have seen her in, she did a fine job (her performance in  Millie was especially tragic and she more than held her own in a role that could have been played by someone like Barbara Stanwyck), and showed that there probably was quite a bit more than what we were allowed to see.  Sadly enough, we will never know the full extent of Twelvetrees' talents, but if this piece on the long lost actress gets even just one person to check out her films, then it is well worth the writing.  Now go out there and see these films.

William Dieterle's Masterful But Mostly Forgotten The Last Flight

Miriam Bale, in a recent issue of Film Comment, said of William Dieterle's 1931 Lost Generation movie The Last Flight, that it is "the best film version of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises that never was."

With more than mere similarities to Hemingway's iconic post-WWI novel, Dieterle shows us a group of four pilots, all injured, in both body and soul, from the devastation of war, making their way through the bars and nightclubs of Jazz-age Paris.  "Get tight and stay tight" one character matter-of-factly states when asked what he will do after the war.  Somewhere along this parade of inebriation, these ex-flyer ex-pats, always nattily dressed, and just as nattily sauced, meet a young, near-sighted woman, who just may be even more lost than they.  She is of course taken on as their mascot, and, in this age of pre-code wanton cinematic decadence (though still seeming quite tame by today's anything-goes standards), much more, if only in allusion and/or innuendo.

The film stars Richard Barthelmess, David Manners, Johnny Mack Brown and the strange beauty, Helen Chandler as the effervescent, and quite peculiar Nikki.   "Hey, what kind of girl do you think Nikki is?" Bill (Brown) asks Cary (Barthelmess), to which he replies, "I think she's the kind that sits down on phonograph records."  I am not exactly sure what this means, but it is certainly something that makes both Nikki, and the film's dialogue in general (which is filled with seeming nonsensical, or perhaps even surrealist lines), stand out amongst the more typical fare (in both character and dialogue) of the early talkie era.  And though this is the story of these pilots and their post-war disillusionment (a rather popular subject in both film and literature at the time) it is Chandler's adorably off-kilter Nikki, with those faraway eyes and seeming oblivious nature, that acts as the proverbial glue that holds both these men and this picture together.

Risque and randy, with inevitable tragedy for these lost souls, this Lost Generation, Dieterle's film is a unique combination of both hard-hitting message moviemaking and an hypnotic sentimentalism that digs deep into the heart of this quite sentimental critic.  Dieterle, who was a typical hard-working studio director of the times, would never gain the vaunted auteur status that many of his compatriots would later garner during the 1960's revitalization of filmic history, but then again, his output, but for here or there, is probably not worth such recognition, though he is surely worth getting much more recognition than he is usually afforded - which is pretty much none at all.  

After coming over from Germany (where he worked as an actor/director and whose best known work was the homosexual-themed prison movie, Sex in Chains), in the wave of Hitler-driven emigration that brought Lang, Murnau, Lubitsch and others to the Hollywood fold, Dieterle made a career out of making solid, but rather typical pictures like The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola and Juarez.  Dieterle's Pre-Code output had an interesting international flair to it (mainly attributable to the looser artistry of European filmmaking of the 1920's) even if he did often fall flat later on in his career.   

The Last Flight is now considered one of the great forgotten masterpieces of its day (as well as giving Cary Grant the first half of his stage name, after playing the part of Cary on stage) and is easily one of the most smartly written (as well as most cock-eyed written) motion pictures of the Pre-Code era.  Even though it was a tragedy and not a comedy, the screwball ethic that was born around this same time, managed to come through in the film's great dialogue and pacing, as well as, strangely enough, in the film's melancholy dark humour and surrealist mentality.  Now, thanks to Warner Archives, The Last Flight is out on DVD, and hopefully will be able to drop the forgotten part off of that aforementioned moniker of forgotten masterpiece.

Pre-Code Hollywood

Just to interrupt the day for a second or two, I am posting my choices for the 10 best Pre-Code Hollywood films.  The good folks over at the LAMB (Large Association of Movie Blogs for those who are not already acquainted) have handed out the assignment of naming your favourite/the best Pre-Code films.  As a long-admitted and well-established listoholic, I had no choice but to vote in this latest poll.  The full results will be posted sometime soon over at the LAMB, but for now I am putting my list out there for all to see (and scrutinize).  I made the list rather quickly, so I probably missed some films that deserved to be on here, but hey, c'est la vie.

1. Public Enemy 

2. Three on a Match

3. Blonde Venus

4. Baby Face

5. Gold Diggers of 1933

6. Wild Boys of the Road

7. Union Depot

8. The Strange Love of Molly Louvain

9. Blonde Crazy

10. Heroes For Sale

Runners-Up (in no particular order): Other Men's Women; Sinner's Holiday; Frisco Jenny; I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang; Big City Blues; Mexicali Rose; The Purchase Price; Broadway Babies.

While writing this, I realized I did make one pretty big omission - Howard Hawks' Scarface.  C'est la vie.  It belongs in a much larger stratosphere anyway.

I also realized that I must really like Joan Blondell (not that such a thing is much of a secret!) since she is in half of my top ten and another three runners-up - easily topping other favourites like Cagney, Stanwyck and Dvorak.  Of course Cagney is in three of those films with Blondell.

Show People (King Vidor, 1928)

"With me it was 5 per cent talent and 95 per cent publicity." 
-Marion Davies

If you have ever seen any of Marion Davies comedies, you know the above quote is total balderdash, and most likely, at least partly, quite tongue-in-cheek.  Yet that is the perception many have of Marion Davies.  Well, at least those who even remember the long forgotten actress.   For those few who do remember her, she is known mainly as the paramour of a wealthy mogul who had a film studio created just for her.  But there is more than just that.  Much more.

In one of those stories just dripping with irony, it was infamous newspaper tycoon (and later movie mogul) William Randolph Hearst who gave his young mistress, Marion Davies, her first big break in Hollywood, yet (and here is the irony dripping part of our story) it was his insistence on Davies starring in lavish period dramas (something she was not very good at) instead of the quick-witted comedies the actress was so adept at playing, that led to her eventual decline in popularity and even more eventual fading into obscurity - a mere scandalous footnote in film history.

Famously (or is that infamously?) thought of as the inspiration behind the ill-fated (and quite talentless) Susan Alexander character in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (just as Hearst was the model for the titular good ole Charlie Kane) Davies has indeed had her share of Hollywood Babylon-like tall tales told about her.  Welles, though obviously using Hearst as the model for Kane, has denied Susan Alexander was based on Davies (at least not completely on her) and has been quoted as saying "Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  Though there is the rumour that Hearst's nickname for Davies nether regions was Rosebud - that's neither here nor there I suppose.

Another tale has Davies having an affair with Charlie Chaplin right under Hearst's fat cat nose and being involved in the murder of Thomas Ince aboard Hearst's luxury yacht (a tale that is retold in Peter Bogdanovich's 2002 film The Cat's Meow, featuring Edward Herrmann as Hearst, Eddie Izzard as Chaplin, Cary Elwes as Ince and Kirsten Dunst as Davies).  The fact that Ince died on land, a day after leaving the yacht, of heart problems, is still not enough to put this urban legend to rest though.  But enough about Davies supposedly sordid lifestyle (mostly exaggerated of course), let us get on with why we are here.  To reuse part of Mr. Welles' quote from above, we are here to talk about Marion Davies being "one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  Namely, her work in King Vidor's 1928 silent comedy, Show People.

Though a loose interpretation of the early career of Gloria Swanson (that ill-fated young starlet who would one day play an almost mirror image of her forgotten self in the great and tragic Billy Wilder noir, Sunset Blvd.) could also have quite possibly been based on Davies herself.  The story of the wonderfully named Peggy Pepper, a young Southern girl (Davies of course) who comes to Hollywood, along with her father (the typical blow hard Southern Colonel type), to become a great star of gorgeous, flowing epics.  Yet, just like Davies, the girl finds herself the star of slapstick comedies (though Davies' comedies were far from slapstick, one gets the coincidental idea) and completely unhappy with what she perceives as a failure on her part to become the dramatic star she had always dreamt of being.  Though in actuality, Davies loved doing comedy (it was only Hearst, in his desire to see Davies at her most glamourous, who pushed her toward the dramatic) Show People can be construed as being similar to Davies own career problems in many ways.

In many ways, this is a feminine take on the classic Hollywood story of Merton of the Movies (eventually made into 3 movies, in 1924, 1932 and finally in 1947).  After being tricked into doing comedy (her screen tests, as they were, though meant to be dramatic, were hilarious enough to be cast in what she thinks is a dramatic motion picture) Peggy Pepper becomes unhappy with her slapstick stardom, even though she finds true love in comic co-star Billy Boone (played with the usual glee by star William Haines, whose own career would plummet only a few later, due mainly to his insistence on living life as an openly homosexual actor - an act that Louis B. Mayer would not stand for) and turns instead toward the dramatic films she so desired to make.  Of course this only made her unhappier as she loses (temporarily of course) Billy during this foray into the "more legitimate" kind of moviemaking. 

Yet through all this unhappiness we find (of course) quite a bit of laughter, and a lot of said laughter is brought on by Davies and her willingness to do anything for a laugh.  A beautiful woman (a sex symbol even!?), Davies was not afraid to contort that gorgeous face into something that would make even Buster Keaton bust a gut.  Show People was the second of three films she would do with King Vidor (The Patsy, a great comic film in its own right, where we get to see Davies impersonate Lillian Gish, Mae Murray and Pola Negri - all of whom she was famous for mimicking at her Hollywood parties - and Not So Dumb were the others) and it was he who seemed to bring out the best in Davies.  One thinks of melodrama when they think of Vidor but it was his gift at directing comedy (a sort of Chaplinesque comedy usually) that made Davies' own gift for comedy come out stronger than it had in other films.  We also get to peek Chaplin in a particularly hilarious cameo in Show People (was the rumour true?) and it is just another nod to Davies' gift that the great comic genius would do her film.

Davies was what one could call a born comedienne (much like Lucille Ball would be called years later - another beauty willing to play it for laughs) and it is a shame her career faded so quickly.  A tragic irony indeed.  To use Mr. Welles quote for my own purposes just one more time, it is a shame that more people do not know of Marion Davies and her being "one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen".  A shame indeed.