Walter Brennan and Barbara Stanwyck

Walter Brennan and Barbara Stanwyck

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

From my childhood and adolescence misspent in front of a television set, many of my surviving impressions were accurate, but many others were not.  For years, I recollected Walter Brennan's acting only from remembering his TV series "The Guns of Will Sonnett."  Likewise, I hardly knew of Barbara Stanwyck's film career because I had enjoyed her only as a silvery matron in her TV series "The Big Valley."  Learning about Stanwyck's great performances on film came only much later, and learning that Brennan had won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor three times surprised me.

Nominated four times for the Supporting Actor Oscar, Brennan lost in 1942 for "Sergeant York," but he had already won in 1937 ("Come and Get It"), 1939 ("Kentucky"), and 1941 ("The Westerner").  Gary Cooper, the Westerner actually born in Helena, Montana, a star and friend often paired with Brennan, challenges Brennan's Judge Roy Bean, a lawless lawman erotically obsessed with English beauty and actress Lily Langtry. A depiction of the struggle that cattle ranchers and their cowboys waged against homesteading farmers in the fight to control access to open land, "The Westerner" is well-written as well as well-acted, with Brennan deserving his Oscar

But Brennan acts just as memorably in many other films.  Several other great Hollywood character actors populate "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)--Spencer Tracy, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine--but I especially enjoyed Brennan as a sharp-tongued town doctor who doubles as mortician.

There is nothing much to Black Rock except an evil secret, and everybody in town worries that the visiting outsider Tracy will find it out. A mortician need never fear unemployment in Black Rock.

Brennan and Babe Ruth (playing himself) give fine support to Teresa Wright and Cooper as Eleanor and Lou Gehrig in "Pride of the Yankees" (1942). "Pride of the Yankees" displays the best of the California studio product--beautifully paced and produced as well as redolent of its period.  I liked Brennan's sports reporter in this film almost as much as his Eddie, the alcoholic sidekick to Humphrey Bogart in "To Have and Have Not" (1944).  While Bogart and his new leading lady, Lauren Bacall, are wonderful as Harry and Marie (who mystifyingly address each other as "Steve" and "Slim"), Brennan as Eddie out-acts everyone.

Brennan also gives great support to Stanwyck and Cooper in "Meet John Doe" (1941), about a fake populist movement turned real, then hijacked to serve the presidential ambitions of a callous, contemptuous, and megalomaniacal newspaper publisher. Stanwyck is one of my favorite golden-era actresses. If you haven't seen her bowl men over like pins as she sleeps her way to prosperity in the early-Thirties "Baby Face" (1933; be sure to see the uncensored version), you are in for a treat. A hardboiled girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Stanwyck's character is great fun to watch and is a far cry from the sedate matron of "The Big Valley."

A good sample of Stanwyck towards the end of her film career is "Clash by Night," with Ryan and Paul Douglas.  In this 1952 melodrama, Stanwyck portrays a tough, cool, self-aware, and strong character.  A fiesty Stanwyck battles her cattle baron father, Walter Huston (in his last film, 1950) in "The Furies," an unusual Western.

Besides all of these dramatic parts, Stanwyck excels in comedic roles.  Very, very funny as "The Lady Eve" (1941), Stanwyck splendidly depicts the con artist daughter of con artist father Charles Coburn. Henry Fonda is wonderful, too, as their mark, Hopsie, the ale fortune heir / snake scientist just back from a trip on the Amazon and ready to be charmed out of his money.

Clearly, Hopsie's Amazonian research had not included the snake in whom Eve confided in Eden.

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent

Sherlock Holmes and Horace Rumpole

Sherlock Holmes and Horace Rumpole:  

The Pleasure of Repetition

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

My future husband and I first bonded with each other because we both like Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. A shared love of detective fiction has glued us together more sturdily than many another inducement. Now that we’ve stayed together for over 30 years, our most enduring favorites have turned out to be Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and John Mortimer’s Horace Rumpole—most memorably portrayed by Jeremy Brett and Leo McKern.

Watching the DVD editions of the many British TV productions starring Brett and McKern, I wondered whether enjoying detective fiction reaches the status of universal passion. Do mostly Britons and North Americans read the genre with gusto, do other Europeans also favor it, and do people in our world’s many other cultures also hanker for the misleading clue, the too-obvious suspect, the inept official, and the eventual symbolic victory over chaos and evil?

Some look down on mystery fiction because it uses stock characters. In both poor and excellent detective fiction, characterization does remain at the surface level—essentially flat, predictable, unchanging. Actually, far from constituting a drawback, this provides the genre with its most solid attraction: the pleasure of repetition.

We yearn to hear Watson exclaim over Holmes’s amazing deductions, Holmes dismiss the praise with “Elementary,” or Rumpole quote Alice’s White Rabbit, “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” when alarmedly confronting a crisis. The successful writer of detective fiction devises a formula and writes according to formula.

Sherlock Holmes and Horace Rumpole basically remain surface characters. Watching them portrayed by Brett and McKern, we do not delve into the psychological complexities explored by such masters of film as Krzysztof Kieslowski or Pedro Almodóvar, nor do we really want to do so. How disconcerting to find Holmes cherishing a secret passion for one or indeed all three Mrs. Watsons, or to watch the Rumpole family truly revealing what their patriarch terms “the horrors of home life.” Indeed, the pilot episode of the McKern series, “Rumpole and the Confession of Guilt,” did exactly that—an error never repeated in the many subsequent dramatizations.

The valid contrast between the surface, stereotypical characterization of detective fiction and the much more subtle, far more complex portrayals in great films and novels pits the pleasure of repetition against the pleasure of surprise.

Nevertheless, Brett and McKern surpass most other actors of detective fiction by providing a mix of these two pleasures. One of Australia’s most valuable exports, McKern allows us at times to glimpse beneath Rumpole’s corroded shell of jokey cynicism to perceive the man’s profound discontent, as when the barrister grumpily confesses to a pupil, “After a lifetime at the bar, I have no interest in the law.”

Brett’s flamboyant take on Holmes leads him to deliver famous lines with elegance, whip a table cover from under the tea things with great flair, and show intense, if guarded, emotion. In fact, Brett’s psychological acuity leads him often to exceed the instructions inherent in his material, for surely Brett’s edgy, neurotic, explosive Holmes blends the actor with his character.

So true and effective are their depictions that many viewers can no longer watch any other actor than Brett play Sherlock Holmes. Certainly, no one else holds my interest. Nor can I even imagine anyone but McKern whom I would want to watch impersonating Rumpole of the Bailey.

first published in The Woodstock Independent

Bette Davis

Bette Davis

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Was Bette Davis ever better than in "Now, Voyager" (1942) and "All about Eve" (1950)? Shy, refined, repressed Charlotte Vane could not differ more from histrionic, plainspoken, passionate Margo Channing; yet I like both of these characters, and I like Davis's artistry in portraying each of them. I admire Davis for her range, for she was as much actor as star. I admire as well her ferocious self-discipline and her fearlessness about appearing in ugly guises in films.

Although I had watched many of Davis's performances over the years, I first sensed her great capacity as an actor when she mesmerized me while playing Mildred the waitress in "Of Human Bondage" (1934). Leslie Howard was bad in this movie, but Davis was splendid. I admire most her lack of vanity. After pestering Jack Warner for months to get her the role of the detestable Mildred, Davis insisted on makeup that would accurately show the ravaged face of a poor woman dying of TB.

Well-supported by Sterling Hayden in "The Star" (1952), the middle-aged Davis plays a middle-aged star confronting the death of her career and the emptiness of her vanity. Unlike the woman she plays here, Davis revels in looking bad and old if the part calls for it. And, in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962), Davis amuses herself and her audience by obviously relishing her own grotesqueness.

Yet she was not a physically ugly person; her beauty was not absent but simply unusual. Look at her metamorphosis as Charlotte Vane from depressed dumpiness into a unique loveliness. Like Jeanne Moreau and Susan Sarandon, Davis had an almost distorted beauty that dominates one's attention far more than more conventional good looks do.

Besides her disregard for physical vanity, Davis showed her courage by often portraying unlikable women. Chilling as the heartless wife in "The Little Foxes" (1941), Davis was even better as the manipulative, lying murderer in "The Letter" (1940). A frustrated, passionate woman in a mismatched marriage who carries on a long secret affair with an attractive man with whom she becomes utterly obsessed and whose rejection she cannot tolerate, Leslie Crosbie shoots her lover as if she is spraying bug killer at a spider.

Davis also excelled in portraying more appealing women. Suffering magnificently in "Dark Victory" (1939), Davis also gives an extremely good performance in "Old Acquaintance" (1943). If Miriam Hopkins seems over the top in this film, you have never had the doubtful pleasure of knowing a histrionic narcissist. I greatly enjoy the scene where Davis finally confronts her "old acquaintance" Hopkins but will not spoil it for anyone who has not seen the film. It will shock you a bit!

An actress to her core, Davis bravely gave everything she had to her roles. Never afraid to look ugly or to be ugly, she drove herself to an extreme. Watching her incandescent Mildred in "Of Human Bondage," I thought to myself that, had Davis's Mildred lived in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 17th century, she surely would have been burned as a witch, for Bette Davis burned a hole in the silver screen in this film.

Driven as she was, Davis was probably “difficult” in private life, but her father had stubbed a cigarette hole in her heart by leaving their family and leaving to Bette the job of taking care of her mother, her sister, and herself. Davis never really healed from this early betrayal. Her work always remained her focus throughout what her autobiography called “The Lonely Life.”

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent

Killing Shakespeare

Killing Shakespeare

(c) Copyright (2016) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

 

Having taught Shakespeare's plays to adult students, I feel saddened by the aversion that many adults retain from their exposure to Shakespeare in high school and college.  Far from being the dreaded poison pill that many adults remember ingesting, Shakespeare's plays amuse, delight, entertain, and edify.  But his plays can amuse, delight, entertain, and edify only people who remain open to the possibility that Shakespeare has something to offer them.   

Perhaps adolescents and young adults are simply too young to appreciate Shakespeare; perhaps the classroom practice of reading plays written only for performance is at fault.  Watching Shakespeare is like drinking a fine whiskey or a wine of rare vintage—a bracing and adult experience best restricted to viewers who bring to the viewing their perceptions and insights about their own lives.  Every time that I watch a Shakespearean play, I see something else, something more—because I am different.

Of course, Shakespeare's 17th-century language challenges 21st-century Americans, but patience, determination, and interest can bury that difficulty.  When watching televised or recorded productions, I find Shakespeare's language much easier to follow and much more enjoyable when I turn on the closed captions or the subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired.  Suggesting this strategy to my students, I told them to use the captions or subtitles to gain their footing within the ebb and flow of the plays' prose and poetry.  Do not worry if you do not understand everything; anyone has to live with great poetry for a while to comprehend it.

Among great recent film adaptations of Shakespeare is Ralph Fiennes's "Coriolanus."  Caius Martius is an angry, proud veteran who has killed and suffered much for his country; his service in Corioles has won him the honorary surname "Coriolanus." Offered high office, he resists flattering the people to acquire their love and instead demonstrates his contempt for them.  Driven from the city by an enraged populace, he joins his former enemies to invade his own country.  Relocating Shakespeare's Roman tragedy to late 20th-century Eastern Europe, Fiennes with extreme care and imagination employs TV news and other devices of modern communication.  This stunning film includes great performances by Fiennes as Coriolanus and by Vanessa Redgrave as his lioness mother.  It portrays both the culture of military families and the pretense by politicians to esteem the populace that they manipulate for votes.  Anyone who is interested in military culture, the debasement of democracy, or the study of character would find it fascinating.

   

An extraordinary Italian film, "Caesar Must Die," depicts a production of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in a Roman high-security prison performed by inmates jailed for murder, drug trafficking, and other very serious offenses.  This film would interest people who enjoy Shakespeare, people who feel intrigued by offbeat theatrical productions, and people who are knowledgeable about the psychology of prisoners.

Joss Whedon's contemporary, New York City-based version of "Much Ado about Nothing" is very clever and entertaining. "Much Ado" contains many witty lines, like "paper bullets of the brain" and "man is a giddy thing." Both this version, and Kenneth Branagh's wonderful film of a few decades ago, set in Sicily, are a joy to watch.  Surely, there has never been a sunnier, more pleasurable adaptation of Shakespeare than Branagh's "Much Ado."

Julie Taymor adapted and directed "The Tempest," a stunning version of Shakespeare's last masterpiece, with Helen Mirren assuming the role of the deposed ruler of Milan who practices sorcery on a deserted island and exacts revenge on her deposers by raising a tempest that shipwrecks them on her island.  In Taymor's imaginative adaptation, I particularly admired Prospera's sprite, Ariel, rendered very impressive by the film's special effects.

Among older films of Shakespeare, I value "Richard III" (1995), with Ian McKellan as a fascist Richard scheming to take power in 1930s England. I also like Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "Julius Caesar" (1953)—a very competent, straightforward, well-acted version, with James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and Marlon Brando as Marc Antony.   

Mentioning "Julius Caesar" calls to my mind the actor John Wilkes Booth, who played Marc Antony before Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln was not a widely read man, but he was a deeply read man, and one of his well-plumbed authors was Shakespeare.  I caught six quotes from Shakespeare during our viewings of Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln."  "Macbeth" was Lincoln's favorite.  The Shakespearean echoes in Lincoln's death are eerie—from his dreaming repeatedly of his own murder, to his assassin's being a Shakespearean actor who had recently appeared in "Julius Caesar," to Lincoln's being shot in the fifth and final act of the great tragedy of our Civil War--after hard-won victory and in a theatre.

first published in The Woodstock Independent