Tag: Judith Anderson

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)

Excellent acting almost saves a neutered, inverted version of Williams’ powerhouse play

Director: Richard Brooks

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor (Maggie Pollitt), Paul Newman (‘Brick’ Pollitt), Burl Ives (‘Big Daddy’ Pollitt), Jack Carson (‘Gooper’ Pollitt), Judith Anderson (‘Big Mama’ Pollitt), Madeleine Sherwood (Mae Flynn ‘Sister Woman’ Pollitt), Larry Gates (Dr Baugh), Vaughn Taylor (Deacon Davies)

There is a fun little anecdote of Tennessee Williams running into a crowd of people lined around the block to catch Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at their local multiplexes and loudly begging them “Go home! This movie will set the industry back 50 years!” You can sort of see why Williams was a bit pissed. It’s a miracle really that Cat on a Hot Tin Roof works at all. The studio snapped up this Broadway mega-hit and promptly instructed Richard Brooks to remove all the content that worked with a bunch of New York Times readers, but wasn’t going to fly in a mid-West fleapit. What we end up with is a curious, mis-aligned, neutered work that arguably inverts several of Williams’ points and is reliant on its incredibly strong, charismatic acting to work.

Brick (Paul Newman) is a former College sports star, now adrift in life, trapped in an unhappy marriage with Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) who he resents and blames for the suicide of close friend Skipper. All Maggie’s attempts to rediscover any love is met with cold, blank disinterest as Brick hits the bottle big-time. Maggie keeps up the front of wedding bliss, as she is determined they will win their share of the inheritance from Brick’s father ‘Big Daddy’ (Burl Ives) who believes he’s merely under-the-weather, but is in fact dying. This news is also being kept from his devoted (but privately barely tolerated by Big Daddy) wife Big Mama (Judith Anderson), while Brick’s brother’s Gooper (Jack Carson) and his wife Mae Flynn (Madeline Sherwood) makes aggressive pitchs to cement Big Daddy’s fortune for themselves.

This simmering Broadway adaptation of a Southern family weighted down by lies (or mendacity as they love to call it), concealments and barely disguised resentments, was a smash hit but a very mixed film. It’s weighed down by both too much respect of the theatrical nature of the play, and too little interest in its actual message. Richard Brooks’ production largely restricts itself to interspersing wider shots with some reaction shots and sticks very much to its ‘same location for each act’ set-up. It’s a surprisingly conservative and safe re-staging of a hit play.

Despite Brooks’ liberal re-writing of the dialogue (of which more later), it remains a very theatrical rather than cinematic piece, largely devoid of imaginative editing or photography. The attempts to ‘open up’ the piece introduced by Brooks feel pointless or add very little (such as witnessing the accident where Brick breaks his leg or travelling to the airport to see the arrival of Big Daddy’s plane). Compared to the inventive and dynamic use of single-location shooting in Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof feels considerably more stately and reserved, and is far less successful in using the tricks of cinema to successfully build tension and conflict.

What it shares however with 12 Angry Men is the electric acting. Elizabeth Taylor gives one of her finest performances, her Maggie bubbling with sexual and emotional frustration, reduced to hurling physical and verbal punches at Brick in an attempt to get any sort of emotional rise out of him. She makes Maggie, for all her desperation and confusion, surprisingly sympathetic. Taylor manages to be both selfish and domineering while also showing how broken up Maggie is with shame and guilt. It’s a detailed, intense, passionate performance.

It also works perfectly opposite Paul Newman’s brooding intensity as Brick. This is the handsome, blue-eyed legend inverting his charisma into something insular, at times merely starring in self-loathing into the middle distance as other speak at him, only rarely rising to let rip at others with contempt and fury. Newman is a force of quiet, emotional anger, even if (stripped of his character’s primary motivation) he comes across at times like a spoilt child who never really grew up rather than the tortured man trapped in a lie of a life, that Williams intended (Brooks even frames him at one point with a high-school football of himself behind him, his past literally haunting him).

Burl Ives would certainly have won an Oscar for this, if he hadn’t won that year for The Big Country. Recreating his Tony Award winning role, he’s a whirligig force of nature as Big Daddy, bullishly insistent on getting his own way, shrugging off with irritation his wife’s affection (an effectively unsettled Judith Anderson) and hiding his own fear at oncoming death in a relentless pursuit of the future. Ives also nails Big Daddy’s outstanding late speeches, investing them with a deep sense of melancholy and sadness under the bombast and strength. It’s a great performance. Jack Carson is perfectly, anonymously uninteresting as ‘other son’ Gooper and Madeline Sherwood hits the beats of shrill hostility she’s asked for as his wife Mae Flynn.

That these performances work so well is a tribute to the underlying strength of a play that has been radically, almost disastrously, lobotomised by Brooks into something that flattens, blurs and (at points) radically inverts the intention. Putting it bluntly, Williams’ original used Brick’s unspoken (perhaps even subconscious) homosexual attraction to Skipper as the root cause of his disastrous marriage and booze-laden depression. Maggie, all too-aware of her husband’s sexual orientation, fumes in frustration at his lack of interest in making the inheritance-required babies. Even Big Daddy suspects this massive unspoken secret at the heart of a family. The fact this remains unspoken to the end, that the characters carry on with the fake fiction of the Pollitt dynasty is a damning indictment of the hypocrisy of American family life.

That wasn’t going to wash in Hollywood. No hint of Brick’s homosexuality could be allowed: in fact, Newman’s heteronormative virility is repeatedly stressed (at one point he even embraces Maggie’s dressing gown in romantic longing). It weakens both characters – for all the skill of Newman and Taylor, it makes both characters shallower, two people letting sulks and pride stand between happiness, rather than two people trapped into a doomed cycle. The film resolutely associates happiness with love and duty to the family unit, emphatically not what Williams’ play suggested.

No wonder he was pissed. A daring play about Southern family hypocrisy and buried secrets, where the burden of the family is a deadweight crushing people is turned into a straight (in every sense) celebration of it. It makes the play a conservative, reassuring lie, as much as a mendacity as the characters talk about. So maybe Williams was right to berate that crowd. Still it pissed Brooks off mightily: he pithily retorted it was a bit rich of Williams to kick up such fuss over a film which made him very wealthy. I guess at least there Brooks makes a strong point.

The Ten Commandments (1956)

DeMille’s massive, camp epic sets the table for what we expect from Biblical epics

Director: Cecil B. DeMille

Cast: Charlton Heston (Moses), Yul Brynner (Rameses II), Anne Baxter (Nefretiri), Edward G. Robinson (Dathan), Yvonne De Carlo (Sephora), Debra Paget (Lilia), John Derek (Joshua), Cedric Hardwicke (Seti I), Nina Foch (Bithiah), Martha Scott (Yochabel), Judith Anderson (Memnet), Vincent Price (Baka), John Carradine (Aaron), Olive Deering (Miriam), Douglass Dumbrille (Jannes)

“Let my people go!” Close your eyes and think of Moses. Chances are you’ll see an image of Charlton Heston, arms spread wide, parting the waves to lead his people to freedom. Heston had been partly chosen for his resemblance to Michelangelo’s sculpture of the famous law-giver. It’s also a tribute to how Cecil B DeMille’s slightly ponderous, very-very-serious Biblical epic pretty much defined what we expect from Bible stories.

The Ten Commandments would be DeMille’s final movie (and for all its many flaws, it’s way more deserving of the Best Picture Oscar than the valedictory pat-on-the-back his penultimate film got). It’s basically a triumphal capturing of his self-important style, with sonorously devout voiceover and a faultless hero chiselled from marble an excuse to fill the screen with action, campy scheming and lots of sexiness. The Ten Commandments became a massive hit because it’s a rollicking pile of nonsense and something you could persuade yourself was “good for you” because it’s about the Exodus.

It’s a BIG film. DeMille delivers an opening direct-to-camera address, dripping with pompous self-satisfaction, where he piously tells us about the level of historical and Biblical research he’s carried out. The credits list a stack of professors, historians, religious experts and, last of all, the Holy Gospels as sources (presumably the Gospels’ writers got no cut of the vast profits). DeMille, as per his style, marshals thousands of extras and some huge (and distinctly sound-stage looking) sets to play out a series of tableaux, many of them rooted in classic silent-movie framing and techniques. Special effects abound to create plagues (disappointingly the film skips seven of them) and parting of the Red Sea. DeMille narrates with the grandiose aloofness of a Sunday School teacher.

It’s almost enough grandeur to make you overlook this pageantry covers a rather camp, frequently silly piece of entertainment. The film is ripe with buff actors striking poses: Heston does a lot of this during the first half, matched by Brynner (who worked out at length so as not to be shown-up). Opposite them, gorgeous Israelite and Egyptian babes fawn and flirt. The film is at least as interested in the love/hate relationship between Moses and Nefretiri as it is in the Word of God, not least because DeMille knows that this soapy stuff really sells.

Perhaps that’s why Anne Baxter plays Nefretiri with a level of campy purring that would be almost laughable, if you weren’t sure that she’s in on the joke. Relishing the chance to play a sex bomb – in costumes designed to stress her assets – Baxter simpers, flirts, drapes herself across Heston’s ram-rod (in every way but one of course – he’s righteous man of God) Moses and gets to utter lines like “Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid adorable fool”. She mocks and cajoles Rameses into rejecting Moses’ demands, partly because she can’t stand Moses is immune to her charms, partly because she can’t bear the idea of Moses leaving Egypt (and her) behind forever.

Ten Commandments elevated Heston to the rank of the immortals. Few actors could carry the weight of films like this as well as he. His performance is in two acts. The first is the visionary, egalitarian adopted son of the Pharoah: the guy who builds the best cities, turns rival kingdoms into allies, gives the stuffy priests’ grain to the slaves (even before he finds out he’s one of them) and whom Seti (a haughtily British Cedric Hardwicke) would rather took over the kingdom than Rameses. Discovering his roots, he morphs over a (long) time into the white-haired, broad-shouldered prophet, speaking most of his lines in sonorous block capitals (“BEHOLD. THE POWER. OF GOD” that sort of thing). Very easy to mock, but only Heston could have played such woodenly written silliness with such skilful conviction.

He generously said he believed Brynner gave the better performance. Brynner does have the more interesting material. A playboy monarch who is true to his word and seems (at first) torn with how he feels about this adopted brother who overshadows him at every turn, Brynner adds a lot of light and shade to a character written as a pretty much straight villain. Moses is presented as such an imperious stick-in-the-mud, it’s a little tricky not to feel a bit sorry for the put-upon, inadequate Rameses, for all he’s a tyrant.

Heston was the only actor who went on location for a few key shots (the others all perform on sound stages or in front of green screens). Keeping things sound stage based allowed DeMille to have complete visual control over the set-ups. This suited his conservative camera movements and editing – most of the scenes take place in a few carefully extended mid-shots, that allow us to soak up the pretty costumes and the theatrical acting. The Ten Commandments is partly a flick-book of devotional pictures – so much so that a tracking shot into Seti’s face when he banishes Moses stands out for the amount of camera movement.

That doesn’t stop DeMille throwing in plenty to look at in frame. With Heston spending half the movie as (in some cases literally) the voice of God, John Derek’s Joshua carries the action torch: chiselled of chest, he’s introduced zip wiring to save Moses’ mother from being crushed by a mighty stone. Like most of the “good” characters he gets very little to actually work with: the decent Jews are either excessively pure or aged men of physical weakness who commentate on the wonders around us. Still, it’s better than the hilariously cheesy dialogue of the regular Israelites (“We’re going to the land of milk and honey – anyone know the way?”) that contrasts laughably with the Biblical pastiche Moses and the other principals speak in.

DeMille has plenty of fun with the doubters and naughty among the Israelites. Edward G Robinson goes gloriously over-the-top as quisling Dathan, blackmailing Joshua’s girl Lilia (a timid Debra Paget) into years of servitude and taking every single opportunity to undermine Moses’ leadership. It works as well: no wonder Moses gets so peeved – the slightest set-back and the Israelites seem ready to stone him. Dathan leads the final act Golden Calf orgy (DeMille’s voiceover tuts constantly, while letting us see as much of the action as the censor would allow) while Moses is up the mountain picking up the Word of God.

Robinson has the tone right though: the cast is stuffed full of OTT actors. Vincent Price plays a perverted Egyptian architect with lip-smacking glee. Judith Anderson jumps over the top as Nefretiri’s nursemaid. Nina Foch (one year younger than Heston!) plays Moses’ adopted mother with grandiose gentleness. They know this is a big, silly, pose-striking pantomime passing itself off as a piece of devotional work.

But that’s why its popular. DeMille knows that people don’t want to see a devotional lecture – or even really have to think that much about the rights and wrongs of an Old Testament story that sees the Lord strike down a load of kids with a murderous cloud (even Moses is torn by this for a minute). The Ten Commandments is huge in every sense, full of campy nonsense, pose-striking acting and a mix of stuff it’s taking very-very-seriously and campy ahistorical nonsense. It’s a winning cocktail that doesn’t make for a great film (or even, possibly, a good one) but cemented it as a landmark everyone recognises even if they haven’t seen it. In a way, making it one of Hollywood’s most magic epics.

Rebecca (1940)

Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier find married life isn’t a bed of roses in Rebecca

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Cast: Joan Fontaine (The second Mrs de Winter), Laurence Olivier (Maxim de Winter), Judith Anderson (Mrs Danvers), George Sanders (Jack Favell), Reginald Denny (Frank Crawley), Gladys Cooper (Beatrice Lacy), C. Aubrey Smith (Colonel Julyan), Nigel Bruce (Major Giles Lacy), Florence Bates (Mrs Edythe Van Hopper), Edward Fielding (Frith), Leo G. Carroll (Dr Baker)

It’s impossible to know what people are really thinking isn’t it? Rebecca is a film all about secrets and misconceptions, the biggest enigma of them all being that title character, the deceased wife casting a ghostly shadow over every scene. Adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling novel, Rebecca was Hitchcock’s first American picture and a masterclass in atmosphere with a vulnerable and deeply sympathetic lead, packaged into a wonderfully entertaining film combining the best of producer David O. Selznick’s sense for literary translation with Hitchcock’s filmic virtuosity.

On the French Riviera, a naïve young woman (Joan Fontaine), working as a paid companion for widower Mrs Van Hopper (Florence Bates), meets and becomes engaged to the aristocratic Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier). Maxim is a widower, whose previous wife Rebecca drowned. Becoming the second Mrs de Winter, our heroine quickly finds herself out of her depth in Manderley, Maxim’s colossal country home. Every where she goes there are memories of Rebecca, her husband still seems to be in love with his first wife and the housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson), still fanatically loyal to Rebecca, takes every opportunity to subtly remind the second Mrs de Winter of her own inadequacy. But is there a darker mystery behind the death of Rebecca?

Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning film (his only one, although he didn’t get the Director award) is a gothic delight. The action takes place in a mist-filled Cornwall, in a house where every nook and cranny has a dark secret. From its opening sequence, with the camera tracking through a fogbound forest before emerging in sight of a the intimidatingly grand Manderley, this is a film swimming in atmosphere and a dread of dark, psychological secrets, wrapped up in a dynamic melodrama.

At its heart is the vulnerable second Mrs de Winter – so timid we never even learn her name – beautifully embodied by Joan Fontaine. Nervous, awkward and shy, her hands often clasped together and shoulders (under a parade of unglamourous cardigans) tense, she rarely (if ever) looks comfortable. Fontaine’s wonderfully judged performance makes her bashful and deferential but also kind and guileless. Her polite eagerness to do the right thing and help people makes us warm to her instantly. And it’s impossible not to empathise with this gentle middle-class girl, parachuted into being the grand mistress of a huge house. Everyone seems to find her wanting – even Maxim’s decent sister (a droll performance by Gladys Cooper) good naturedly criticises everything from her lack of hobbies to poor dress sense.

That house would make anyone feel inadequate. Hitchcock frequently shoots Fontaine dwarfed by Manderley’s huge interiors, with its walls which seem to stretch on forever. She looks like a small frightened rabbit, as hopelessly oppressed by the building as she is bewildered by the procedures involved in running a house like this. Plus, there are all those reminders of Rebecca – everything seems to carry a monograph and not an item in the house seems to be without her personal touch. In many ways Rebecca is a ghost story without a ghost, where Rebecca’s presence (or lack of it) dominates the entire world of the film.

And our heroine (so uncertain of who she is, she tells a phone caller “I’m sorry Mrs de Winter has been dead for some time” before she suddenly remembers that is now her) won’t be allowed to escape that legacy. Not least because Mrs Danvers is there to remind her. In a superbly cold, calculating and chilling performance of barely repressed obsessiveness, Judith Anderson is outstanding as this housekeeper from your nightmares. Mrs Danvers is determined to turn Manderley into a mausoleum to her lost mistress – and ideally the new Mrs de Winter into a human sacrifice. Hitchcock manages to suggest more than a hint of sexual obsession into Mrs Danvers – she fondles with awe Rebecca’s negligee, drapes herself in Rebecca’s fur coats and remembers her with a breathless intensity. It’s an obsession that makes her subtly unbalanced and deeply dangerous.

Rebecca contains many of the themes that would run through Hitchcock’s work. Obsession obviously has a dark hold over Manderley, not least over Maxim who has the air of a man capable of violence. Unspoken, unknown crimes haunt over Manderley. The death of Rebecca is constantly bought back to us, not least with the film’s continual visual reference to crashing waves. The second Mrs de Winter feels isolated and watched at every turn, a stranger (and potential victim) in her own home. Several shots hammer home giddy, vertigo-inducing heights – from Maxim’s introduction on the cliffs, to the long drop from the heights of Manderley which Mrs Danvers urges a distraught Mrs de Winter to consider taking.

But what’s superb about Rebecca is that the reveals we expect to find are of course totally different to the reveals we get. A lot of this hinges on Olivier’s complicated and fascinating performance as Maxim. In many ways a man of total self-assurance – he barely breaks away from his breakfast to phone Mrs Van Hopper and inform her he will marry her companion – the more time we spend with him, the more his vulnerability, insecurity becomes clear, as does his patrician pride which leads to a self-damaging bluntness. When the secrets are revealed, its striking how this scion of the upper classes becomes suddenly lost – just as finally receiving some answers and reassurance turns Fontaine’s Mrs de Winter into someone more sure of herself than we have ever seen.

The film’s final act spools out a well-paced, intriguing courtroom drama, turned reversed murder-mystery. While some of the original novel’s developments are changed for code-related reasons (the usual provisos on crime and punishment), it makes very little impact on the compelling nature of the vice that seems to be trapping Maxim and his wife. Much of this is powered by George Sander’s superbly hissable turn as a preening playboy (and total shit), purring lines such as “I say marriage to Max is hardly a bed of roses is it?” with a near sadistic glee. It builds to a denouement straight out of horror, with Mrs Danvers taking rightful place as a demonic lord of misrule.

Rebecca was a product of the collaboration between Selznick and Hitchcock: two strong personalities who knew their own mind. Their relationship was fraught and troubled – they basically agreed on almost nothing – but the clash produced a work that stands as some of their best. Selznick demanded Hitchcock stick to the book – he had wanted to name the lead character ‘Daphne’, and introduce a running joke of sea sickness and a Jane Eyre-ish ‘mad woman in the attic’ – and in turn Hitchcock refused to film Selznick’s suggested flourishes (such as a smokey “R” filling the night sky for the final shot). Goes to show that conflict can produce great art.

Rebecca is an outstanding gothic melodrama, superbly acted (there is not a weak link in the cast) and brilliantly directed with a mist-filled flair and sense of heightened tension. A fascinating psychological puzzle while also being superbly gripping entertaining, it’s one of the finest Best Picture winning films of all time.

Laura (1944)

Dana Andrews investigates in the shadow of Gene Tierney in film noir Laura

Director: Otto Preminger

Cast: Gene Tierney (Laura Hunt), Dana Andrews (Mark McPherson), Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker), Vincent Price (Shelby Carpenter), Judith Anderson (Ann Treadwell), Dorothy Adams (Bessie Clary)

Laura is the sort of film noir that on the surface gives you what you would expect, but actually shakes its formula up pretty successfully. The femme fatale starts the film dead (although anyone who has seen a mystery will be expecting a twist when we hear a shotgun has destroyed her face beyond recognition). The detective does very little detecting, and engages in hardly any police business. One of the lead suspects is allowed to tag along to every interrogation to spray witty barbs around. There are only four potential suspects and barely any other characters. The solving of the mystery often takes a back seat to flashbacks and character beats. When the reveal comes, it feels like it’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time. But yet it really works.

Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is a leading female advertising executive found murdered in her apartment. Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) is called in to investigate, with the suspects being: Walso Lydecker (Clifton Webb), a waspish newspaper columnist who was her mentor; Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price), a parasitic southerner, sponging off Laura’s success; and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), a matriarch who may or may not be conducting an affair with Shelby. But is all as it seems? Well of course it isn’t, and as McPherson gets more obsessed with Laura, so does the mystery of her murder deepen.

Otto Preminger took over the direction of Laura mid-way through the production, after the rushes of the original director (Rouben Mamoulian) underwhelmed. Preminger repackaged the film as a sort of part-thriller, part-shrewd black comedy, and gave huge scope to Clifton Webb’s hugely enjoyable performance as the waspish Waldo, a turn that totally dominates the film. Clifton Webb’s arch performance is a complete delight, and the film plays subtly with Waldo’s sexuality. Introduced in a bath with a typewriter, like some gossipy Marat, Waldo is heavily implied to be at least ambiguous in his sexuality, a dandy about town with more knowledge about clothing and high society than the initial ingénue Laura.

To be honest, watching it today, Waldo is so clearly a possessive creep – a preening, domineering personality who takes an obsessive pleasure from “owning” Laura – that you’re far less likely to be surprised to find he has a considerable dark side than many of the viewers of the original film. For all the witty barbs he throws about – “Haven’t you heard about science’s latest invention, the doorbell?” he snaps at an welcome intrusion from MacPherson – Waldo remains part comic delight, part intensely black-hearted weirdo. It’s a line Webb’s performance walks extremely well.

It does mean that there is very little room in the film for Andrews and Tierney as the film’s two leads. Laura is the presence that hangs over the film – quite literally at times, with many scenes taking place in her flat, beneath an enormous portrait of her. But despite this, she becomes less and less interesting as the film progresses. Essentially, Gene Tierney is so striking looking as the lead – and the build-up she gets from Waldo in particular is so extreme – that her acting can’t quite live up to the presence. The character is possibly the least well written of the film, an enigma that we never quite get into – or feel inclined to try.

McPherson is a far more interesting part. The film suggests (indeed Waldo says it outright) that McPherson is falling hard for the victim. There is a wonderful sequence where McPherson stays overnight in Laura’s apartment, moving through the flat, rearranging things in her rooms, drinking her whisky then settling into a chair and starring up at her painting before going to sleep. It’s like a date with only one person there. McPherson gets a very personal investment in the case – so it’s a shame that he’s played so flatly and boringly by Dana Andrews, a serviceable sort of B-list film noir lead who brings no spark to the part at all.

The two leads can’t compete with Webb, or the playful performances in the supporting roles from Price and Anderson. Preminger gets the tone just right with these big performers, playing both characters just on the edge of satire. Price is languidly dry, delighting in his gauche lack of interest in other people and his selfishness. Anderson is a strangely needy matriarch, a woman hiding her need for the interest of a younger man, archly proud but slightly tragic. Throw these colourful performers at the edge of the picture and it’s not hard to lose interest in the two leads – especially as they are playing characters so different from what you expect from these films.

The mystery itself is not too much of a puzzle. There are two or three twists in there, two of which I was able to predict and the third one I didn’t pick up on some early signposting (including in the opening lines). But the enjoyment here isn’t from the puzzle but from the colour that it’s put together with. Preminger stages the whole thing like a jet black comedy and mixes it with plenty of gorgeous film noir lighting. The story is slight but staged with real energy and dynamism – you can’t believe how swiftly it flies by. The film probably has more sympathy for the eventual murder than a modern audience will feel – but that’s no big deal. Well written, spicily played by the supporting cast and well directed, you can see why this is one of the classic film noirs.