Tag: Norma Shearer

The Divorcee (1930)

In its way ahead of its time, a liberated but melodramatic look at women’s freedom in relationships

Director: Robert Z Leonard

Cast: Norma Shearer (Jerry Martin), Chester Morris (Ted Martin), Conrad Nagel (Paul), Robert Montgomery (Don), Florence Eldridge (Helen), Helene Millard (Mary), Robert Elliott (Bill), Mary Doran (Janice), Tyler Brooke (Hank), Zelda Sears (Hannah), Judith Wood (Dorothy), George Irving (Dr Bernard)

Jerry (Norma Shearer) and Ted (Chester Morris) are young, in love and have been married for three years. It’s not ideal then, that Ted’s ‘pal’ Don (Robert Montgomery) brings a surprise guest to their anniversary party: Janice (Mary Doran) who also happens to be Ted’s illicit squeeze. When Jerry catches them in a clinch, the truth comes tumbling out. Ted says, of course, it didn’t mean anything and he’d be perfectly happy for a bit of freedom in marriages especially in these modern times. Jerry, after a lifetime of being a good girl, promptly ‘balances accounts’ with Don – only for Ted to reveal that what’s good for the gander was very much not for the goose. Divorced, Jerry finds a new life of wild sexual adventures while Ted sinks into bitter alcoholism. Will Jerry take up the offers of the other man who wished to marry her, Paul (Conrad Nagel)? Or will she decide Ted was her real love?

It’s hard to imagine a film like The Divorcee being made even a couple of years later. It’s remarkably open about sex in a film where everyone is pretty much unashamedly at it. Nor can you really imagine a film from Hollywood’s Golden Age where we would be invited to sympathise with Jerry for engaging in tit-for-tat infidelity, especially after Ted’s fury (screw you Ted, you hypocritical wanker). Or where Jerry’s series of conquests across New York – rather wittily told through a montage of close-ups of hands clasped while we hear the voices of a Jerry and a parade of exotic sounding men – doesn’t see her being punished by public shaming, horrific illness or any other of the wallopings a woman behaving like this in a film made a few years later would have faced. In its own way it makes The Divorcee a bit of a landmark – albeit a landmark Hollywood would spend most of the next thirty years running away from.

It also makes The Divorcee rather refreshing, even if it’s a slight film shot with a mix of stagy theatricalism and some sharp-paced editing. It’s also a film that, despite the amount of sex going on, isn’t exactly awash with sensual chemistry between its various leads. It’s hard to put your finger on, but Leonard’s film never quite manages to bring out a real sense of connection, despite the devotedly puppy-dog eyes Nagel’s Paul shoots Jerry or the protestations of adoration between Morris and Shearer. In fact, it’s the lack of steamy flirtatiousness that actually makes The Divorcee seem old-fashioned, despite all its liberal openness about extra-marital sex. (Compare it The Awful Truth, the closest – comic – film to this from the Code Era, where you are never in doubt that no matter who they screwed, Grant and Dunne were crazy for each other.)

The Divorcee makes it mark on history as the film Norma Shearer won one of the first Best Actress gongs for. Shearer’s head-girl looks and slightly plummy voice is perfect for the good-girl life Jerry has been leading as the devoted wife, thrilled and excited at Ted’s proposal. But she also brings a heartbroken fury to her discovery of Ted’s betrayal – and a coolly determined energy to her conscious decision, in that case, to take advantage of Don’s attraction to her. From there, Shearer embraces the hedonistic joy of a woman determined to enjoy the bad side for the first time in her life – without ever letting us forget there is a good girl bubbling below the surface. It’s a good performance, the finest in the film – good enough to make it sad that Shearer was pretty much from here on straight-jacketed into stiff prestige roles in frequently self-consciously ‘noble’ pictures.

It’s also nice that the men in this story are frequently shown as inadequate, whining, self-pitying, cowardly or some combination of all four. Chester Morris gives one of his patented performances of smug roguishness, collapsing into pathetic self-pity at a series of worse-for-wear appearances at various posh parties. Robert Montgomery is energetic and funny as the appallingly selfish and shallow Don, rather funny in his blatant cowardice (fleeing to Europe the second he works out Ted is not exactly thrilled at knowing another man has bumped uglies with his wife). Conrad Nagel does what he can with a terminally dull role as Paul, cursed with a series of needy glances.

Paul is at the centre of the film’s main sub-plot. Jilted potential husband of Jerry, Paul leaves the hunting lodge party where Ted and Jerry get engaged, deeply pissed (in both senses) hitting the roads with a fury. As the back-projection swings from side-to-side like it’s been attached to a whirligig, the car overturns and Dorothy (Judith Wood) is left ‘hideously deformed’. (We never see what happens to her, only a shrieking reaction of someone else; in her later appearances she’s behind a shroud). Paul marries her out of guilt but is convinced she loathes him for the accident and can’t wait to be shot of him, meaning she need not be an obstacle for a reunion with Jerry.

But that would mean – even though they get divorced – Jerry turning her back definitively on Ted. And, as modern as the film is – it even gives Jerry an actual job, at which she is so successful she is promoted and moved to the London office – it’s not crazy enough to escape the idea that, at the end of the day, all girls really want is to be settled and married with the man of their dreams. The Divorcee settles in the end of a resolutely conservative ending. Much as you might want Jerry to carry on having a whale of a time and kick her drunken louse of a husband back to the kerb for his hypocritical one-sided views of sexual freedom, she of course doesn’t.

Naturally, Dorothy in fact is devoted to Paul (she even, pathetically, begs Jerry not to take him from her since, as she is so ‘deformed’ no other man will ever look at her). Naturally Jerry doesn’t want to be a home wrecker. Naturally, a happy ending looms. Even before the code, Hollywood was only ever going to go so far, wasn’t it? After all women really would rather be wives and mothers, wouldn’t they?

The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

Laughton dominates in a dry, rather stately adaptation of the romance between the Brownings

Director: Sidney Franklin

Cast: Norma Shearer (Elizabeth Barrett), Fredric March (Robert Browning), Charles Laughton (Edward Moulton-Barrett), Maureen O’Sullivan (Henriette Barrett), Katharine Alexander (Arabel Barrett), Ralph Forbes (Captain Surtees Cook), Marion Clayton (Bella Hadley), Una O’Connor (Wilson), Leo G Carroll (Dr Ford-Waterlow)

The poet Elizabeth Barrett (Norma Shearer) is confined to her bed (she hasn’t stepped out of the room let alone gone downstairs or stood up in years) and in love with fellow poet Robert Browning (Fredric March), a love he returns with all the giddy enthusiasm of a schoolboy. But despite what you might think, that’s not the real drama in The Barretts of Wimpole Street and there are precious few emotional obstacles between these two. The real drama comes from Elizabeth’s relationship with her father, Edward Moulton-Barrett (Charles Laughton), a possessive control-freak with an unhealthy concern for his daughter who he wants to keep locked away so only he can possess her. Can Elizabeth escape her gilded prison?

Adapted from a highly thought-of Broadway hit, and about two of the most famous poets of the nineteenth century, it’s not a surprise Barretts of Wimpole Street was singled out as another perfect vehicle to cement Norma Shearer as the leading actress of her age. Despite her Oscar-nomination here, as is often the case with Shearer, when called upon to do ‘serious drama’, her mannered breathlessness can be a little trying. That quality is present throughout Barretts, her delivery crammed with heightened earnestness and dramatic intensity. But, there is a real commitment, and she gives a decent performance, capturing Elizabeth’s complex feelings towards her father and the fierceness of her determination – even if it’s a performance that always feels like she’s trying too hard to be taken seriously.

You can say much of the same thing about the rest of this, at times very stately, film, which wears its theatrical, single-set roots very heavily. Shot with a safely staid camera, that frames the action with little invention, it can feel slow and artificial. As with so many other films about writers, we also get little sense of what drives them. The only moment we touch on this is the first meeting between Browning and Elizabeth, with March’s Browning bounding around the room apologetically trying to explain his work while distracted with romantic attraction. For Elizabeth herself, other than settling at her desk once with pen in hand – Shearer cocking her head to the left with a wistful stare as she thinks carefully – you could quite easily forget she is a celebrated poet.

What is perhaps refreshing is how uncomplicated the romance element of the story is. There are no doubts at all about the affections, and no sense of compromise or danger that anything (other than her father) will come between them. March actually seems slightly lost on some level with how little there is to play with Browning: other than a giddy enthusiasm and romantic earnestness, he has almost nothing to do and is all but banished from the film’s most dramatic moments. There is an undeniable chemistry between him and Shearer, but so little stakes between them – and Browning remains largely a pleasant cipher – that it’s very hard to really find much interest in their scenes.

But then that’s because the drama is at home, and the ogre dominating the Barrett household. Franklin communicates the dread this figure holds over his children, even subconsciously, from the start: during the opening shots, we are shown repeated close-ups of Shearer grinning as each of her several siblings enter, culminating in a shot of fixed neutrality when her father enters. This domineering monster controls every inch of his children’s life, makes it clear that disobedience (like getting married) will be met by instant disinheritance and banishment from the family home. A home that is run entirely to his whims and personal tastes.

Who better to play this vile bully filled with fear and loneliness, than Charles Laughton? The film had to remove all references to Edward’s potentially incestuous interest in his daughter but, as Laughton so memorably said, the censors couldn’t ‘cut the glint in my eye’. And they felt fine leaving in dark implications that Barrett’s later children were not “born of love”. Laughton’s performance is towering, a ramrod stiff body of frustrated desires, whose instinct when he feels threatened is to lash out with cruel, verbal and physical violence. He thinks nothing of literally twisting the arms of his daughter Henriette (a very good Maureen O’Sullivan) to extract her confession of loving another man, just as he feels free to browbeat her into swearing on the bible to renounce him.

His creepy parental desire – at one point he sits with Elizabeth and earnestly desires her to stay with him, with all the intense longing of a lover – is palpable, his frustrated sexuality clear. There is a great scene where Marion Clayton’s lisping cousin Bella playfully sits on his lap and asks him to kiss her: Laughton grabs the back of her head for a full-on snog, then leaps instantly to his feet as if terrified that she will detect his obvious arousal. At another, he sweeps a tired Elizabeth into his arms like some sort of Rochester to carry her up to her bedroom.

This but scratches the surface of Laughton’s portrayal of suppressed desires. All of them are bottled up in an intense fear and vulnerability that Edward has of being abandoned – Laughton almost trembles with fear at the prospect of any of his children leaving. At great length with Elizabeth, he hammers away at her confidence, a torrent of passive aggressive words stressing her weakness and incapability to survive. It comes from a deep insecurity but, whenever we feel even a moment of sympathy for this psychologically damaged man, he reverts to bullying, shouting and a willingness to commit acts of petty, damaging cruelty.

Laughton’s superb performance (rightly he was immensely put-out not to be Oscar nominated) not only elevates the film (all its most memorable moments feature him) but also draws some of her best work out of Shearer, who raises her game to match him in their confrontation scenes. The drama of these sequences is the heart of a film that otherwise fails to bring much energy, despite some good performances (including Una O’Connor, giving one of her finest maids, full of exasperated, supportive patience). Away from Laughton, the film feels slight and slow. But with him, it’s a portrait of creepy possessiveness and misdirected desire. Even if, of course, no one could say that at the time.

Romeo and Juliet (1936)

Tediously reverent version, lacking drama and energy with two miscast leads

Director: George Cukor

Cast: Norma Shearer (Juliet), Leslie Howard (Romeo), John Barrymore (Mercutio), Edna May Oliver (Nurse), Basil Rathbone (Tybalt), C. Aubrey Smith (Lord Capulet), Andy Devine (Peter), Conway Tearle (Prince Escalus), Ralph Forbes (Paris), Henry Kolker (Friar Laurence), Violet Kemble-Cooper (Lady Capulet), Robert Warwick (Lord Montague), Reginald Denny (Benvolio) Virginia Hammond (Lady Montague)

In The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Norma Shearer takes part in a comic skit as Juliet alongside John Gilbert, where they play the balcony scene in modern slang. It clearly gave her a taste for the role, since six years later she and powerhouse-producer husband Irving Thalberg bought the play to film for real. And not just any production: this cost north of $2million, hired an army of cultural consultants and was determined to prove Hollywood could do the Bard. It’s bombing at the Box Office (despite Oscar nominations) meant it would be years before Hollywood tackled Shakespeare again.

And you can see why. Decades later, Cukor called it the one film he’d love to get another go at, to get “the garlic and the Mediterranean into it”, by which I guess he means the spice. This production of Shakespeare’s play of doomed love is singularly lifeless, painfully reverential, lacks almost any original ideas, labours several points with on-the-nose obviousness and slowly curls up and disappears into a miasma of uncomfortable actors dutifully reading poetry. Is there any wonder it’s been lost by time?

It’s all particularly sad since it starts with something approaching a bang (once it gets the earnest, classical-inspired credits and list of literary consultants out of the way). Cukor stages the opening brawl between the Capulets and Montagues with a certain pizzazz, missing from almost all of the dialogue-heavy scenes that follow. Perhaps it was felt a dust-up in a lovingly detailed recreation of Verona, with sword fights and slaps, was far less stress for Hollywood folks who saw this as their bread-and-butter?

Either way, it’s an entertaining opening that grandly stages two lavish parades of the rival families arriving in parallel processions to a church, Dutch angles throw things into tension while extras whisper “It’s the Capulets! It’s the Montagues!”. The fight, when it comes (provoked by Andy Devine’s broad Peter, with his whiny, creaking voice and slapstick thumb biting) is impressive, with lashings of a Curtiz action epic, rapidly consuming the whole square in violence. Romeo and Juliet certainly puts the money on screen here – just as it will do later with a costume-and-extras-laden Capulet ball. Briefly, you sit up and wonder if you are in for an energetic re-telling of the classic tale. Then hope dies.

It dies slowly, under the weight of so much earnest commitment to doing Shakespeare “right” that all life and energy disappears from the film. Suddenly camera work settles down to focus on dialogue mostly delivered with a poetical emptiness that sacrifices any beat of character or emotion in favour of getting the recitation spot-on. That extends to the sexless, sparkless romance between our two leads, neither of whom convince as particularly interested in each other, let alone wildly devoted to death.

It doesn’t help that both leads are wildly miscast. It’s very easy to take a pop at them for being hideously too old as teenage lovers (Howard’s lined face looks every inch his forty plus years). But, even without that, both are brutally exposed. Ashley Wilkes is no-one’s idea of a Romeo, and Howard’s intellectually cold readings make him a distant, tumult-free lead it’s hard to warm too. His precision and cold self-doubt make him more suitable for a Macbeth, a thought it’s impossible to shake as he sets about his own destruction with a fixated certainty.

For that matter Norma Shearer would probably have made a better Lady Macbeth. Instead, she makes for a painfully simpering, vapid Juliet. She tries so hard to play young and innocent, that she comes across as a rather dim Snow White (not helped by her introduction, playing with a deer in the Capulet’s garden). Her ‘youthful’ mannerisms boil down to toothy grins and an endlessly irritating constant turning of her head to one side. Rather than making her feel younger, it draws attention to her age. It’s notably how much better she is in Juliet’s pre-poison soliloquy: even if her reading is studied, she’s better playing older and fearful than at any point as naively young.

Truth told, almost no one feels either correctly cast or emerges with much credit: except Basil Rathbone, clearly having a whale of a time as a snobbishly austere Tybalt (it’s joked this was the only time on screen Rathbone won a sword fight, and even then, it was only because Leslie Howard got in the way). Edna May Oliver mugs painfully as the Nurse, C Aubrey Smith makes Capulet indistinguishable from the army of Generals he had played. John Barrymore was allowed complete freedom as Mercutio, but his grandly theatrical gestures, camp accent and overblown gestures (not to mention looking every inch his drink-sodden fifty plus years) feel like he has blown in from an Edwardian stage.

Throughout an insistent score, mixing classical music and Hollywood grandness, hammers home the cultural and literary importance at the cost of drama. It’s combined with an increasingly painful obviousness. Romeo drops a dagger in Juliet’s bedroom for her to use later. Juliet lowers a rope ladder in expectation of an arrival of Romeo she can know nothing about. The Friar literally has a Frankenstein’s Lab cooking up industrial levels of his knock-out potion (what on Earth does he need this for? Investigation needed I think!). Poor Friar John gets a sub-plot we return to multiple times (to make the irony really clear) of being locked up in a plague house (“Hark ye! Help!” he cries, a fine example of the film’s occasional laughable mock-Shakespeare) as the other characters ride back and forth past the house oblivious to his vital news.

The whole production marinates in men-in-tights traditionalism, where the nearest thing approaching an interesting interpretative idea is Mercutio tossing wine up to some prostitutes on a balcony. Otherwise, all the beats you’d expect to see in a school production are ticked off – but done so on sets that cost a fortune, and in some impressive location setting filled with hordes of costumed extras. But it’s presented in a lifeless, passion-free, poetic sing-song; a dutiful homage, that drains all meaning.

Romeo and Juliet feels like a very long film. Any cinematic invention has long-since disappeared by the end (where you are rewarded with a brief burst of expressionist lighting for the Apothecary and a decently moody, shadow-lit sword-fight in the Capulet tomb). It’s replaced with a dry, lifeless, reverential deference to the Bard, as if everyone in the film was either apologising for having the gall to make it or defensively trying to prove they were doing their best. Either way, it doesn’t make for a good film or good Shakespeare.