Tag: Reginald Denny

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.

Cat Ballou (1965)

Zany western comedy, a little dated, but with almost enough good jokes

Director: Eliot Silverstein

Cast: Jane Fonda (Cat Ballou), Lee Marvin (Kid Shelleen/Tim Strawn), Michael Callan (Clay Boone), Dwayne Hickman (Uncle Jed), Nat King Cole (Sunrise Kid), Stubby Kate (Sam the Shade), Tom Nardini (Jackson Two-Bears), John Marley (Frankie Ballou), Reginald Denny (Sir Harry Percival)

In a town out West in Wyoming, Cat Ballou (Jane Fonda) is to be hanged as a notorious outlaw. How did she end up here? Let Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye tell you as they recount ‘The Ballad of Cat Ballou’. This young, would-be school-teacher ended up on the gallows after a feud over her father’s (John Marley) land with Sir Harry Percival (Reginald Denny). Percival has a brutal hired gun, Tim Shrawn (Lee Marvin). So, Cat hired her own gunman, the legendary Kid Shelleen (Marvin again) who has become an equally legendary drunk. After the death of her father, Cat, Kid and her friends and love interests form a gang to bring Percival’s corporation down.

Cat Ballou stems from an era when audiences were not quite ready for the violent, nihilistic Western revisionism that would spawn the likes of McCabe and Mrs Miller and The Wild Bunch, but could no longer take the Ford/Wayne style Western seriously. Instead, it takes its inspiration from Swinging Sixties comedy, playing like Tom Jones or a Dick Lester Beatles movie. It’s zany, tongue-in-cheek, daubed in primary colours and nothing in it is meant to be taken particularly seriously, not even the bullets. It’s a fast-paced entertainment and if it looks rather dated today, at least it has its moments.

It’s most notable as the film that won Marvin the Oscar for his double performance as the drunk, shambling Kid Shelleen and the Marvinesque heavy Tim Strawn (with missing nose). Marvin revelled a chance to showcase his comic skills – and even have his stereotypical role as a bruising, violent killer as a contrast. Kid Shelleen doesn’t turn-up until almost a third of the way in, but all the film’s most memorable moments involve him. Slurring, scruffy, stumbling and only able to shoot straight when a little bit pissed (in an early shooting test he literally can’t hit a barn door), Marvin offers not only a red-eyed piece of comedy acting just this side of hammy, but also a neat jokey commentary on the truth behind an army of Western heavies (Cat is hugely disappointed to find the stories she’s read of Kid’s exploits, in no ways matches the mess she sees before her).

Marvin, rather graciously, always claimed of his Oscar “that half of this belongs to a horse somewhere out in San Fernando Valley”. It’s a touchingly modest reference to the film’s closing sequence – the inevitable rescue attempt on Cat – where Kid turns up pissed, riding a horse that seems as drunk as him (a neat shot, that took much careful animal wrangling, shows both Kid and his horse leaning lopsidedly against a wall, the horse with its legs drunkenly crossed). But Marvin’s performance works because it nails the tone of the film in a way no-one else really does.

That’s arguably true of Jane Fonda, who seems either slightly bemused or mildly contemptuous of the role she’s ended up in. When the film throws in moments close to tragedy, she reacts with more emotional realism than a zany comedy can support. She’s not willing to surrender herself to the moments of farce or flirtation, not helped by the dull or forgettable performances of her love interests. Callan lacks charisma or flair as outlaw Clay Boone, Dwayne Hickman overeggs as Boone’s comedic partner-in-crime Uncle Jed while Tom Nardini tries hard but lacks grace as Jackson Two-Bears. Fonda is also stuck in the only role where she can’t corpse at the drunken antics of Marvin.

The film bounces along, from its animated opening, via a series of comedic twists on Western tropes (a dance, a fight, a train robbery etc). Personally, I’ve never really been a fan of zany comedies, and my mind wasn’t changed here. Mixed with its very 60s view of the West, all colour splashed checked shirts, the try-hard craziness of Cat Ballou can start to wear cynical modern viewers like me down.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a good joke here or there, or that Marvin isn’t worth the price of admission. Silverstein directs with a professional smoothness that leaves the actors to get on with it (perhaps a little too much). The darker moments of the film don’t always marry up successfully with the tone – Cat’s reaction to the death of her father is from a different movie altogether – but generally it glides along, helped with some catchy tunes well sung by Cole and Kaye as a ballad-touting Greek Chorus.

Cat Ballou might actually be best enjoyed by taking a leaf out of Kid Shelleen’s books: get a couple of whiskies inside you and you’ll find the accuracy of your laughter jumping up several notches.

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.