The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (168 page)

Elliott Gould
(Elliott Goldstein), b. Brooklyn, New York, 1938
If you lifted off the music in
The Long Goodbye
(73, Robert Altman), the endless attempts at the title tune, you might not realize that Elliott Gould’s performance is like a brilliant, very cool, stoned musician—Art Pepper, say—doing “I Can’t Get Started” in a Bogart mood. He’s hunched over his instrument, very sad, very alone, yet chronically musical. It’s a great performance, with a lovely, secret beat that everyone else in the movie feels but cannot quite get. Who knows if even Altman got it?

Clearly, that kind of acting wasn’t going to start a trend, and Gould’s career was slipping away by the mid-seventies. Not that he was the man to resist slippage. Still, his doomed cameo in
Bugsy
(91, Barry Levinson) was enough to remind us all of what we have missed over the years and of the rare gentleness in Gould.

The list is not cheerful: a deaf-mute in
Quick, Let’s Get Married
(64, William Dieterle);
The Night They Raided Minsky’s
(68, William Friedkin); a supporting actor nomination in
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
(69, Paul Mazursky);
Getting Straight
(70, Richard Rush);
I Love My … Wife
(70, Mel Stuart);
M*A*S*H
. (70, Altman);
Move
(70, Stuart Rosenberg); having and missing his big chance, in
The Touch
(71, Ingmar Bergman);
Little Murders
(71, Alan Arkin);
Busting
(74, Peter Hyams);
California Split
(74, Altman);
S.P.Y.S
. (74, Irvin Kershner);
Who?
(74, Jack Gold);
I Will, I Will … For Now
(76, Norman Panama); briefly in
Nashville
(75, Altman);
Whiffs
(75, Ted Post);
Harry and Walter Go to New York
(76, Mark Rydell);
Mean Johnny Barrows
(76, Fred Williamson);
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Richard Attenborough);
Capricorn One
(78, Hyams);
Escape to Athena
(79, George Pan Cosmatos);
The Lady Vanishes
(79, Anthony Page);
The Muppet Movie
(79, James Frawley);
Falling in Love Again
(80, Steven Paul);
The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark
(80, Charles Jarrott);
The Devil and Max Devlin
(81, Steven Hilliard Stern);
Dirty Tricks
(81, Alvin Rakoff);
Over the Brooklyn Bridge
(84, Menahem Golan);
The Naked Face
(85, Bryan Forbes);
Inside Out
(86, Robert Taicher);
Dangerous Love
(88, Marty Ollstein);
The Telephone
(88, Rip Torn);
The Lemon Sisters
(90, Joyce Chopra); and
Night Visitor
(90, Rupert Hitzig).

For years now, Gould has done little bits all over the place, apparently cheerful, and always ready to rise to good material. Is there another screen presence so innately appealing and so steadily wasted?
Wet and Wild Summer!
(92, Maurice Murphy);
Togo il Disturbo
(92, Dino Risi);
Amore!
(93, Lorenzo Doumani);
Bleeding Hearts
(94, Gregory Hines);
The Glass Shield
(94, Charles Burnett);
The Feminine Touch
(94, Conrad Janis);
Kicking and Screaming
(95, Noah Baumbach);
Let It Be Me
(95, Eleanor Bergstein);
Johns
(96, Scott Silver);
Busted
(96, Corey Feldman);
City of Industry
(97, John Irvin)—uncredited; the TV version of
The Shining
(97, Mick Garris);
The Big Hit
(98, Kirk Wong);
American History X
(98, Tony Kaye);
Picking Up the Pieces
(00, Alfonsau Arau);
Playing Mona Lisa
(00, Matthew Huffman); a recurring role as Ross and Monica’s father in
Friends; Ocean’s Eleven
(01, Steven Soderbergh);
The Experience Box
(01, Reid Green and Florian Sachisthal);
Baby Bob
(02, John Forternberry and Rob Schiller);
Puckoon
(02, Terence Ryan).

He drifts around, a bobbing cork in
Ocean
films (12 and 13), a voice narrating this and that, and a figure in pictures that may get no proper release. It is a sad decline, and maybe the modern terminus for a fatal, if endearing, lack of self-importance.

Edmund Goulding
(1891–1959), b. London
1925:
Sun-Up; Sally, Irene and Mary
. 1926:
Paris
. 1927:
Women Love Diamonds; Love
. 1929:
The Trespasser
. 1930:
Paramount on Parade
(codirected);
The Devil’s Holiday
. 1931:
Reaching for the Moon; The Night Angel
. 1932:
Grand Hotel; Blondie of the Follies
. 1934:
Riptide
. 1935:
The Flame Within
. 1937:
That Certain Woman
. 1938:
White Banners; The Dawn Patrol
. 1939:
Dark Victory; We Are Not Alone; The Old Maid
. 1940: ’
Til We Meet Again
. 1941:
The Great Lie
. 1943:
The Constant Nymph; Claudia; Forever and a Day
(codirected). 1946:
Of Human Bondage; The Razor’s Edge
. 1947:
Nightmare Alley
. 1949:
Everybody Does It
. 1950:
Mister 880
. 1952:
We’re Not Married; Down Among the Sheltering Palms
. 1956:
Teenage Rebel
. 1958:
Mardi Gras
.

Goulding was a boy actor who appeared in
Alice in Wonderland
and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(16, Fred Durrant). After war service, he went to America and, with Edgar Selwyn, wrote the play
Dancing Mothers
. That led him to write for the movies, with Inspiration, Tiffany, and Fox:
Dangerous Toys
(21, Samuel Bradley);
The Man of Stone
(21, George Archainbaud);
Tol’able David
(21, Henry King);
Broadway Rose
(22, Robert Z. Leonard);
Fascination
(22, Leonard);
The Seventh Day
(22, King);
Till We Meet Again
(22, Christy Cabanne), which Goulding later remade;
Dark Secrets
(23, Victor Fleming);
Fury
(23, King), which Goulding also turned into a book;
Tiger Rose
(23, Sidney Franklin);
Dante’s Inferno
(24, Henry Otto); and
Havoc
(25, Rowland V. Lee). His writing credits also include
Broadway Melody
(29, Harry Beaumont) and many of his own early films. He acted again in
Three Live Ghosts
(22, George Fitzmaurice).

As a director, Goulding was an expert handler of actresses in expert romantic melodrama, a man rooted in 1930s cinema who was ill at ease after the Second World War. His best-known film,
Grand Hotel
, is not his best, and it seems likely that on so prestigious a movie his control was reduced by executives and the stars themselves. Contrary to legend, Joan Crawford is the best thing in that film, and it is worth noting that Goulding had directed her in one of her first important roles:
Sally, Irene and Mary
. Goulding was at his best in four extravagant Bette Davis films:
That Certain Woman, Dark Victory, The Old Maid
, and
The Great Lie
. The latter also contains an acid performance from Mary Astor. He made excellent, if conventional, use of Joan Fontaine and Charles Boyer in
The Constant Nymph;
of Tyrone Power, Gene Tierney, and Anne Baxter in
The Razor’s Edge;
and of Dorothy McGuire in
Claudia
.

Despite a reputation that had been won with actresses, immediately after the war Goulding made two films around unbeguiling actors:
Mister 880
, a weird mixture of Fox’s postwar realism and grassroot sentimentality, with Edmund Gwenn so benign one could wring his neck; and
Nightmare Alley
, a bleak study of breakdown that struggled to make Tyrone Power affecting.

Betty Grable
(Elizabeth Ruth Grable) (1916–73), b. St. Louis, Missouri
There is something touching in
The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend
(49, Preston Sturges) about the way supporting characters persist in remarking on Betty Grable’s lovely shape and the remorseless ingenuity with which the plot uncovers her legs. Her huge wartime fame was all based on leggy virtuosity and her very good-natured, long-distance sexiness, and
Pin-Up Girl
(44, Bruce Humberstone) was a tribute to the taste of GIs everywhere. Did she really recur in the dreams of frightened men on Pacific atolls as the blonde looking over her shoulder at the boys supposedly ogling the backs of her knees? She was brassy, energetic, and amused, but her body was too pert to be disturbing, too thoroughly healthy to be interesting.

The importance of the moment in certain careers is perfectly demonstrated by Betty Grable. For ten years she had labored away at glamour without really rising above supporting parts. She began as a very young chorine, and after
Let’s Go Places
(29, Frank Strayer) and
Whoopee!
(30, Thornton Freeland), Samuel Goldwyn signed her up and changed her name to Frances Dean. She had small parts in
Palmy Days
(31, Edward Sutherland) and
The Kid from Spain
(32, Leo McCarey), before RKO used her as an ingenue in musicals and comedies:
The Gay Divorcee
(34, Mark Sandrich);
The Nitwits
(35, George Stevens);
Follow the Fleet
(36, Sandrich); and
Pigskin Parade
(36, David Butler). RKO dropped her and she went briefly into variety with her new husband, Jackie Coogan. Paramount called her back to replace Shirley Ross in
This Way Please
(37, Robert Florey), and she stayed at the studio for
College Swing
(38, Raoul Walsh);
Give Me a Sailor
(38, Elliott Nugent); and
Man About Town
(39, Sandrich).

Yet again she was dropped. But after some stage work, Fox asked her to replace a sick Alice Faye in
Down Argentine Way
(40, Irving Cummings). At last she was the leggy centerpiece of boisterous, Technicolor musicals (and from 1943 on she was married to Harry James—there was some surreal import in her legs and his horn):
Tin Pan Alley
(40, Walter Lang);
Moon Over Miami
(41, Lang);
Song of the Islands
(42, Lang);
Springtime in the Rockies
(42, Cummings);
Coney Island
(43, Lang);
Sweet Rosie O’Grady
(43, Cummings); and
Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe
(45, George Seaton).

After the war, she kept a brave face against changed tastes:
The Dolly Sisters
(46, Cummings) and
Mother Wore Tights
(47, Lang). She flopped in a straight role
—That Lady in Ermine
(48, Otto Preminger and Ernst Lubitsch)—the first since
A Yank in the RAF
(41, Henry King) and
I Wake Up Screaming
(41, Humberstone). Her last few years at Fox were spent waiting for some new blonde goddess:
When My Baby Smiles at Me
(48, Lang);
My Blue Heaven
(50, Henry Koster);
Wabash Avenue
(50, Koster);
Call Me Mister
(51, Lloyd Bacon); and
The Farmer Takes a Wife
(53, Henry Levin). Marilyn Monroe settled her fate. They were together in
How to Marry a Millionaire
(53, Jean Negulesco), after which Grable made only two films—
How to Be Very, Very Popular
(55, Nunnally Johnson) and
Three for the Show
(55, H. C. Potter).

Gloria Grahame
(Gloria Grahame Hallward) (1925–81), b. Los Angeles
The excellent English critic Judith Williamson has said of Grahame (in
Human Desire):
“… she seems to represent a sort of acted-upon femininity, both unfathomable and ungraspable. She slips through the film like a drop of loose mercury. Neither we nor the other characters know whether to believe what she says; elusive as a cat, she is the focus of terrible actions, but unknowable herself.”

How well those words apply to most of Grahame’s films—and how surely they reach out for that strange life of hers, so easily mistaken for film noir. Just a few years before her death, there she was in England, doing theatre—Sadie Thompson in
Rain
, and a new play about a movie star,
A Tribute to Lili Lamont
. In an interview at the time, she kissed the writer on the lips, and said, “Well, I couldn’t go home and write an article about
you
. Or maybe I could …” If that isn’t a loaded hesitation from one of her pictures, how do we place her wretched death, not long afterwards, or its half-fictional, half-biographical treatment in her young lover Peter Turner’s
Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool?

Ms. Williamson was right: Grahame was always mysterious, or less than reliable. Even in
In a Lonely Place
, where she is ostensibly the fixed character who must judge another, there are hints of turbulence ready to break out, and of a past that makes her absentminded. If she only ever really played supporting parts, that may be because that level of work allowed her to be most enigmatic. But things happened when she was around: any room became a place where coffee was coming to the boil.

Her Scottish mother had been a singer and an actress before she became drama coach at the Pasadena Playhouse. Her father, too, was British, and his father, Basil Hallward, was a painter referred to in Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Little Gloria was in the theatre as a kid, an understudy, when she made her movie debut as a waitress in
Blonde Fever
(44, Richard Whorf).