The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (22 page)

Perhaps she needed Bogart and Hawks and the remarkable combination of youth and dryness she shows in her two films with them. If so, two films are enough. She did make an honest landlady in
The Shootist
(76, Don Siegel), grim and proper but understanding the pains of heroic men.

After that, her career proceeded without evident explanation: on TV in
Perfect Gentleman
(78, Jackie Cooper);
Health
(79, Robert Altman); as a Broadway star pursued by an admirer in the lackluster
The Fan
(81, Edward Bianchi); playing
Sweet Bird of Youth
in London onstage—directed by Harold Pinter;
Appointment with Death
(88, Michael Winner);
Mr. North
(88, Danny Huston); in a version of the Marie Dressler role in the TV
Dinner at Eight
(90, Ron Lagomarsino); as James Caan’s agent in
Misery
(90, Rob Reiner);
All I Want for Christmas
(91, Robert Lieberman); and
The Portrait
(93, Arthur Penn) for TV.

The saddest aspect of her longevity is her haughtiness, her rather hollow grandeur—it is just the pomp that her Slim would have deflated. She has been in
A Foreign Field
(93, Charles Sturridge);
The Parallax Garden
(93, David Trainer);
Ready to Wear
(94, Altman);
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
(95, Marian Cole). She got a real movie and the mother’s role in
The Mirror Has Two Faces
(96, Barbra Streisand). She was not good in it, but she was nominated, and she proved she couldn’t act in the moment when she tried to pretend she didn’t care about losing.
Le Jour et la Nuit
(97, Bernard-Henri Levy); the old lady in
Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke
(99, John Erman);
Diamonds
(99, John Mallory Asher);
The Venice Project
(99, Robert Dornhelm);
Presence of Mind
(99, Antonio Aloy).

Enough? No. How about Ma Ginger in
Dogville
(03, Lars von Trier); her stern matriarch in
Birth
(04, Jonathan Glazer); a voice in
Howl’s Moving Castle
(04, Hayao Miyazaki);
Manderlay
(05, von Trier);
The Walker
(07, Paul Schrader)?

Enough now? In 2009, at last, she won an honorary Oscar, and they gave it to her on a Sunday in November. No class!

Kevin Bacon
, b. Philadelphia, 1958
While there was never any malice in the media game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” it did have a quiet hint that his ubiquity in film was not exactly significant or valuable. Wasn’t it more the case that everyone “knew” him, even if they couldn’t quite place him? That mood has passed. In the last few years, Kevin Bacon has been too good too often to be taken for granted. He may become just a fine supporting actor, but he’s more than the emblem of faceless team play. He has also directed two films—
Losing Chase
(1996)—about the relationship between a disturbed woman and the younger woman who looks after her children, which starred Helen Mirren and Bacon’s wife, Kyra Sedgwick; and
Loverboy
(04).

He began on stage and won a place in movies as one of the gang:
National Lampoon’s Animal House
(78, John Landis);
Starting Over
(79, Alan J. Pakula);
Hero at Large
(80, Martin Davidson);
Friday the 13th
(80, Sean Cunningham);
Only When I Laugh
(81, Glenn Jordan). Like everyone else, he benefited from the chance offered in
Diner
(82, Barry Levinson), and after
Forty Deuce
(82, Paul Morrissey), he got the lead in a hot movie
—Footloose
(84, Herbert Ross)—in which he led the young ensemble cast and danced well enough.

After that, he was in
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
(83, Mirra Bank);
Quicksilver
(86, Tom Donnelly), about bike messengers;
White Water Summer
(87, Jeff Bleckner);
End of the Line
(87, Jay Russell);
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
(87, John Hughes); as the young filmmaker in
The Big Picture
(89, Christopher Guest); a psychopath in
Criminal Law
(89, Martin Campbell);
Tremors
(90, Ron Underwood); a student still in
Flatliners
(90, Joel Schumacher); the lead in
Queens Logic
(91, Steve Rash); with Kyra Sedgwick in
Pyrates
(91, Noah Stern);
He Said, She Said
(91, Ken Kwapis); excellent as a gay pickup in
JFK
(91, Oliver Stone);
A Few Good Men
(92, Rob Reiner);
The Air Up There
(94, Paul M. Glaser); an effective villain in
The River Wild
(94, Curtis Hanson); an astronaut in
Apollo 13
(95, Ron Howard). He was very good as the deranged convict in
Murder in the First
(95, Marc Rocco); creepy as the child abuser in
Sleepers
(96, Levinson); with Jennifer Aniston in
Picture Perfect
(97, Glenn Gordon Caron); wonderful in
Telling Lies in America
(97, Guy Ferland); nicely cool in
Wild Things
(98, John McNaughton); and the lead in
Stir of Echoes
(99, David Koepp). He was good in
My Dog Skip
(00, Jay Russell), and rather nasty in
Hollow Man
(00, Paul Verhoeven). He was uncredited in
Novocaine
(01, David Atkins);
Trapped
(02, Luis Mandoki); uncredited and frightening in
In the Cut
(03, Jane Campion); and outstanding in
Mystic River
(03, Clint Eastwood).

Bacon has only built on his reputation for bold choices—especially in the way of dark character studies in material many actors would shun: as the released child molester in
The Woodsman
(04, Nicole Kassell); directing his wife in
Loverboy
(05);
Beauty Shop
(05, Bille Woodruff);
Where the Truth Lies
(05, Atom Egoyan);
Death Sentence
(07, James Wan), as a man whose life disintegrates;
Rails & Ties
(07, Alison Eastwood);
The Air I Breathe
(08, Jieho Lee); as the loyal aide in
Frost/Nixon
(08, Howard);
My One and Only
(09, Richard Loncraine).

Lloyd Bacon
(1890–1955), b. San Jose, California
1926:
Finger Prints; Private Izzy Murphy; Broken Hearts of Hollywood
. 1927:
The Heart of Maryland; White Flannels; A Sailor’s Sweetheart; Brass Knuckles
. 1928:
Pay As You Enter; The
Lion and the Mouse; Women They Talk About; The Singing Fool
. 1929:
Stark Mad; No Defense; Honky Tonk; Say It With Songs; So Long, Letty
. 1930:
She Couldn’t Say No; The Other Tomorrow; A Notorious Affair; Moby Dick; Office Wife
. 1931:
Sit Tight; Kept Husbands; Fifty Million Frenchmen; Gold Dust Gertie; Honor of the Family
. 1932:
Fireman, Save My Child; Manhattan Parade; Famous Ferguson Case; Miss Pinkerton; You Said a Mouthful; Crooner; Alias the Doctor
. 1933:
Picture Snatcher; Mary Stevens M.D.; 42nd Street; Footlight Parade; Son of a Sailor
. 1934:
Wonder Bar; A Very Honorable Guy; Six-Day Bike Rider; He Was Her Man; Here Comes the Navy
. 1935:
Devil Dogs of the Air; In Caliente; Frisco Kid; The Irish in Us; Broadway Gondolier
. 1936:
Cain and Mabel; Gold Diggers of 1937; Sons o’Guns
. 1937:
San Quentin; Marked Woman; Submarine D-1; Ever Since Eve
. 1938:
A Slight Case of Murder; Cowboy from Brooklyn; Boy Meets Girl; Racket Busters
. 1939:
Wings of the Navy; Indianapolis Speedway; Espionage Agent; Invisible Stripes; The Oklahoma Kid; A Child Is Born
. 1940:
Three Cheers for the Irish; Brother Orchid; Knute Rockne—All American
. 1941:
Honeymoon for Three; Footsteps in the Dark; Affectionately Yours; Navy Blues
. 1942:
Larceny Inc.; Wings for the Eagle; Silver Queen
. 1943:
Action in the North Atlantic
. 1944:
Sunday Dinner for a Soldier; The Sullivans
. 1945:
Captain Eddie
. 1946:
Wake Up and Dream; Home Sweet Homicide
. 1947:
I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now
. 1948:
You Were Meant for Me; Give My Regards to Broadway; An Innocent Affair/Don’t Trust Your Husband
. 1949:
Mother Is a Freshman; It Happens Every Spring; Miss Grant Takes Richmond
. 1950:
The Good Humor Man; The Fuller Brush Girl/Affairs of Sally; Kill the Umpire
. 1951:
Call Me Mister; The Frogmen; Golden Girl
. 1953:
She Had to Say Yes; Walking My Baby Back Home; The French Line; The I Don’t Care Girl
. 1954:
She Couldn’t Say No
.

Bacon was a stage actor who worked with Chaplin and became a director of shorts with Sennett in 1921. That led him into a seventeen-year spell as director at Warners before, in 1944, he moved on to Fox. It is not a career of special character, but through his long period at Warners he was associated with several notable musicals: Jolson in
The Singing Fool;
the classic backstage setting of
42nd Street
and
Footlight Parade
, which have a special tough sentiment and a clutch of good performances; and
Gold Diggers of 1937
, which has some of Busby Berkeley’s most floral dance patterns.
Marked Woman
is a good story of attempts to break prostitution racketeering, with Bette Davis as the informer and Bogart as the prosecutor. He also handled that unlikely Western,
The Oklahoma Kid
, in which Bogart and Cagney make very implausible hoods in ten-gallon hats, and two of Edward G. Robinson’s comedy thrillers:
A Slight Case of Murder
and
Brother Orchid
. His Fox years are much duller, but his last three films were made at RKO, and
The French Line
has Jane Russell in her bath and in some startlingly explicit songs.

Carroll Baker
, b. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1931
A splendidly vulgar creature, capable of a specially daft sexiness. She was a nightclub dancer and a pupil at the Actors’ Studio—a mixture that has never deserted her. She had a tiny part in
Easy to Love
(53, Charles Walters) but came to real notice brilliantly served by Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, Karl Malden, and Eli Wallach so that she seemed genuinely overripe and heedlessly erotic, in
Baby Doll
(56)—sucking her thumb as if vaguely mindful of the sucked toe in Buñuel’s
L’Age d’Or
. In the same year, she was reassessed by George Stevens as a dull little blonde in
Giant. The Big Country
(58, William Wyler) had her pouting throughout, while
The Miracle
(59, Irving Rapper) was fatuous. She strove in the next few years to dignify her blonde voluptuousness, sometimes taking it to a point of exaggeration. She is terribly serious in
Something Wild
(62, directed by her then husband Jack Garfein); but perfectly exploited by Seth Holt as the disruptive element at
Station Six Sahara
(63). Her finest hour came for Joseph Levine in a prurient series that caught her flamboyant earnestness:
The Carpetbaggers
(64, Edward Dmytryk);
Harlow
(65, Gordon Douglas); and
Sylvia
(65, Douglas). Since then, she has been unobtrusive in
Cheyenne Autumn
(64, John Ford), as Veronica in
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(65, Stevens), in
Mister Moses
(65, Ronald Neame); and otherwise given up to lurid concoctions, two of which claim to be called
The Sweet Body of Deborah
(68, Romolo Guerrieri) and
Orgasmo
(68, Umberto Lenzi). She was also in
Captain Apache
(71, Alexander Singer); a witch in
Baba Yaga
(73, Corrado Farina);
The Virgin Wife
(76, Franco Martinelli);
Andy Warhol’s Bad
(76, Jed Johnson);
Confessions of a Frustrated Housewife
(76, Andrea Bianchi);
Zerschossene Traume
(77, Peter Petzak);
The Watcher in the Woods
(81, John Hough);
Red Monarch
(83, Jack Gold); the mama to Bud Cort’s Freud in
The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud
(83, Danford B. Greene); the mom to Dorothy Stratten in
Star 80
(83, Bob Fosse);
Hitler’s S.S.: Portrait in Evil
(85, Jim Goddard);
Native Son
(86, Jerrold Freedman);
On Fire
(87, Robert Greenwald); as Jack Nicholson’s wife in
Ironweed
(87, Hector Babenco);
Kindergarten Cop
(90, Ivan Reitman); and
Blonde Fist
(91, Frank Clarke).

Most of her work nowadays is obscure, or for television, but she has been in
Judgment Day: The John List Story
(93, Bobby Roth);
Men Don’t Tell
(93, Harry Winer);
A Kiss to Die For
(93, Leon Ichaso);
Gipsy Angel
(94, Al Fata);
Im Sog des Bözen
(95, Nikolai Mullerschon);
Dalva
(96, Ken Cameron);
North Shore Fish
(96, Steve Zuckerman);
Just Your Luck
(96, Gary Auerbach);
Skeletons
(96, David DeCoteau);
The Game
(97, David Fincher);
Heart Full of Rain
(97, Roger Young);
Rag and Bone
(97, Robert Lieberman);
Nowhere to Go
(98, John Caire);
Another Woman’s Husband
(00, Noel Nosseck).

Rick
(Richard A.)
Baker
, b. Binghamton, New York, 1950
Once upon a time in the movies, makeup was apparently the province of the Westmore family: how George Westmore, a British barber and wig-maker, came to America, began doing makeup at Metro in 1917, and passed on the secrets of the trade to six sons—Monte, Perc, Ern, Wally, Bud, and Frank. Makeup in that era could go to wild extremes: it took Jekyll into Hyde, and so on; it was the treasury of an actor like Lon Chaney, supposedly collected together in one small case; and it was the application of cosmetics that made anyone and everyone look better (God save us, there is still in most of our minds a simple but unshakeable equation of smooth, handsome looks with virtue).