The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (251 page)

And why do
Me and Orson Welles?
Let me count the ways. First of all, it had the most interesting material and the best script Linklater had ever touched. It had a winning Zac Efron and a performance from Christian McKay as Orson that might have touched Orson himself—or driven him to murder. So thank you for
Me and Orson Welles
, but then how do you begin to explain why it is so much better and worthier than anything Linklater had touched before? And how do you trust him to follow that with more gold, instead of more whimsy?

Laura Linney
, b. New York, 1964
Educated at Brown and Juilliard, Laura Linney studied at the Moscow Arts Theatre and remains attached to the stage. Most recently, she was on Broadway in a revival of
The Crucible
. For film and television, she has accumulated an intriguing body of work, most of it in the character-actress range. Her own palpable intelligence has rather too often been diverted to nags, helpless onlookers at male accomplishment, the sad, the wistful, and sometimes the nasty. I suspect that she could do more than has been required of her so far.

She made her debut in
Lorenzo’s Oil
(92, George Miller), and followed with
Dave
(93, Ivan Reitman); in Armistead Maupin’s
Tales of the City
(93, Alastair Reid)—a role repeated in
More Tales of the City
(98, Pierre Gang) and
Further Tales of the City
(01, Gang). She was in
Searching for Bobby Fischer
(93, Steven Zaillian);
A Simple Twist of Fate
(94, Gillies MacKinnon); with gorillas in
Congo
(95, Frank Marshall); battling with Richard Gere in
Primal Fear
(96, Gregory Hoblit);
Absolute Power
(97, Clint Eastwood); and making an impression as the wide-eyed, treacherous wife in
The Truman Show
(98, Peter Weir)—a very clever performance.

For TV she made
Love Letters
(99, Stanley Donen); and then back to movies for
Lush
(99, Mark Gibson); very good in
You Can Count on Me
(00, Kenneth Lonergan);
The House of Mirth
(00, Terence Davies);
Running Mates
(00, Ron Lagomarsino);
Maze
(00, Rob Morrow);
Wild Iris
(01, Daniel Petrie);
The Laramie Project
(02, Moisés Kaufman); still a stooge for Gere in
The Mothman Prophecies
(02, Mark Pellington);
The Life of David Gale
(03, Alan Parker); very tough in
Mystic River
(03, Eastwood); neglected in
Love Actually
(03, Richard Curtis).

She played the wife in the research team in
Kinsey
(04, Bill Condon); excellent in
The Squid and the Whale
(05, Noah Baumbach);
The Exorcism of Emily Rose
(05, Scott Derrickson);
Driving Lessons
(06, Jeremy Brock);
Jindabyne
(06, Ray Lawrence);
The Hottest State
(06, Ethan Hawke);
Man of the Year
(06, Barry Levinson);
The Savages
(07, Tamara Jenkins);
Breach
(07, Billy Ray);
The Nanny Diaries
(07, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini); winning public affection and awards as Abigail in
John Adams
(08, Tom Hooper);
The Other Man
(08, Richard Eyre);
The City of Your Final Destination
(09, James Ivory).

Laura Linney could become the next Meryl Streep—or a kind of Agnes Moorehead. My guess is that she will last better not as a liberal sweetheart but as a wide-eyed bitch.

Anatole Litvak
(1902–74), b. Kiev, Russia
1924:
Tatiana
. 1930:
Dolly Macht Karriere
. 1931:
Nie Wieder Liebe
. 1932:
Coeur des Lilas; Das Lied einer Nacht
. 1933:
Sleeping Car; Cette Vieille Canaille
. 1935:
L’Equipage
. 1936:
Mayerling
. 1937:
The Woman I Love; Tovarich
. 1938:
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse; The Sisters
. 1939:
Confessions of a Nazi Spy
. 1940:
Castle on the Hudson; City for Conquest; All This and Heaven Too
. 1941:
Out of the Fog; Blues in the Night
. 1942:
This Above All; The Nazis Strike
(codirected with Frank Capra) (d);
Divide and Conquer
(codirected with Capra) (d). 1943:
The Battle of Russia
(d). 1944:
The Battle of China
(codirected with Capra) (d). 1945:
War Comes to America
(d). 1947:
The Long Night
. 1948:
Sorry, Wrong Number; The Snake Pit
. 1951:
Decision Before Dawn
. 1953:
Act of Love
. 1955:
The Deep Blue Sea
. 1956:
Anastasia
. 1957:
Mayerling
. 1958:
The Journey
. 1961:
Goodbye Again
. 1962:
Five Miles to Midnight
. 1967:
The Night of the Generals
. 1969:
La Dame dans l’Auto avec des Lunettes et un Fusil/The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun
.

At either end of Litvak’s career there is a nomadic flurry, but in the center, from 1937–51, he looks like a Hollywood pro and a patriot. A philosophy student at St. Petersburg, he made
Tatiana
in Russia and then went to Germany, where he was called Lutwak and worked on the editing of
Die Freudlose Gasse
(25, G. W. Pabst), was an assistant director and then director.
Sleeping Car
was made in England for Gaumont British with Ivor Novello and Madeleine Carroll, after which he made three films in France before going to Hollywood to remake
L’Equipage
as
The Woman I Love
with Miriam Hopkins, his wife from 1937–39.

In America, he adopted a curious mixture of anti-Nazi, thriller, and women’s pic material. During the war he was active in the
Why We Fight
series and worked on many propaganda films. But, with peace, he subsided into Broadway melodramas that grew more clotted with the years.
The Long Night
was an attempted remake of
Le Jour se Lève; Sorry, Wrong Number
is a classic sheet-chewer, with Barbara Stanwyck cracking into fragments; while
The Snake Pit
is a dull central love story alongside some startlingly good footage of life in an asylum—there, in one film, the documentarist and the tearjerker rattled against one another.

The documentarist was abandoned and his films became increasingly turgid.
The Deep Blue Sea, Anastasia, The Journey
, and
Goodbye Again
are toppling on the edge of parody, but Litvak solemnly put his actresses through the motions of ordeal. The growing staidness in Ingrid Bergman owes a lot to Litvak’s direction.

The plodding films give no hint of Litvak the man—he was a great womanizer, a Hollywood socialite, and a dashing figure.

Frank Lloyd
(1889–1960), b. Glasgow, Scotland
1916:
The Code of Marcia Gray; Sins of Her Parent
. 1917:
The Price of Silence; A Tale of Two Cities; American Methods; When a Man Sees Red; The Heart of a Lion; The Kingdom of Love
. 1918:
Les Miserables; Blindness of Divorce; True Blue; For Freedom; The Rainbow Trail; The Riders of the Purple Sage
. 1919:
The Man Hunter; Pitfalls of a Big City; The Loves of Letty
. 1920:
The Silver Horde; The Woman in Room 13; Madame X; The Great Lover; The World and Its Woman
. 1921:
Roads of Destiny; A Tale of Two Worlds; The Invisible Power; A Voice in the Dark; The Man from Lost River; The Grim Comedian
. 1922:
The Eternal Flame; Oliver Twist; The Sin Flood
. 1923:
Within the Law; Ashes of Vengeance; The Voice from the Minaret
. 1924:
Black Oxen; The Silent Watcher; The Sea Hawk
. 1925:
Winds of Chance; Her Husband’s Secret; The Splendid Road
. 1926:
The Wise Guy; The Eagle of the Sea
. 1927:
Children of Divorce
. 1928:
Adoration
. 1929:
The Divine Lady; Weary River; Drag; Dark Streets; Young Nowheres
. 1930:
Son of the Gods; The Way of All Men; The Lash
. 1931:
Right of Way; The Age for Love; East Lynne
. 1932:
A Passport to Hell
. 1933:
Cavalcade; Berkeley Square; Hoop-La
. 1934:
Servant’s Entrance
. 1935:
Mutiny on the Bounty
. 1936:
Under Two Flags
. 1937:
Maid of Salem; Wells Fargo
. 1938:
If I Were King
. 1939:
Rulers of the Sea
. 1940:
The Howards of Virginia
. 1941:
The Lady from Cheyenne; This Woman Is
Mine
. 1943:
Forever and a Day
(codirected). 1945:
Blood on the Sun
. 1954:
The Shanghai Story
. 1955:
The Last Command
.

“Normally an effective director of commercial films,” was Josef von Sternberg’s deadpan verdict on Frank Lloyd when B. P. Schulberg asked him to “salvage”
Children of Divorce
, a “sad affair,” starring Gary Cooper and Clara Bow, that Lloyd had just completed. And yet, two years later, Lloyd won the best director Oscar for
The Divine Lady
, while in 1933 he received the direction Oscar for the prestigious
Cavalcade
(it got best picture, too). It is an odd contrast, as inexplicable as the way Lloyd declined in the 1940s, went into an early retirement, and made two last pictures at Republic.

He came to America in 1910, as an actor. By the early 1920s he was a leading director.
The Eternal Flame
was made for Natalie Talmadge’s own company with Talmadge as Balzac’s Duchesse de Langeais; while
Oliver Twist
, made for Jackie Coogan Productions, paired Lon Chaney’s Fagin with Coogan’s urchin. He set up his own production company for a version of Sabatini’s
The Sea Hawk
and for
Her Husband’s Secret
. For the next few years his films were made for First National, notably
Divine Lady
with Corinne Griffith as Nelson’s Emma. But from 1931, he worked for Fox:
East Lynne
, with Clive Brook, who also appeared in the adaptation of Noel Coward’s
Cavalcade
. In 1935, he was loaned to MGM for
Mutiny
, a slow, stagy film in which Laughton and Gable both seem cramped. It is intrinsically dull, carried by its own publicity, the idea of history, and some second-unit exotica, but it won best picture and another director nomination for Lloyd. After
Under Two Flags
, Lloyd went over to Paramount and was given a string of swashbucklers.

Why did he fall away when still only middle-aged? Geraldine Farrar referred cryptically to his having had “better luck with ships than with people,” as though studio spectacle was his only forte. But, in truth, his work is short of character and excitement, as flatulent as this definition of the role of a director from Lloyd quoted in
The Parade’s Gone By:
“The director is essentially an interpreter. To him is given the task of making logical and understandable, pictorially, what the author and the continuity writer have set down.”

Now, why can’t every director behave like that?

Harold Lloyd
(1893–1971), b. Burchard, Nebraska
Although Lloyd is generally ranked alongside Chaplin and Keaton as masters of silent comedy, he is a more conventional personality. It is less Lloyd himself who is funny than the succession of gags in his films. When we see Chaplin, Keaton, Fields, or Groucho, laughter is inspired by character. It is their response to chaos or hostility that is amusing. But Lloyd’s world is sunny, orderly, and tractable; it is rearranged to fit the maneuvers of his often very complex jokes. And Lloyd himself is not just the “college boy”—fresh-faced, neat, bespectacled—but the budding executive of Comedy Inc.

That famous skyscraper climb was forced upon Lloyd only when his stuntman broke a leg. In the same way, the rest of his films are like comedies made when the clown was ill and when bustling, eager Lloyd stood in for him. His strength was organizational. He took comedy very practically, controlling his own work whenever possible, inaugurating the circle of contributing gagmen, and actually directing most of his own films. It has been pointed out by Andrew Sarris that Lloyd survived, intact despite all the risks he took, very rich, and even in old age clinging to a rather vacant grin. Keaton was marooned, Fields a drunk, Chaplin an exile, and Groucho neutered by TV. Whereas Lloyd sat in his beautiful Californian home, rationing out the rerelease of his old films and “very active in civic organizations.”

Lloyd was a traveling actor who, in 1912, worked for Edison as an extra. He met Hal Roach and the two men set up a company with Lloyd playing “Willie Work.” The pair joined Pathé and evolved “Lonesome Luke,” a copy of Chaplin. By 1919, Lloyd had made over a hundred one-and two-reel comedies. He abandoned Luke because he was too derivative, and adopted ordinariness, spectacles, and “comedies where people would see themselves and their neighbors.” Early clowns are all outsiders, men incapable of, or uninterested in, society’s scale of merit. Chaplin admits that scale but criticizes it. Langdon never notices it, Keaton is bewildered by it, the Marx Brothers know it is a lie, Laurel and Hardy believe it will never come their way. But Lloyd became the least deviant of comedians, a man who never dreamed of being out of the ordinary.

Pathé liked the new image, and
Bumping Into Broadway
(19) and
Captain Kidd’s Kidds
—both with Bebe Daniels—established him. Daniels went on her way and was replaced by Mildred Davis, whom Lloyd married. But after
From Hand to Mouth
(19) and
His Royal Slyness
(19), he was seriously injured while making
Haunted Spooks
(20). He recovered, and by 1921 was making three-reelers:
Now or Never, Never Weaken
, and
Among Those Present
. From those he moved into feature-length films:
A Sailor-Made Man
(21, Fred Newmeyer);
Grandma’s Boy
(22, Newmeyer);
Dr. Jack
(22, Newmeyer); and
Safety Last
(23, Newmeyer and Sam Taylor).