The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (272 page)

Except for Groucho. He is the most human, the one who serves as an unreliable gobetween for us and the mad duo, Harpo and Chico, and the one who knows he is trapped and that we are watching him. He alone admits, with lacerating scorn, to emotions. Women and money move him, but so hopelessly that he has been compelled to make a comic persona out of lechery and money-grubbing: here is the American boy—intact in the work of Griffith—so ashamed of the mockery that greets his aspirations to romance and prosperity that he has had to distort them. It is no accident that Groucho’s confessional confidence trickster bestrides the Wall Street crash, nor that his frigid lecher looks in retrospect like the brother of Gaston Modot in Buñuel’s
L’Age d’Or
, an idealist warped by the system.

Groucho is visibly stranded by the complete insanity of Chico and Harpo. Chico wears a pixie hat and talks ice-cream Italian. He is an inert character, content with his stupor, and unable to deal with people on any other terms. As monotonous and stupid as his own virtuosity on the piano, he is able to interpret for Harpo, the most luridly dressed, most evidently infantile brother. Harpo is not dumb but refuses to speak, not human but able to give a protruding-tongue impersonation of idiocy, asexual but eager to scoop up women, as icy as his dreadful harp solos. These two operate on a single level, refusing to participate on any other.

But Groucho knows how alien his brothers are and concedes that his own greasepaint moustache and collapsible walk have not fully admitted him to their company. He still wears a straight suit and, like all confidence tricksters, he is neurotically attached to the emblems of bourgeois success. In every film, he carried the weight of the senseless plot, which does not distinguish him but humiliates him even further. His only weapon in defense, his tongue, also hacks away at himself. When he opens his mouth barbs fly out. But what damage have they done already to his own interior? As if to stand up for classical culture, he insists on making verbal, even donnish jokes. Sacrificing anything for a sharp answer, he has cut himself to pieces. He announces his lust because he is impotent, and his rascally concentration on money because he is a failure.

Look to the text for instances. In
Monkey Business
, Groucho crosses swords with the captain of the ship on which he has stowed away:

G
ROUCHO:
I want to register a complaint.

C
APTAIN:
Why, what’s the matter?

G
ROUCHO:
Matter enough. Do you know who sneaked into my stateroom at three o’clock this morning?

C
APTAIN:
Who did that?

G
ROUCHO:
Nobody, and that’s my complaint. I’m young, I want gaiety, laughter, ha-cha-cha. I want to dance. I want to dance till the cows come home.

Standard Groucho. That harrowed gaze had come from a lifelong struggle to generate conversations that would prompt lines to set off his firecracker answers. There is also the admission of romantic frustration and the Perelman-like ogling of cliché that bespeaks a mind yearning after innocence. But how does Groucho fare with women when they materialize? In
Duck Soup
, he falls in with a hot little number, evidently willing, but his sexual urge is throttled by literary cross-reference:

G
ROUCHO:
I could dance with you till the cows come home. On second thoughts I’d rather dance with the cows till you come home.

At moments of opportunity, Groucho’s prick backs off, piercing himself. In
Monkey Business
, he emerges from Thelma Todd’s closet to find that she wants life, laughter, and gaiety, and needs no wooing. Too much for Groucho. He retreats into surrealist anonymity:

G
ROUCHO:
Madam, before I get through with you, you will have a clear case for divorce, and so will my wife. Now the first thing to do is to arrange for a settlement. You take the children, your husband takes the house, Junior burns down the house, you take the insurance, and I take you.

L
UCILLE:
But I haven’t any children.

G
ROUCHO:
That’s just the trouble with this country. You haven’t any children, and as for me, I’m going back in the closet where men are empty overcoats.

The ripe young women always frighten Groucho away or, as with Eve Arden in
At the Circus
, totally rout him. That is why Margaret Dumont is so necessary, as an absorbent victim for his insult and innuendo who does not offer a real threat of denouement. Her imperturbability is based on the placid knowledge that she is stronger than Groucho, that all his insult is childish prattle, so desperate is he that serious subjects may arise if he lets silence reign for a moment:

M
RS
. T
EASDALE:
As chairwoman of the reception committee, I welcome you with open arms.

R
UFUS
T. F
IREFLY:
Is that so? How late do you stay open?

M
RS
. T
EASDALE:
I’ve sponsored your appointment because I feel you are the most able statesman in all Fredonia.

F
IREFLY:
Well, that covers a lot of ground. Say, you cover a lot of ground yourself. You better beat it. I hear they’re going to tear you down and put up an office building where you’re standing. You can leave in a taxi. If you can’t get a taxi you can leave in a huff. You know you haven’t stopped talking since I came here? You must have been vaccinated with a phonograph needle.

The more Groucho talked, the more he exposed his own vulnerability. One grotesque line, from
Monkey Business
, caught his tragedy: “Love flies out the door when money comes innuendo.”

If I have concentrated on Groucho it is because time has had that effect. Chico and Harpo look like hardworking vaudeville comics put into movies. They are valuable only for highlighting Groucho’s poignant situation.

The history of the brothers is a commentary on their act. Their anarchical power within films was helpless: awesome to direct, they were putty in a producer’s hands. First, their mother dragooned them into a stage act that led to Broadway successes in
The Cocoanuts
and
Animal Crackers
. Paramount signed them up and, with the nondescript Zeppo, they made:
The Cocoanuts
(29, Robert Florey and Joseph Santley);
Animal Crackers
(30, Victor Heerman);
Monkey Business
(31, Norman Z. McLeod);
Horse Feathers
(32, McLeod); and
Duck Soup
(33, Leo McCarey). The Paramount pictures are their most unbridled, but
Duck Soup
alone suggests a director: its humor is better organized, and its satire on war more serious, for all that McCarey felt abashed by the ruthlessly uncooperative brothers.

In fact,
Duck Soup
flopped and hurried them on to MGM where Irving Thalberg wrapped them up in romantic subplots and songs. He has been criticized for that, and it is true that the MGM films slacken, but the writing became ordinary and the brothers grew bored in the way that children are listless without order in their lives. It is irrelevant to praise or lament structure in their films. At MGM they made
A Night at the Opera
(35, Sam Wood) and
A Day at the Races
(37, Wood). There was an excursion to RKO for
Room Service
(38, William A. Seiter). Then back to MGM, increasingly unhappy with that studio, for
At the Circus
(39, Edward Buzzell),
Go West
(40, Buzzell), and
The Big Store
(41, Charles Reisner). After the war, they worked for United Artists in
A Night in Casablanca
(46, Archie L. Mayo) and
Love Happy
(50, David Miller) and appeared together in
The Story of Mankind
(57, Irwin Allen) and in a TV film,
The Great Jewel Robbery
(60), directed by Mitchell Leisen.

Groucho alone had an independent career of substance. In addition to a TV quiz show that he regularly reduced to chaos,
You Bet Your Life
, and the publication of
The Groucho Letters
, he appeared in several films:
Copacabana
(47, Alfred W. Green);
Mr. Music
(51, Richard Haydn);
Double Dynamite
(51, Irving Cummings);
A Girl in Every Port
(52, Chester Erskine);
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
(57, Frank Tashlin); and
Skidoo
(68, Otto Preminger). But time has not altered that baleful, unreleased pool of ardor in his eyes. What a film it would have been: Groucho meets
Belle de Jour
.

James Mason
(1909–84), b. Huddersfield, England
Talent, intelligence, versatility, independence, and enterprise made Mason’s career remarkable. Trained as an architect, he had a few years on the stage before becoming the most stylish leading man in British films. He made his debut in
Late Extra
(35, Albert Parker) and played in
Twice Branded
(36, Maclean Rogers);
Troubled Waters
(36, Parker);
Prison Breaker
(36, Adrian Brunel);
Secret of Stamboul
(36, Andrew Marton);
The Mill on the Floss
(37, Tim Whelan);
Fire Over England
(37, William K. Howard);
The High Command
(37, Thorold Dickinson);
Catch as Catch Can
(37, Roy Kellino, brother of Pamela, Mason’s wife, 1941–64); and
I Met a Murderer
(39, Kellino), which Mason also wrote and produced.

But he really came to the fore during the war years in a run of films where he brought a unique sensuality to polite arrogance. The blend of Yorkshire and trans-Atlantic drawl was very musical, and arguably there has never been a sexier Englishman in British films, especially when opposite Margaret Lockwood:
Hatter’s Castle
(41, Lance Comfort);
The Night Has Eyes
(42, Leslie Arliss);
The Man in Grey
(43, Arliss);
Fanny by Gaslight
(44, Anthony Asquith);
The Wicked Lady
(45, Arliss); treating Ann Todd with hostile relish in Compton Bennett’s
The Seventh Veil
(45).

His best performance, however, was in Carol Reed’s
Odd Man Out
(47), and it was no surprise when Mason decided he deserved better things and left for Hollywood. He claimed that he never became a star in America, and it is true that few films prospered on his appeal alone. But his contribution was many-sided. He was always an attractive villain, whether in kids’ stuff, as Rupert of Hentzau in
The Prisoner of Zenda
(52, Richard Thorpe),
Prince Valiant
(54, Henry Hathaway), and Captain Nemo in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(54, Richard Fleischer), or at the more sophisticated level of Hitchcock’s
North by Northwest
(59) in which he harks back to the chauvinism of the Leslie Arliss films.

He played Rommel in two dull movies:
Desert Fox
(51, Hathaway) and
The Desert Rats
(53, Robert Wise). He was Flaubert in Minnelli’s
Madame Bovary
(49) and Brutus in Mankiewicz’s
Julius Caesar
(53), if a little too suave in both cases. But he was masterly as the butler spy in Mankiewicz’s
Five Fingers
(52), the best support Judy Garland ever had in
A Star Is Born
(54, George Cukor), and outstanding on the edge of a crackup in
Bigger Than Life
(56, Nicholas Ray), a film Mason also produced.

Indeed, he was always ready to encourage and boost films that might not have been made, or been as successful, without him. Soon after he arrived in Hollywood, he befriended Max Ophuls and played in
Caught
(48) and
The Reckless Moment
(49), magnificent films that also showed the generosity and the weakness he could deliver as an actor. In 1951, he went along with the high camp of Albert Lewin’s
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman;
in 1953 he appeared in Carol Reed’s
The Man Between;
he lent class to Andrew Stone’s
Cry Terror
(58) and
The Decks Ran Red
(58), to Henry Levin’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
(59) while he committed himself to such worthwhile ventures as Leslie Stevens’s
Hero’s Island
(62) and Michael Powell’s
Age of Consent
(69).

His Humbert in Kubrick’s
Lolita
(62) was worthy of that idealist: it caught the sweet, tricky voice of the book. He pursued character parts, often with great success—
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
(60, Ken Hughes);
The Fall of the Roman Empire
(64, Anthony Mann);
The Pumpkin Eater
(64, Jack Clayton);
Lord Jim
(65, Richard Brooks)—but sometimes less happily: infatuated with Lynn Redgrave in
Georgy Girl
(65, Silvio Narizzano); as a supercilious Hun in
The Blue Max
(66, John Guillermin);
The Deadly Affair
(67, Sidney Lumet);
Duffy
(68, Robert Parrish);
Spring and Port Wine
(69, Peter Hammond);
Mayerling
(69, Terence Young);
Kill
(71, Romain Gary);
Child’s Play
(72, Sidney Lumet);
The Mackintosh Man
(73, John Huston);
Frankenstein: The True Story
(73, Jack Smight);
The Marseilles Contract
(74, Parrish);
The Autobiography of a Princess
(75, James Ivory); a Southern gentleman in
Mandingo
(75, Richard Fleischer);
Inside Out
(75, Peter Duffell); Magwich in
Great Expectations
(75, Joseph Hardy);
Voyage of the Damned
(76, Stuart Rosenberg); a disenchanted commander in
Cross of Iron
(77, Sam Peckinpah); Mr. Jordan in
Heaven Can Wait
(78, Buck Henry and Warren Beatty). He was a smooth Nazi in
The Boys from Brazil
(78, Franklin Schaffner); Dr. Watson in
Murder by Decree
(78, Robert Clarke);
The Passage
(78, J. Lee Thompson); and
The Water Babies
(79, Lionel Jeffries).