The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (291 page)

Montgomery was not popular with the studio, and they may have given him the part of the killer in
Night Must Fall
(37, Richard Thorpe) to shatter his glossy image. In the event, he was well received, though still neglected by his employers:
Ever Since Eve
(37, Lloyd Bacon);
Three Loves Has Nancy
(38, Thorpe); and
The Earl of Chicago
(40, Thorpe). Despairing of good parts, he went elsewhere and in 1941 made
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
(Alfred Hitchcock) with Carole Lombard at RKO; the curious
Rage in Heaven
(Van Dyke) at MGM; an unexpected hit,
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
(Alexander Hall) at Columbia; and
Unfinished Business
(Gregory La Cava) at Universal.

At this point, he joined the navy and returned only in 1945 as the commander in John Ford’s
They Were Expendable
. For his last MGM project, he acted in and directed a Raymond Chandler adaptation,
The Lady in the Lake
(46), helplessly slowed by a subjective camera and thus ponderously illustrating how he preferred directing to acting. His next direction,
Ride the Pink Horse
(47), though a failure, was much more impressive and moody. In 1948 he acted in two more movies:
The Saxon Charm
(Claude Binyon) and
June Bride
(Bretaigne Windust); next year he directed again:
Once More My Darling
and, in Britain,
Eye Witness
, another interesting work. He then went into TV and served as Eisenhower’s television consultant. In 1960, he directed a labor of love: his friend James Cagney as Admiral Halsey in
The Gallant Hours
.

Colleen Moore
(Kathleen Morrison) (1900–87), b. Port Huron, Michigan
In his invaluable biography of Louise Brooks, Barry Paris goes into contortions of research trying to decide whether Brooks or Colleen Moore created the flapper look. The truth is that, at this moment—say, 1923–28—Moore was a phenomenon, while Brooks was a curiosity. Moore was a major American star, while Brooks was too smart, too difficult, too everything to be that. By 1927, Colleen Moore was the top boxoffice attraction in the country, and she was making $12,500 a week. Brooks earned $250 a week, and so she went off to Germany to do
Pandora’s Box
. But Colleen Moore is not known today. Few readers of this book will have seen her in a film, or know what she looked like. Well, she looked like a less interesting version of Louise Brooks. A lot less interesting. But that took a while to sink in.

Moore said that she got into pictures because her uncle, Walter Howey, a Chicago press lord, was owed a favor by D. W. Griffith on account of having helped to get
Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
past the censor. So she got her new name, played with Tom Mix in several movies, established herself as a standard heroine, and was there, cuteness itself, ready to have her hair cut for the breakthrough flapper movie,
Flaming Youth
(23, John Francis Dillon).

Her glory years had her in
The Perfect Flapper
(24, Dillon);
Flirting With Love
(24, Dillon);
So Big
(25, Charles Brabin);
Sally
(25, Alfred E. Green);
We Moderns
(25, Dillon);
Irene
(26, Green);
Ella Cinders
(26, Green);
It Must Be Love
(26, Green);
Twinkletoes
(26, Brabin);
Her Wild Oat
(28, Marshall Neilan);
Lilac Time
(28, George Fitzmaurice);
Oh Kay!
(28, Mervyn Le Roy);
Why Be Good?
(29, William A. Seiter); and
Smiling Irish Eyes
(29, Seiter).

She took a few years off and then returned for
The Power and the Glory
(33, William K. Howard);
Social Register
(34, Neilan); and
Success at Any Price
(34, J. Walter Ruben). She then bowed out after a ludicrous failure as Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter
(34, Robert G. Vignola).

Moore’s later life was as rock-steady as Louise Brooks’s was insecure. Ms. Moore had several businessmen husbands, one of whom, Homer Hargrave, was a vice-president at Merrill Lynch. She learned so well that she wrote a book,
How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market
.

Demi Moore
(Demi Guynes), b. Roswell, New Mexico, 1962
In the January–February 1993
Movieline
, asked to assess her “position in the business right this second,” Demi Moore said, “That’s tough. I’m probably in a better position than I’ve ever been thus far, okay? I think people in the business are certainly interested in doing business with me.” Gone are the days of longing to be alone, of cute answers and wistful smiles. Today a hot young actress can sound as if she’s in plastics (and Moore’s voice is as harsh as unfinished polymer). And Demi Moore is a very keen purveyor of her own image. Despite some good movie work, it is likely that the public’s most immediate sense of Demi Moore is still vested in two images—the covers she did for
Vanity Fair
, one nude and pregnant, the other nude and painted. Further, these covers were not simply Tina Brown’s wit and wisdom. Demi Moore consented to them, and kept as much control as she could contrive.

After working on TV’s
General Hospital
, she got into movies in the early 1980s, married Bruce Willis, had two children, and generally hustled herself to the forefront:
Choices
(81, Silvio Narizzano);
Parasite
(82, Charles Band);
Young Doctors in Love
(82, Garry Marshall);
Blame It On Rio
(84, Stanley Donen); as a singer in
No Small Affair
(84, Jerry Schatzberg);
St. Elmo’s Fire
(85, Joel Schumacher);
About Last Night
(86, Edward Zwick);
One Crazy Summer
(86, Savage Steve Holland);
Wisdom
(86, Emilio Estevez); pregnant and threatened in
The Seventh Sign
(88, Carl Schultz);
We’re No Angels
(89, Neil Jordan); riding the hit of
Ghost
(90, Jerry Zucker); excellent and touching in
Mortal Thoughts
(91, Alan Rudolph); blonde in
The Butcher’s Wife
(91, Terry Hughes);
Nothing But Trouble
(91, Dan Akroyd); wasted in
A Few Good Men
(92, Rob Reiner).

She was the wife open to
Indecent Proposal
(93, Adrian Lyne), a movie that drew upon the ghost of a computer behind her fully sexed but tough stare. The film was so listless and underdone, at $1 million the actress seemed overpriced.

She was a far more flagrant sexual aggressor, ravishing Michael Douglas, in
Disclosure
(94, Barry Levinson). She helped produce
Now and Then
(95, Lesli Linka Glatter), and then went out for big acting in the risible
The Scarlet Letter
(95, Roland Joffe). She was at a perilous point.
The Juror
(96, Brian Gibson) was routine, but for
Striptease
(96, Andrew Bergman) she offered her all (for a record $12 million), and showed that the bod was still awesome. It was more than the public wanted, though, and
G.I. Jane
(97, Ridley Scott) was a more hysterical assertion of physical splendor. She was in
Deconstructing Harry
(97, Woody Allen). The marriage to Willis broke up. And she did
Passion of Mind
(00, Alain Berliner) as if to prove that she had her sixth, and seventh, senses, too. But no dramatic sense. At present it is not quite clear if she is active, resting, or just out of it. She did a voice for
The Hunchback of Notre Dame II
(02, Bradley Raymond), and she had a spot in
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
(03, McG).

Her career now is fitful and bizarre:
Half Light
(06, Craig Rosenberg); very good in
Bobby
(06, Emilio Estevez);
Flawless
(07, Michael Radford);
Mr. Brooks
(07, Bruce A. Evans).

Julianne Moore
(Julie Smith), b. Fayetteville, North Carolina, 1960
On half a dozen occasions at least, Julianne Moore has given ample demonstration of her ability and intelligence. Thus, she lent herself faithfully to the increasingly pale and withdrawn figure for Todd Haynes’s
Safe
(1995), while staying in the memory as the half-naked, very talkative, and fiery red young woman for Robert Altman’s
Short Cuts
(93). Then there was the porn queen for
Boogie Nights
(97, Paul Thomas Anderson), in which drugs and kindness had led to a blur of warmth.

She was trained at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, she has worked on stage, and won an Emmy for
As the World Turns
. But she had the looks and attitude that led her more naturally to independent films (classic Hollywood complains at her freckles), until late 1999, when she found herself in two big lead roles—as the adulteress who turns away in
The End of the Affair
(99, Neil Jordan) and as the young wife in
Magnolia
(99, Anderson). The former was disappointing. But the latter was good—clearly, Moore had arrived.

She made her debut in
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
(90, John Harrison) and appeared in
The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag
(92, Allan Moyle);
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
(92, Curtis Hanson);
Benny & Joon
(93, Jeremiah Chechik);
Body of Evidence
(93, Uli Edel);
The Fugitive
(93, Andrew Davis);
Vanya on 42nd Street
(94, Louis Malle);
Assassins
(95, Richard Donner);
Nine Months
(95, Chris Columbus);
Roommates
(95, Peter Yates);
Surviving Picasso
(96, James Ivory);
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
(97, Steven Spielberg);
The Myth of Fingerprints
(97, Bart Freundlich, her companion);
The Big Lebowski
(98, Joel Coen);
Chicago Cab
(98, Mary Cybulski and John Tintori); in the Vera Miles part in
Psycho
(98, Gus Van Sant);
Cookie’s Fortune
(99, Altman);
An Ideal Husband
(99, Oliver Parker); superb in
A Map of the World
(99, Scott Elliott).

She had little to do in
The Ladies Man
(00, Reginald Hudlin), but after the short
Not I
(00, Jordan), adapted from Beckett, she took over the role of Clarice Starling and helped make
Hannibal
(01, Ridley Scott) into a wistful romance. She was wasted in
Evolution
(01, Ivan Reitman) and in
World Traveler
(01, Freundlich); but she was good again in
The Shipping News
(01, Lasse Hallström), brilliantly passive, in huge A-line dresses in rich, erotic colors in
Far from Heaven
(02, Haynes), and she had the toughest part in
The Hours
(02, Stephen Daldry).

She took a year off and returned in
Marie and Bruce
(04, Tom Cairns);
Laws of Attraction
(04, Peter Howitt);
The Forgotten
(04, Joseph Ruben).

Coming up on fifty, a mother and spouse, with four Oscar nominations, she remains a determined and independent figure:
Trust the Man
(04, Freundlich); the mother of ten in
The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
(05, Jane Anderson);
Freedomland
(06, Joe Roth);
Children of Men
(06, Alfonso Cuarón);
Next
(07, Lee Tamahori); as Barbara Baekeland in
Savage Grace
(07, Tom Kalin);
I’m Not There
(07, Haynes);
Blindness
(08, Fernando Meirelles);
A Single Man
(09, Tom Ford);
Chloe
(09, Atom Egoyan);
Shelter
(09, Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein);
The Kids Are All Right
(10, Lisa Cholodenko).

Michael Moore
, b. Flint, Michigan, 1954
1989:
Roger & Me
(d). 1992:
Pets or Meat: The Return to Flint
(TV) (d) (s). 1994:
TV Nation
(TV) (d). 1995:
Canadian Bacon
. 1997:
The Big One
(d). 1998:
And Justice for All
(d). 1999:
The Awful Truth
(TV) (d). 2002:
Bowling for Columbine
(d). 2004:
Farenheit 9/11
(d). 2007:
Sicko
(d). 2009:
Capitalism: A Love Story
(d).

Michael Moore is a baby-faced bear, shambling, down-home and uniformly seen in a baseball cap, but he is as quick and dangerous as Lonesome Rhodes or any other snake. No, that last term is not fair, and it may be that not enough readers recall Lonesome Rhodes from Elia Kazan’s film
A Face in the Crowd
(57), but Michael Moore is not really known or treasured for his fairness or his judiciousness. He is not up for the Supreme Court. He makes splendid demagogue films, writes much less interesting bestselling books, and might yet become a TV ogre. By which I mean to say that the disentangling of sense and authority (or authorial virtue) while watching his films is quite as testing as it is with Ken Burns. A diverting comedy might be made of a conversation between those two balloons, each vying shyly to burst the other.

But none of that adequately conveys the sheer stir of discourse that attended
Bowling for Columbine
, an essay that is local at first (springing out of the Colorado school killings as well as the major corporate abuse of Moore’s homeland in Michigan), but which builds into maybe the most potent attack on Bushery and on a fully armed, thoroughly scared America of the first Bush administration. It speaks to the slick noise and actual cowardice of our television that Moore had identified and then sprawled across the hearthrug of discourse on current affairs. It’s so neat a trick that you wonder if Moore’s real point isn’t to demonstrate the abject failure of television.