The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (307 page)

Phillip Noyce
, b. Griffith, Australia, 1950
1975:
God Knows Why, But It Works
(d). 1977:
Backroads
. 1978:
Newsfront
. 1982:
Heatwave
. 1987:
Echoes of Paradise
. 1989:
Dead Calm; Blind Fury
. 1992:
Patriot Games
. 1993:
Sliver
. 1994:
Clear and Present Danger
. 1997:
The Saint
. 1999:
The Bone Collector; Blast Off
. 2001:
The Rabbit-Proof Fence
. 2002:
The Quiet American
. 2006:
Catch a Fire
. 2010:
Salt
.

By now, Australia must regard Phillip Noyce as someone who always reckoned to find his place in Hollywood. His American pictures are conventional fantasies of heroism, masquerading behind the ostensible realism of the Cold War, Harrison Ford, and New York crime. But
The Bone Collector
shows just how far violence, the decay of flesh, and the horrors of a subterranean world are just material for a very deft fantasy about Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie getting it on. Whereas in Australia, Noyce made tough pictures about race, the newspaper world, and the small evil of murder. He was a truly promising director who has acted out the ease of transition from real material to movie bombast. Equally, he shows how easily the prizewinning student can become the warning figure held up to future generations.

The Quiet American
was held up a year—in case Greene’s sour view of U.S. terror instigation might unsettle the age of Bush!

Elliott Nugent
(1900–80), b. Dover, Ohio
1932:
The Mouthpiece
(codirected with James Flood);
Life Begins
(codirected with Flood). 1933:
Whistling in the Dark; Three-Cornered Moon; If I Were Free
. 1934:
She Loves Me Not; Strictly Dynamite; Two Alone
. 1935:
Love in Bloom; Enter the Madam; College Scandal; Splendor
. 1936:
And So They Were Married; Wives Never Know
. 1937:
It’s All Yours
. 1938:
Professor Beware; Give Me a Sailor
. 1939:
Never Say Die; The Cat and the Canary
. 1941:
Nothing But the Truth
. 1942:
The Male Animal
. 1943:
The Crystal Ball
. 1944:
Up in Arms
. 1947:
My Favorite Brunette; Welcome Stranger
. 1948:
My Girl Tisa
. 1949:
Mr. Belvedere Goes to College; The Great Gatsby
. 1950:
The Skipper Surprised His Wife
. 1951:
My Outlaw Brother
. 1952:
Just for You
.

Like his father, the actor J. C. Nugent, Elliott Nugent was first and last a man of the theatre, equally polished as writer, actor, and director. A Broadway actor in the early 1920s, he wrote plays with his father and made his movie acting debut in
Headlines
(25, Edward H. Griffith). The emphasis on words that came with sound made Nugent exactly the sort of stage talent required in Hollywood. In 1929, he went west, as an actor, a writer, and eventually, a director. He played the lead in
So This Is College
(29, Sam Wood);
For the Love o’ Lil
(30, James Tinling);
Not So Dumb
(30, King Vidor); and
Romance
(30, Clarence Brown). He acted in and wrote dialogue for
Wise Girls
(29, E. Mason Hopper);
Sins of the Children
(30, Wood); and
The Unholy Three
(30, Jack Conway).

When he graduated to directing, from 1934 onward he worked for Paramount, specializing in romantic comedy—thus
Three-Cornered Moon
, starring Claudette Colbert and Mary Boland, a clever gilding of a Depression subject. His style seemed more sophisticated than low-down, but after
Professor Beware
—one of Harold Lloyd’s last films—Nugent played an important part in Bob Hope’s career. He worked five times with Hope: in
Give Me a Sailor, Never Say Die, Nothing But the Truth, My Favorite Brunette
, and best of all,
The Cat and the Canary
, a comedy horror that is always a little too frightening for comfort and very good-looking. He directed Danny Kaye in
Up in Arms
, but still retained a feeling for wit in
The Male Animal
, an adaptation of a stage play he had written with James Thurber, and starring Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. He went back to the stage in 1952 after two less successful but more ambitious excursions
—My Girl Tisa
and
The Great Gatsby
—and the domestic comedy,
Mr. Belvedere Goes to College
.

O

Warren Oates
(1928–82), b. Depoy, Kentucky
In 1981, without having met the man, or knowing much about him, I wrote of Oates in
Film Comment:

Oates seems at first sight grubby, balding, and unshaven. You can smell whiskey and sweat on him, along with that mixture of bad beds and fallen women. He’s toothy, he’s small, he’s 53 this year, and he has a face like prison bread, with eyes that have known too much solitary confinement. But the eyes bulge and shrink in a sweet game of fear and courage.… Sublimest thing with Oates is when he does nothing. Only Mitchum could do nothing so well, until you think a hole is opening up in the middle of the picture and everything is gonna fall down it. Then you see Oates starting that shy grin of his, and you shake yourself because he could’ve been dead. The greatest trick to writing about Oates is to catch the spirit of obituary.

The trick got easier, for Oates was dead within the year. Since then it has been pleasing to feel the swell of appreciation for Oates the actor. There is a cult, maybe, much helped by Tom Thurman’s resourceful documentary film on Oates. It owes something also to the notion that the Oates world—the Southwest, Mexico, the borderlands—has passed on with Sam Peckinpah’s death and our new squeamishness about rough men or films that celebrate them. Oates was narrow in range, until you got into those narrows, and then you felt depths of humor, ferocity, foolishness, and honor. Let Oates have a word. In an interview, he said this of Peckinpah, and it could be applied to himself: “I don’t think he’s a horrible maniac; it’s just that he injures your innocence, and you get pissed off about it.”

Carrying a modest fee, and being intrigued by the experimentalism of Monte Hellman, Oates took leading parts in two films outside the scope of his “industrial work”: as Gashade and Coigne (twin brothers, the slowly converging faces of the existential coin) in
The Shooting
(66, Hellman); and as G.T.O., the fantasizing little man behind a large engine, solitary but craving sociability in
Two-Lane Blacktop
(70, Hellman). Both parts abandoned mannerism and showed that a plain, balding man with a toothy grin could carry a movie.

Oates had been a steady TV actor, and he accumulated a long list of films:
Up Periscope
(58, Gordon Douglas);
Yellowstone Kelly
(59, Douglas); the brother in
The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond
(60, Budd Boetticher);
Private Property
(60, Leslie Stevens);
Ride the High Country
(62, Sam Peckinpah);
Hero’s Island
(62, Stevens);
Mail Order Bride
(63, Burt Kennedy);
The Rounders
(65, Kennedy);
Major Dundee
(65, Peckinpah);
Return of the Seven
(66, Kennedy);
Welcome to Hard Times
(67, Kennedy);
In the Heat of the Night
(67, Norman Jewison);
The Split
(68, Gordon Flemyng);
Crooks and Coronets
(69, James O’Connolly); magnificently stupid in
The Wild Bunch
(69, Peckinpah);
Smith
(69, Michael O’Herlihy);
Barquero
(70, Douglas);
There Was a Crooked Man
(70, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
The Hired Hand
(71, Peter Fonda);
The Thief Who Came to Dinner
(73, Bud Yorkin);
Tom Sawyer
(73, Don Taylor);
Kid Blue
(73, James Frawley); very good as a subtler
Dillinger
(74, John Milius) than Johnny Depp managed in 2009; as another of Monte Hellman’s dour obsessives in
Cockfighter
(74);
Badlands
(74, Terrence Malick); effortlessly raising a scruffy little adventurer to the legend of
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
(74, Peckinpah) and coming close to a portrait of Peckinpah;
The White Dawn
(74, Philip Kaufman);
Race with the Devil
(75, Jack Starrett);
92 in the Shade
(75, Thomas McGuane);
Drum
(76, Steve Carver);
Dixie Dynamite
(76, Lee Frost); and
China 9, Liberty 37
(78, Hellman). He was superb as a style-mad thief in
The Brink’s Job
(78, William Friedkin), and he went to New Zealand to make
Sleeping Dogs
(78, Roger Donaldson).

He did
My Old Man
(79, John Erman), for TV;
1941
(79, Steven Spielberg); a flat-out comedy role in
Stripes
(81, Ivan Reitman);
The Border
(82, Tony Richardson);
Tough Enough
(83, Richard Fleischer); and
Blue Thunder
(83, John Badham).

Merle Oberon
(Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson) (1911–79), b. Bombay, India
Oberon was a renowned beauty with a graven face and the legend of mixed blood. There is footage that survives from the unfinished
Claudius
(37, Josef von Sternberg) in which she looks as delectable as any woman ever filmed in Britain. Alas, she was often a dull actress. Perhaps only her marriage to Alexander Korda (1939–45) contributed the sense of regal allure that her acting lacked.

When she first came to Britain, as a dancer, she was using the working name of Queenie O’Brien, more barmaid than enchantress. She worked as an extra in
Alfs Button
(30, Will P. Kellino),
Never Trouble
(31, Lupino Lane), and
Fascination
(31, Miles Mander) before Korda noticed her. In 1932, she made
Service for Ladies
and
Wedding Rehearsal
for him, and also appeared in
For the Love of Mike
(32, Monty Banks);
Ebb Tide
(32, Arthur Rosson); and
Aren’t We All
(32, Harry Lachman). The next year, she starred in
Men of Tomorrow
(Leotine Sagan) and played Anne Boleyn in
The Private Life of Henry VIII
(Korda). In 1934 she was opposite Douglas Fairbanks in Korda’s
The Private Life of Don Juan
and played the female lead in
The Scarlet Pimpernel
(Harold Young).

Korda then sold a share of her to Samuel Goldwyn and she went to America to make
Folies Bergere
(35, Roy del Ruth);
The Dark Angel
(35, Sidney Franklin);
These Three
(36, William Wyler); and
Beloved Enemy
(36, H. C. Potter). Back in England, it was her taxi accident that terminated
Claudius
. By 1938, she was again with Goldwyn for
The Cowboy and the Lady
(Potter) and in 1939 she was cast, optimistically, as Cathy in Wyler’s
Wuthering Heights
. Married now to Korda, she made
The Lion Has Wings
(39, Michael Powell, Brian Desmond-Hurst, and Adrian Brunel) in England and returned to Hollywood for
Till We Meet Again
(40, Edmund Goulding);
Affectionately Yours
(41, Lloyd Bacon);
That Uncertain Feeling
(41, Ernst Lubitsch);
Lydia
(41, Julien Duvivier);
Forever and a Day
(43, Frank Lloyd, et al.);
First Comes Courage
(43, Dorothy Arzner);
The Lodger
(44, John Brahm);
Dark Waters
(44, André de Toth); as George Sand in
A Song to Remember
(44, Charles Vidor);
This Love of Ours
(45, William Dieterle);
A Night in Paradise
(46, Arthur Lubin);
Temptation
(46, Irving Pichel);
Night Song
(47, John Cromwell); and
Berlin Express
(48, Jacques Tourneur).

Her career took some odd turns—
24 Hours of a Woman’s Life
(52, Victor Saville);
Todo es Possible en Granada
(54); as Josephine in
Desirée
(54, Henry Koster);
Deep in My Heart
(54, Stanley Donen);
The Price of Fear
(56, Abner Biberman);
The Oscar
(65, Russell Rouse); and
Hotel
(67, Richard Quine).

She spent her later years as a grand hostess eventually to be novelized by her husband’s nephew, Michael Korda, in
Queenie
.

Edmond O’Brien
(1915–85), b. New York
Actors do not sweat: an interesting essay could be researched on the methods they employ to prevent it. For sweat is not glamorous—no matter that, photographically, it is just a shining. Edmond O’Brien sweated—not always, yet often enough for him to seem, in memory’s eye, always disheveled, out of breath, and aglow. There was never a truer role for this actor than
D.O.A
. (49, Rudolph Maté), in which an insurance salesman goes to San Francisco for the cool air and some fun, only to get fatally overheated. He is desperately energetic in
D.O.A.
, living his circumscribed life to the full, terrified of stopping, and past caring that sweat shows.

Twice in his career, he ventured into direction:
Shield for Murder
(54, codirected with Howard W. Koch) and
Mantrap
(61), emphatic, tabloid movies, with actors chased by boom shadows.