The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (35 page)

4.
Talking Heads
, six dramatic monologues—no, adramatic—done for BBC TV in 1988. These are shattered lives, no matter that the broken pieces are held politely together in the way a humble soldier on the Somme might have held his privates in place waiting for his turn with the surgeon. They are all from thirty to fifty minutes long, and they are one character chatting or sighing to the camera—they catch the woeful intimacy in which in the TV age lonely people talk to themselves as if in interview. The form is as poignant as the words or the performances. To see the six in a row is to cry out for some explosive energy that would destroy gentility once and for all. There is a passivity here that must count as Bennett’s most profound limitation. But the six are beautiful black portraits:

Maggie Smith in
Bed Among the Lentils
(Bennett);

Patricia Routledge in
A Lady of Letters
(Foster);

Stephanie Cole in
Soldiering On
(Tristram Powell);

Thora Hird in
A Cream Cracker Under the Settee
(Stuart Burge);

Julie Walters in
Her Big Chance
(Foster);

Bennett himself in
A Chip in the Sugar
(Burge).

Bennett remains an important figure in British culture, a writer, a performer, and a presence far more trusted and beloved than the barbed work really merits. He adapted his own play to make the film,
The Madness of King George
(94, Nicholas Hytner), and in 1996 a second series of
Talking Heads
played on the BBC. This series was as exquisite as the first, but the darkness and the shift towards crime and suicide was far more marked.

In recent years, he has written
The History Boys
(06, Hytner) and
The Habit of Art
(10, Hytner).

Constance Bennett
(1905–65), b. New York
She was the older sister of actresses Joan and Barbara Bennett, and the daughter of Richard Bennett (1873–1944—matinee idol onstage and Major Amberson onscreen). Now little known, in the early 1930s, Constance Bennett was one of the classiest and highest-paid stars, despite a rather fitful allegiance to Hollywood. She was not as good an actress as Joan, but she was a social figure in Hollywood, an expert gambler, much inclined to money and men, a fashion plate, and an arbiter of style. Very cunningly, she placed herself as someone who did not really need pictures—this allowed her to be bored, disdainful, and not even that good. She stressed the pose of an amused outsider, and she was so pretty, as well as heartless, that her humor was the more striking. High 1930s romantic comedy had few cleverer exponents, even if
Topper
is as much as most people know today. A good life of the Bennett sisters might help redress the balance.

She had a tiny part in her father’s
The Valley of Decision
(16), and then small roles in
Reckless Youth
(22, Ralph Ince);
Evidence
(22, George Archainbaud);
What’s Wrong with Women?
(22, R. William Neill)—before Goldwyn put her in
Cytherea
(24, George Fitzmaurice). In the next few years, she quickly built up her reputation:
Married?
(24, George Terwilliger);
The Goose Hangs High
(25, James Cruze);
Code of the West
(25, William K. Howard);
My Son
(25, Edwin Carewe);
My Wife and I
(25, Millard Webb);
The Goose Woman
(25, Clarence Brown);
Sally, Irene and Mary
(25, Edmund Goulding); and
The Pinch Hitter
(26, Joseph Henabery). But at this point, Bennett eloped with a millionaire, Philip Plant, and dropped out of films. She returned three years later, divorced, but ready to marry again, to the Marquis de la Falaise. Her agent, Myron Selznick, successfully negotiated the break in her career and, thanks to her fetching voice, got her huge salaries over the next few years:
This Thing Called Love
(29, Paul L. Stein);
Son of the Gods
(30, Frank Lloyd);
Rich People
(30, Edward H. Griffith);
Common Clay
(30, Victor Fleming);
Three Faces East
(30, Roy del Ruth);
Sin Takes a Holiday
(30, Stein);
The Easiest Way
(31, Jack Conway);
Born to Love
(31, Stein);
Bought
(31, Archie Mayo);
Lady With a Past
(32, Griffith);
What Price Hollywood?
(32, George Cukor), in which she is well cast as the Brown Derby waitress who becomes (inexplicably) a star;
Two Against the World
(32, Mayo);
Rockabye
(32, Cukor);
Our Betters
(33, Cukor);
Bed of Roses
(33, Gregory La Cava);
After Tonight
(33, Archainbaud);
Moulin Rouge
(34, Sidney Lanfield);
The Affairs of Cellini
(34, La Cava);
Outcast Lady
(34, Robert Z. Leonard);
After Office Hours
(35, Leonard);
Ladies in Love
(36, Griffith);
Topper
(37, Norman Z. McLeod);
Merrily We Live
(38, McLeod);
Service De Luxe
(38, Rowland V. Lee);
Topper Takes a Trip
(39, McLeod); and
Tailspin
(39, del Ruth).

By then, her boxoffice stock had slumped, she married (briefly) Gilbert Roland, but she worked on through the 1940s:
Escape to Glory
(40, John Brahm);
Law of the Tropics
(41, Ray Enright);
Two-Faced Woman
(41, Cukor);
Wild Bill Hickock Rides
(42, Enright);
Madame Spy
(42, Neill);
Paris Underground
(46, Gregory Ratoff), produced by Bennett herself with Gracie Fields as an unlikely costar;
Centennial Summer
(46, Otto Preminger);
The Unsuspected
(47, Michael Curtiz);
Smart Woman
(48, Edward A. Blatt);
As Young as You Feel
(51, Harmon Jones);
It Should Happen to You
(54, Cukor); and
Madame X
(65, David Lowell Rich), in which she is arguably younger looking than her “daughter-in-law” Lana Turner.

Joan Bennett
(1910–90), b. Palisades, New Jersey
The daughter of actor Richard Bennett and younger sister of actress Constance Bennett, Joan Bennett was educated in Connecticut and Paris. At sixteen she ran away with a millionaire and had a child—at much the same time that Constance eloped with a millionaire. After a rapid marriage and divorce she worked as an extra in
The Divine Lady
(29, Frank Lloyd). Her father then helped her into a larger part in
Bulldog Drummond
(29, E. Richard Jones) and she quickly became a blonde romantic lead. In fact, she made some forty movies before coming to the parts for which she is justly remembered. The blonde, pre–Walter Wanger years saw her in the George Arliss
Disraeli
(29, Alfred E. Green); in Lloyd Bacon’s
Moby Dick
(30); Wellman’s
Maybe It’s Love
(30); Borzage’s
Doctors’ Wives
(31);
She Wanted a Millionaire
(32, John Blystone);
Wild Girl
(32) and
Me and My Gal
(32), both for Raoul Walsh; a demure Amy in Cukor’s
Little Women
(33). At this stage she met Wanger and signed a contract with him. Her talent for comedy improved in
The Pursuit of Happiness
(34, Alexander Hall);
Mississippi
(35, Edward Sutherland);
She Couldn’t Take It
(35, Tay Garnett); and
The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo
(35, Stephen Roberts). In 1936 she made
Thirteen Hours by Air
for Mitchell Leisen and
Big Brown Eyes
for Walsh, and in 1937 Wanger showcased her in
Vogues of 1938
(Irving Cummings).

It was only in 1938, in a Tay Garnett romantic thriller,
Trade Winds
, that she changed from blonde to brunette. It is worth noting that Constance was blonde and that Joan flourished only when her sister was in decline. After
Artists and Models Abroad
(38) with Jack Benny for Leisen, she had a bustle of costume movies with Louis Hayward, including
The Man in the Iron Mask
(39, James Whale) and
Son of Monte Cristo
(40, Rowland V. Lee). But after
Housekeeper’s Daughter
(39, Hal Roach) and
Green Hell
(40, Whale), she divorced her second husband and made
The House Across the Bay
(40, Archie L. Mayo) for Wanger. She married him the next year and entered her most rewarding period as an actress: first in Pichel’s
The Man I Married
(41) and then crucially in Lang’s
Man Hunt
(41). Playing a London tart in that film, she revealed a special, sentimental coarseness that had never emerged before. She then made
Wild Geese Calling
(41, John Brahm);
Confirm or Deny
(41), a Lang project taken over by Mayo; and
Margin for Error
(43), one of the films Otto Preminger chose to disown. In 1944, she was Fritz Lang’s
The Woman in the Window
, trapping Edward G. Robinson into dream, and then in 1946 she was brilliant as Lazy-Legs, who again brought disaster to Robinson in
Scarlet Street
(Lang). Whereas in
Woman in the Window
she is alluring, in
Scarlet Street
she is casually corrupt and endearingly vulgar. Not surprisingly, it is a continental performance in a film that seems to have very little to do with America, and its honest portrait of sensuality only makes some of the official love goddesses of 1946 look reserved.

She was the girl from
Nob Hill
(45) slumming with George Raft for Hathaway; in
Colonel Effingham’s Raid
(46) for Pichel; and Hemingway’s two-timing wife in Zoltan Korda’s
The Macomber Affair
(47) before an astonishing trio of “European” films in America such as the blonde girlie of the 1930s might never have dreamed of:
The Woman on the Beach
(47, Jean Renoir);
The Secret Beyond the Door
(48, Lang); and
The Reckless Moment
(49, Max Ophuls)—the last two produced by her husband. Next, she had a great popular success as an ideal mother and grandmother in Minnelli’s
Father of the Bride
(50) and
Father’s Little Dividend
(51). But such domestic bliss was belied when Wanger felt compelled to shoot his wife’s agent, Jennings Lang. He went briefly to prison and was reunited with Joan in 1953.

She never again starred in a good film and, as well as touring in several plays, she made:
The Guy Who Came Back
(51, Joseph M. Newman);
Highway Dragnet
(54, Nathan Juran);
We’re No Angels
(55, Michael Curtiz); Sirk’s
There’s Always Tomorrow
(56); and then
Desire in the Dust
(60, William Claxton). In the mid-1960s she appeared to have retired, but when Wanger died in 1968 she took on a TV series,
Dark Shadows
, which in 1970 turned into an unnecessary film. In 1976, she played the head teacher in
Suspiria
(Dario Argento), and she appeared in a couple of TV movies:
This House Possessed
(81, William Wiard) and
Divorce Wars: A Love Story
(82, Donald Wrye).

Jack Benny
(Benny Kubelsky) (1894–1974), b. Waukegan, Illinois
In his last twenty years, Jack Benny had appeared briefly, and often without credit, in a number of movies:
Somebody Loves Me
(53, Irving S. Brecher);
Susan Slept Here
(54, Frank Tashlin);
The Seven Little Foys
(55, Melville Shavelson);
Beau James
(57, Shavelson);
Gypsy
(62, Mervyn Le Roy);
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
(63, Stanley Kramer); and
A Guide for the Married Man
(67, Gene Kelly). That so many of those spots were unannounced is an acknowledgment that everyone knew Jack Benny and that, chances are, he was tricked into appearing and would not be paid. The long-running celebration of his meanness was one of the most creative forms of invalidism in the entertainment world. Additional symptoms were his steady assertion that he was only thirty-nine, and that he could play the violin beautifully.

Those movie walk-ons ground away at his reserves a little more painfully because cinema was the one medium in which he had not been entirely successful. In vaudeville, onstage, on radio, and on television, Benny had become an American institution and a huge star, the urbane, complacent man at ease with himself save for two fatal dreams: he loves art and money. His violin, despite his skill with it, becomes an instrument of self-laceration; his reluctance to hide a devotion to the dollar ridicules him in the eyes of a brazenly capitalist public. Easy to say that his meanness was an act, like Bob Hope’s cowardice, from which the comedian was able to stand back. But Benny approached money with mystical reverence. Hope snaps and snarls at cowardice like a dog, but Benny is a romantic about money; it heals every hurt for him. His act grew slower, more meditative, less filled with gags, but given over to the beautiful absurdity of man worshiping money, and being scourged for his faith. Benny and money is a classic confrontation, like Don Quixote and the windmills. And over the years, he came to expect that he would be laughed at—this is truly graceful in a comedian—and schooled himself so that, though hurt, he would not be diminished. I have seen Benny set an audience going with his miserliness, then reduce them to helplessness with affront that he should be mocked. He walked with the slow-motion splendor of the ghost of Rockefeller, amazed that so many people can abuse their own church. That was Benny’s real genius, that he briefly freed us from our greatest compulsion. It follows that he needed a live audience, for his reaction to laughter was not just his subtlest technique but his deepest thrust at us. In vaudeville, or with a studio audience on radio and TV, Benny was a major comedian. On film, he was deprived of half his act. Thus most of his films are poor, and deserved their failure. One is exceptional, not least in the way it uses Benny as a stage performer wounded by his audience. But Benny came from the vaudeville that produced most of America’s screen comics and it is worth asking whether his loneliness on film did not afflict many others—including the Marx Brothers and Keaton—and crystallize a forlorn, tragic posture that vaudeville had spared them.