WEIRDLAND

Monday, January 27, 2014

Happy Anniversary, Donna Reed!

Happy Anniversary, Donna Reed!!

Donna Reed and James Stewart in "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946) directed by Frank Capra

Capra told friends that Lu had convinced him to retire, but though his concern for her health was genuine, that was just another excuse. "I want to work! What do you think I'm dying for? I'm in great shape except that nobody wants me for a job. I want to direct —if people would let me alone to do my own picture." In those rare instances when anyone approached him with a "go" project in his later years, Capra would go away. Perhaps he could not be criticized for rejecting such a motley bunch of offers as a 1972 documentary on Frasier, the Sensuous Lion, an elderly resident of Southern California's Lion Country Safari who was renowned for his sexual exploits; a 1975 television special starring Lucille Ball, who had played a bit part in Broadway Bill; Mr. Kruegers Christmas (1980), a sentimental, mildly religious half-hour TV drama with James Stewart and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir (Capra was uncomfortable because the Mormons were the producers);

and It's Still a Wonderful Life, a later-abandoned TV sequel project with Stewart and Donna Reed playing their characters in later years, originally proposed by Reed to the author of this book and offered by Universal in 1982 to Capra, who responded, "That's the kind of goddamn thing a producer would suggest. They can go fuck themselves."

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Frank Capra and Robert Riskin "Magic Towns"

James Stewart confirmed that Robert Riskin did not direct any part of the film "Magic Town" (1947), and William Wellman told John F. Mariani in 1975, "Frank's just being kind about it. I was in on that thing from the beginning, and I wish I never started it. It stunk! Frank and Bob had a big argument about the picture and Riskin asked me to do it. I told him this is the kind of picture only Capra could do. It's not my kind of film. In my book Capra's the greatest, and I thought of giving Magic Town the Capra touch while shooting."

-Mary Peterman (Jane Wyman): The air becomes charged with electricity around desperate men.

-Lawrence 'Rip' Smith (James Stewart): "I've been searching for a town like this for years. You know, when I got off that train this morning, I said to myself 'This is it.' I've just walked through your town, folks, with its shade trees and its lovely parks. I stood before your impressive buildings mellowed with age, and I said to myself 'Here is a sturdy challenge to the evils of the modern era.' I watched your people on the street, and I felt their vitality and their sense of security. Your children are happy. They're happy. You can see it in their dear little faces, and hear it in their wholesome talk. There's beauty here. It's almost indescribable. You're used to it, you're all a part of it, you take it for granted. But to me, it's a hope and a dream of a lifetime. I too want to become a part of it. Please don't change it."

With Riskin unavailable for Liberty Films, Capra went to Leo McCarey, the producer-director whose 'Going My Way' had won the Oscar as best picture of 1944 and whose Rainbow Productions was making a sequel for RKO, The Bells of St. Mary's. McCarey was formally offered a Liberty partnership on May 7, 1945.

When he explained in a 1968 public appearance why he did not want to film the first script RKO had commissioned for The Greatest Gift —the one by Dalton Trumbo— Capra gave a simple reason that spoke volumes: Trumbo's script "was about politics." Already by 1946, politics for Capra had become a dirty word. Trumbo's George is a politician who rises from an idealistic state assemblyman to a cynical congressman contemptuous of the people he represents. He goes to the bridge to attempt suicide after losing a race for governor. The angel shows him Bedford Falls as it would have been not if he had never been born but as it would have been if he had gone into business instead of politics. Bedford Falls in Trumbo's nightmare sequence has changed from an idealized small town to a foul, polluted, overindustrialized modern city: there is no Potter to serve as George's nemesis, for George, in effect, serves as his own Potter—a ruthless modern businessman who carelessly spoils the town for his own profit.

Capra's postwar regression was manifested in his depiction of sexual politics in Bedford Falls. The fact that Donna Reed's Mary Bailey is a housewife and mother, unlike the Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck single professional women in the Capra-Riskin films, reflects the prevailing mood of postwar America, in which women were being pressured to give their jobs back to returning servicemen and stay home raising children.

Yet in Wonderful Life, Mary's yearning for marriage, home, and family is portrayed with considerable ambivalence by Capra in the deeply moving telephone scene with Mary, (which Capra considered "one of the best scenes I've ever put on the screen"). George blames his wife and children for their role in keeping him in Bedford Falls and curbing his ambitions to be an architect and city planner; what finally drives him to attempt suicide is Mary's turning on him after his frightening outburst in the living room in which he smashes his models of a bridge and skyscraper. Capra's reaffirmation of family and small-town values at the end is accomplished, as critic Robin Wood put it, "with full acknowledgment of the suppressions on which it depends and consequently, of its precariousness."

Capra's unborn sequence is a powerful vision of despair—though labeled a "fantasy," the sequence was shot in the fashionable film noir style, and it much more closely resembles the reality of 1946 than the rest of the film—but politically it is Capra's ultimate cop-out, his way of washing his hands of the modern world and the clearest expression of how much his social optimism depended on Riskin (whose absence is felt in the unborn sequence just as strongly as George Bailey's) and how utterly distrustful Capra had become of the American public. William S. Pechter noted that the supernatural resolution of Wonderful Life exposes the "fatal weakness" of Capra's work, his tendency to resolve impossible social dilemmas with "strangely perfunctory" happy endings that are imposed "deforce majeure... Yet, for those who can accept the realities of George Bailey's situation and do not believe in angels the film ends, in effect, with the hero's suicide. Capra's desperation is his final honesty. It ruthlessly exposes his own affirmation as pretense."

Jean Arthur explained in 1987: "I am awfully angry when he always says that [It's a Wonderful Life] his favorite picture. I think Stewart did a great job, it was a great part, but I wouldn't have liked to have been that girl, I didn't think she had anything to do. It was colorless. You didn't have a chance to be anything." Capra's thoughts went to his old flame, Ginger Rogers, but she also turned down the film because "the woman's role was such a bland character." He thought of Olivia de Havilland, Martha Scott, and Ann Dvorak.

Then he saw Donna Reed in an MGM film. It probably was They Were Expendable; Reed gave a strong and luminous performance as a Navy nurse. She was only twenty-four when she made It's A Wonderful Life, but her fresh Iowa beauty made her an ideal match with Stewart.

Capra was fed up with independence. "It was the most gentlemanly way of going broke, and the fastest way, anybody ever thought of," he told Richard Schickel in 1971. "We didn't have enough capital, so we decided to sell Liberty Films, which was a very, very hopeless thing to do. My partners did not want to sell. But I got cold feet, and I'm the one who insisted that we sell. And I think that probably affected my picture-making forever afterward." By the spring of 1950, after almost a year of forced inactivity, he was beginning to despair of feature filmmaking altogether, telling the press that he was "gloomy about his future projects" and that he didn't know "where ideas are coming from that will seem worthwhile to him and safe to the studio."

During the shooting of "Here Comes the Groom," he told Alexis Smith, whose playing of Wilbur's spinster cousin Winifred is one of its few delights, that he did not want to make any more movies because "It isn't fun anymore." "I was shocked," she remembered. "I thought he was kidding at first, he seemed to be enjoying himself so much on the set, but he said, 'No, I'm serious. I don't mean it isn't fun here, I mean the pressures that come from the schedule and from money.' That drove him crazy. He said he wasn't used to the banks moving into a position of creative control. This was before the drastic changes in the industry became apparent, and he was probably ahead of a lot of people in realizing what was happening. But I remember being very disturbed by it, because I didn't think Frank Capra should just walk away from it."

The fact that "a large part" of the public "seem[ed] to have more or less forgotten" Capra and Stewart during the war (as Variety observed after Wonderful Life opened weakly) should have been only a temporary setback for Capra. Not only Stewart but also Capra's fellow directors who had spent the war in uniform—Ford, Huston, Wyler, Stevens—were, in time, able to regain their former prominence in the industry. Hollywood's lack of enthusiasm for Capra on his return from service stemmed from an accumulation of factors unique to Capra: it was a reflection on his faltering box-office track record and his reputation for extravagance; a delayed backlash against his rebellious posture toward studio control before the war, both in his own career and on behalf of the Screen Directors Guild; and, perhaps, a resentment of his arrogance toward Hollywood during his Army years, such as his blast from London at Hollywood for "embarrassing" the troops with "flag-waving" war movies. Capra continued to talk poor mouth to the press, telling The Washington Post in 1972, "I wasn't really wise financially — I'm the poorest director you ever saw."

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Happy Anniversary, Patricia Neal!

(20 January 1926 , Packard, Kentucky, USA - 8 August 2010 , Edgartown, Massachusetts, USA)
Birth Name: Patricia Louise Neal

Studio head Jack Warner had considered Jennifer Jones, Gene Tierney, Ida Lupino, and Eleanor Parker for the part of Dominique Francon, the female lead in The Fountainhead. In September 1945, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Warners wanted to borrow Alan Ladd from Paramount to star him opposite Lauren Bacall. The role of Howard Roark was eventually offered to Gary Cooper, whose wife, Rocky, had read the book. He was rightfully hesitant to take the part. Cooper’s own attorney, I. H. Prinzmetal, had declined the offer, stating, “Cooper’s audience was not intellectual, and if they heard him say such selfish things they’d hold it against him. It might change his reputation and career!” Though she never interfered with Gary’s decisions in choosing roles, this time Rocky strongly advised him to override his attorney’s advice and accept the part. Said Rand about Cooper, “He is my choice for ‘Roark.’ His physical appearance is exactly right.”


In a 2002 essay on The Fountainhead, Merrill Schleier says about Dominique’s character, “She is passionate and repressed, but possesses too many masculine traits to be considered female. Rand renders her as a masochist and a defeatist, capable only of destructive acts, in contrast to Roark, who creates... She is unable to respond sexually to men until she meets Roark, whose masculine creative agency ignites her passion, thereby completing her. Rand herself called Francon a masochist, ‘like most women.’ In the film, Francon’s sexual dysfunction and gender confusion are demonstrated by her numerous changes in costumes, from masculine riding attire to lacy negligee... (Her) mannish costumes were erotic, drawing attention to the femininity of the bodies they cloted, and a provocation, an example of gender ambiguity. Like other such female characters, Francon later casts aside her masculine attire to claim her true heterosexuality.”

Will you marry me? I want to stay with you. We’ll take a house in some small town, and I’ll keep it for you. Don’t laugh, I can. I’ll cook, I’ll wash your clothes, I’ll scrub the floors.” —Dominique, The Fountainhead (1949) Following a beautifully tender scene in which Roark professes his love for Dominique, he picks her up in his arms and asks, “You won’t leave me, will you?” He kisses her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, and her hair. Dominique confesses her love for Roark, kneeling before him in a gentle and ironically sensitive moment—a symbolic reversal of roles. This one scene alone solidified the actual and very real moment when Patricia knew that she and Gary Cooper were in love. -"Patricia Neal: An Unquiet Life" by Stephen Michael Shearer.

-"I loved Gary Cooper, for years and years and years. And I still love him. Of course, Becky (Cooper's wife, Veronica Balfe, (Sandra Shaw) was not very happy with me. And I don't blame her. Nor was her little daughter, Maria Cooper, who I guess was about 11 when we started... And I was very sorry. But Gary...I just loved Gary very much." - Patricia Neal, in a 2008 interview.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

It's A Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's Life

Emerging as an annual cinephile tradition, The Criterion Collection has once again kicked off the New Year with an illustrated clue hinting at what fans of the boutique label can expect over the next 12 months. And if these hints pan out, it's going to be another strong slate of releases in 2014. So what is Criterion teasing? Well, the clues seem to be pointing toward: Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter"; Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" (previously issued by Criterion on laserdisc); Howard Hawks' classic "Red River"; the landmark documentary "Jazz On A Summer's Day" (recently re-issued in a theatrical run); Lawrence Kasdan's "The Big Chill" and more. Source: blogs.indiewire.com

“No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way [Frank] Capra can - but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.” —Pauline Kael

“I thought drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.” —Frank Capra

"The most important person in my life" (as Capra later described her) had come to the location to visit her best friend from college, Alyce Coleman, the wife of his assistant director, C. C. (Buddy) Coleman. "What a lovely voice!" he thought when Lu finally spoke to him. She had been sitting at his crowded dinner table for several nights without catching his eye. The Colemans maneuvered her closer to Capra one night after rushes, and he drove her back from San Diego to the hotel along the Silver Strand, a peninsula favored for nocturnal romantic occasions. As he recalled the moment in his book, at the door of her room, "I kissed her. I knew. She knew." Lucille Florence Warner was a bright enough young woman, though in the end her personal ambition went no further than a good marriage. She'd worked as a stenographer, as a clerk for UCLA, and as a secretary for a real estate man. Capra denied that Lu ever worked before he met her. "When I met her," he said, "she wasn't anything."

Capra expressed in "Forbidden" (1932) some aspects of his convoluted emotional life in the characters of a newspaperman (Ralph Bellamy) who wastes his life in devotion to Lulu and of the politician's crippled wife (Dorothy Peterson), whose name is Helen (a reference to Capra's first wife Helen Howell). 'Forbidden' was set to start filming in April 1931, shortly after the completion of 'The Miracle Woman.' Though Capra was in no way to blame for Stanwyck's accident during the filming, it cast a retrospective shadow for him, one of the reasons he disparaged 'Forbidden' in his book. He may have linked her accident in his mind, whether irrationally or not, with Stanwyck's final rejection of his marriage proposal.

Capra and Stanwyck were discreet about their affair, and they were never linked romantically in the increasingly frequent press reports of her marital problems. Capra wrote in his book 'The Name Above The Title': "I fell in love with Stanwyck, and had I not been more in love with Lucille Reyburn I would have asked Barbara to marry me after she called it quits with Frank Fay." But it was Stanwyck who rejected him. Stanwyck must have been shrewd enough to realize, even if Capra did not, that despite their satisfying working relationship, they would not have been compatible in marriage. She must have known that Capra needed a more placid woman, a woman who would stay home and raise children, a woman whose life would revolve around him —not a career woman. Lu knew nothing about his proposal to Stanwyck or Stanwyck's rejection. Capra married Lu on 25 November 1932. "I wasn't after dames. I wanted to make good pictures. That was the good thing about my wife: She helped me."

The Capras were one of the rare married couples in Hollywood about whom there never was any scandal. John Huston, who lived with Capra in London bachelor quarters during World War II, marveled that he was "the most devoted husband I've ever known. He adored Lu."

'Platinum Blonde' (1931) firmly established Jean Harlow's stardom, bringing out qualities of humor and relaxed sexiness that had not been evident in her previous appearances. Los Angeles Express noted that "Jean Harlow shows a marked improvement as an actress. Credit for this, I believe, should go to Director Frank Capra, who again proves his right to be named with the ten best megaphonists." The brilliance of Riskin's contribution and of Capra's direction elevated 'Platinum Blonde' from a formulaic comedy into a first-rate film, probably the most underrated of Capra's career. "Someone is going to evolve a great film out of the Depression," Capra told Variety's Ruth Morris in an interview on February 2, 1932, three months after the release of 'Platinum Blonde.' "Satirical treatment of a plutocrat, insanely trying to conserve wealth and rinding happiness only when he is reduced to a breadline, will strike a responsive note in the mass mind. When that picture is made, it will inaugurate the cycle that follows in the wake of any successful film." Capra also observed that (as Variety paraphrased it) such films were just waiting for a director "cagey enough to capitalize on the present state of public mind."

Some critics recognized that there were political ambiguities in Capra's films, that they were considerably more complex politically than just sentimental paeans to the "little guy." But even the most perceptive critics seemed to have a great deal of trouble coming to terms with his films' political implications. Donald Willis summarized the dizzying variety of critical viewpoints: "Depending on what Capra films one is talking about, Frank Capra is an advocate of Communism, fascism, Marxism, populism, conservatism, McCarthyism, New-Dealism, anti-Hooverism, jingoism, socialism, capitalism, middle-of-the-road-ism, democracy, or individualism." Willis simply threw up his hands: "It's no accident that there are so many interpretations of his films: the composite Capra that emerges from those films is almost impossible to pin down politically. I myself think that Capra's films were basically not political." "If you're a real artist, forget the politics," Capra urged young filmmakers at a Directors Guild seminar in 1981.

The enthusiasm and sincerity Capra brought to his direction of 'American Madness' (1932) tapped into unconscious reserves of goodwill that Capra could not allow himself to express in his off-screen politics and which reflected his belated, reluctant, but nevertheless strongly felt awareness that the country's economic system needed overhauling if the American Dream was to survive. It was a time when, in the words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, "men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of society might break down and cease to work."

Frank Capra, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable during the filming of "It Happened One Night" (1934)

Gable's Peter is exasperated by the snobbery of Colbert's Ellen Andrews and too intimidated by class barriers to make anything more than a tentative romantic move until her Wall Street tycoon father (Walter Connolly) gives his approval. Burned before by his romantic view of women, he tries to protect himself emotionally by thinking of Ellie as "just a headline," a ticket back to his old job in New York. He spends most of the film criticizing her for her wealth and privilege (teaching her how to dunk doughnuts), but he also is criticizing himself for being attracted to someone from her class. And he is blind to the rebellious Ellie's true personality, which is closer to his feminine ideal ("somebody that's real —somebody that's alive") than he wants to admit. Capra saw Colbert's character as the personification of all the rich, "classy," stuck-up women who ever gave him the brush-off. "She wasn't looking for any man, she wasn't looking for any romance," said Capra, who renamed the character after one of the girls he knew when he was trying to crash Pasadena society, Ellen Andrews (in the story the character's name is Elspeth Andrews).

In 1934 Capra faced the prospect of a social message with great trepidation, for, as he told Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times shortly after he made 'Broadway Bill,' "People don't want to think." He worried that he would lose his audience, his money, and his newly achieved social status if he said too much in his films or if he said things the audience did not want to hear.

When Capra told Harry Cohn he wanted Jean Arthur for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939), Cohn, according to both Capra and Arthur, scoffed that Arthur was a has-been. But, as Stanwyck had before, Arthur bloomed under Capra's firm but quiet authority, becoming a major star as she released previously untapped qualities in her personality, qualities best described by the other of her two favorite directors, George Stevens ('The More the Merrier' and 'Shane'):

"Jean Arthur was terribly vulnerable and exposed even under the most ordinary of circumstances, even if she had to stick her hand out into traffic to make a left-hand turn." She became Capra's quintessential leading lady, appearing in three of his last four Columbia films, 'Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,' 'You Can't Take It With You,' and 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.'

"Kick her in the ass!" Capra laughed when asked how to direct Jean Arthur. "She's a funny combination of things. You can't get her out of the dressing room without using force. You can't get her in front of the camera without her crying, whining, vomiting, all that shit she does. But then when she does get in front of a camera, and you turn on the lights — wow! All of that disappears and out comes a strong-minded woman. Then when she finishes the scene, she runs back to the dressing room and hides."

"Meet John Doe" (1941) finds Capra critically examining his own role as a manipulator of the mass audience and the interplay between sincerity and cynicism in his own feelings toward the public. As Charles J. Maland observed, "Doe's picture appears on the cover of Time, just as Capra's had in 1938. Both were getting recognition, and both wondered if they deserved it. When Doe tells Ann in the airport waiting room that he's beginning to see the true meaning of the platitudes he had heard for years and been spouting for weeks, one senses that Capra is also speaking. Yet Capra, like Doe, seems to be torn: who is he (the Sicilian immigrant, the ex-ballplayer) to be a national spokesman of values, communicating to millions through the media?" Underlying those doubts was Capra's fear that he was an "impostor," as the voice of an anonymous member of the public calls John Doe, and the fear that he would be exposed before his audience and vilified by them, as happens to John Doe in the rain-drenched convention sequence, one of Capra's most powerful visions of American madness. No other sequence in Capra's work more clearly reveals his latent fear of the "common man" and his awareness of how easily the public can be manipulated by the media, including the cinema itself.

"I never cease to thrill at an audience seeing a picture," Capra told Geoffrey Hellman shortly before making 'Meet John Doe.' "For two hours you've got 'em. Hitler can't keep 'em that long. You eventually reach even more people than Roosevelt does on the radio. Imagine what Shakespeare would have given for an audience like that!" It is Capra's awareness of the fragility of his hold over his audience, and his doubts about his own worthiness for such an important role, that give the convention scene its extraordinary tension.

The temptation to suicide is a major theme of Capra's work. The heroes of two of his most personal (and least commercially successful) films before 'Meet John Doe'—'The Way of the Strong' and 'The Bitter Tea of General Yen' —actually do commit suicide. Failed suicide attempts figure in several other Capra films, and almost every Capra film takes its central character on violent mood swings between elation and despair before reaching its fragile happy ending. At his best, as François Truffaut put it, Capra was "a navigator who knew how to steer his characters into the deepest dimensions of desperate human situations (I have often wept during the tragic moments of Capra's comedies) before he reestablished a balance and brought off the miracle that let us leave the theater with a renewed confidence in life." Capra's supposed optimism was a cover for his more fundamental pessimism, and his happy endings which seem tacked on, as in 'Meet John Doe,' represent an inability to reestablish the emotional balance.

In later years, Capra flip-flopped between defending and regretting his choice of endings. Commercial considerations undoubtedly contributed as much as religious scruples to his ambivalence about the suicide in 1941, particularly since the film was his first independent production and his own money was on the line for the first time. Even though he claimed that his primary motive for choosing the story was "to convince important critics that not every Capra film was written by Pollyanna," he ultimately backed away from the darker implications of his chosen theme, laying off much of the blame on his public. "The audience told us" that they didn't like the suicide. "You can't kill Gary Cooper," Capra rationalized.

Capra never was attacked by name in those [HUAC] hearings. In fact, it was remarkable how rarely his name was mentioned, since such criticism could have been construed as referring to his prewar films and since even "It's a Wonderful Life" came under suspicion in that atmosphere. "Frank Capra—Is He Un-American?" asked the British Communist paper the Daily Worker on April 5 in the headline over its favorable review of Wonderful Life. Calling it "one of those thought-timulating films which Hollywood produces so rarely these days," John Ross wrote that "the hunt for dollars is again the target of Capra's attack. . . The un-American Committee of the House of Representatives will probably denounce it as Bolshevik propaganda.

The extent of Capra's identification with George Bailey would have astonished those who knew him only through his successful public image and did not know that as he prepared his postwar comeback film he felt "a loneliness that was laced by the fear of failure." In lines he wrote for the film but did not use, Capra had George say after jumping into the river, "I was a 4-F. In my case it didn't stand for Four Freedoms, it meant Four Failures. Failure as a husband, father, businessman—failure as a human being." The fundamental pessimism that counterbalanced the superficial optimism of his prewar films had been brought dangerously to the surface during the war years, triggering Capra's awareness of the fragility of his art and the hollowness of his personal beliefs. Like his surrogate on screen, George Bailey, he was undergoing a secret metaphysical crisis, wondering whether he "had put too much faith in the human race."

Capra and George Bailey share some profound biographical characteristics—their equation of lack of money with desperation and shame, their conflict between a yearning for financial comfort and a desire to serve the community, their thwarted technological ambitions, the fateful roles of their fathers' deaths in deciding their careers, the calming and conservative influences of their wives, their frustration over having to stay in their hometowns during World War II, their terror of anonymity, and, underlying everything, their doubting of their own worth and their temptation to suicide. As critic Stephen Handzo wrote, "One can find the wild oscillations of euphoria and despair of Capra's films in his own life. . . Violent shifts of mood give his films the sense of life being lived." Never was that truth more evident than in "It's A Wonderful Life." -"Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success" (2011) by Joseph McBride

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Jean Harlow, The Noir Forties

On film Jean Harlow often wore white satin gowns that, combined with her ivory skin and platinum hair, gave Jean Harlow an unparalleled luminous quality. Harlow glowed from the screen, reached out and grabbed the attention of the viewer, and never lost it. She was not an unreachable goddess like Greta Garbo but human with an earthy sense of humor, which made her a superb comedienne. As the original blonde bombshell, Harlow set the trend for actresses like Marilyn Monroe for decades to come. Harlow was known as "the baby" around the studio. She claimed she didn't know her real name 'Harlean' until she started school. Somehow the nickname suited her, and with her kewpie doll lips painted a deep red and her cherubic baby face, she played at being a femme fatale but with an underlying childlike quality that set her apart from her contemporaries.

No matter how tough the characters in her early films were supposed to have been, the audiences always loved her. Harlow would say about those characters: "I don't want to play hard-boiled girls. It's so different from the real me."

The crewmembers who worked in her films remembered her as being very kind, down-to-earth, and a great dice player! In those pre-Las Vegas days, one of her favorite getaway spots was Agua Caliente, a high-end Tijuana gambling resort. Harlow, with her heart of gold, was known to help out crewmembers who needed support financially.

There were two men that Mama Jean found to be formidable opponents: mobster Abner 'Longie' Zwillman and the love of Harlow's life William Powell. She met Zwillman when she was just twenty years old in Chicago. Harlow was appearing at the Oriental Theatre, and her con-artist stepfather Marino Bello, in an effort to impress Al Capone and Zwillman, invited them backstage to meet her. In David Stenn's book 'Bombshell: The Life of Jean Harlow', Lina Basquette recalled, "She loved to hang out with guys from the mob. She wanted to be a rebel herself but she didn't have the guts to go against her mother." -"True Hollywood Noir: Filmland Mysteries and Murders" (2013) by Dina Di Mambro

"In the first chapter, I will argue that the actress Jean Harlow, in her acting and bodily presence, uses her sexualized body to affect and seduce viewers away from any primary identification with those characters and their plotlines that are supposed to lead the film, and to instead identify with the kind of sexual empowerment and self-possession her characters consistently display. This sexual empowerment allows Harlow’s characters to manipulate the male characters to their own devices, thereby undermining previous feminist ideas about representations of women and audience identification in film only being constructed for the male viewer." -Jessica Hope Jordan in "The Sex Goddess in American Film, 1930-1965: Jean Harlow, Mae West, Lana Turner, and Jayne Mansfield."

"Red Headed Woman" (1932) is a famous pre-code film because Harlow's character Lil or “Red” as she is referred to, never get punished for her wrong doings. In fact, she prospers and is successful in climbing the social and economic ladder by blatantly using her sexuality. In the opening scene we see Harlow changing her hair color to a fiery red, and poking fun at the ways in which she can be sexy.

Red confides in her best friend (played by Una Merkel) that she wants to become a society woman by going after her boss, Bill Legendre, who is married. Then Red goes after Legendre’s richer partner, Charles Gaerste. Legendre hires a private eye to discover that while Red is having an affair with Gaerste, she is also sleeping around with Gaerste’s French chauffeur. Her shenanigans are discovered by all, and she ends up shooting her husband Bill Legendre. Although Legendre doesn’t press charges, Red flees town. In the closing scene, Red is seen in Paris at the horse races. Now she speaks French and dates a wealthy older man, whom she uses to her benefit. The two drive off in his limousine and the guy who drives their automobile is her French chauffeur lover.

"She was gay and humorous, always. Her vivacity and sincerity remain to inspire those of us who knew her and admired her as one of the most truly beautiful of all Hollywood's beauties." -Robert Taylor on Jean Harlow

"Personal Property" (1937) turned out to be the last full film Jean Harlow ever did. She had poor health throughout her life, beginning at the age of five when she contracted meningitis. Director Woody Van Dyke was nicknamed 'One Take' and "Personal Property" was completed in all of two weeks. At one point, Jean lapsed into a coughing spasm, possibly a precursor to the graver illness to overtake her later. There were other reasons behind the rush. The crew had been invited to Washington to celebrate President Roosevelt's birthday (the event was a way to raise money for the polio foundation). Attendance at the president's party was only part of the "Personal Property" press junket.

Jean Harlow during a visit to Washington for President Frankin D. Roosevelt’s Birthday (photo by Thomas D. McAvoy), 1937.

On the evening of January 30, 1937, the stars appeared at seven hotels hosting Presidential Birthday Balls, going from one, to the next. Prior to the main event in which the week of activities culminated, they were taken into Roosevelt's 'fireside chat' room, and introduced to the President and First Lady. This in particular was a trial for Taylor, who could not stand Roosevelt or his politics. The day after, Jean and Bob climbed wearily on the train and headed back to Hollywood. Jean seemed to get more ill with each mile traveled. Taylor periodically looked in on her to offer help and sympathy. She continued to fail, and by the time they reached home, she took to her bed. Jean Harlow died on June 7, 1937. -"Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood and Communism" (2008) by Linda J. Alexander

Two popular films of 1946, 'Blue Skies' and 'The Blue Dahlia,' similar in titles but opposing in genre, caught the ambivalent public mood of the times, which more or less oscillated between faith in the future and worry about problems that lay ahead. 'Blue Skies,' a musical, was realistic in its way. The plot hinged on marital troubles vaguely reflecting the real-life ones of returning vets. Jed (Fred Astaire) and Johnny (Bing Crosby) are song-and-dance men who vie for the love of Mary (Joan Caulfield, a placidly beautiful blonde). Crosby wins her, but they have marital problems.

A grimmer take on this theme was 'The Blue Dahlia.' In the script by crime novelist Raymond Chandler, Lt. Cmdr. Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) comes home angry and violence-prone to find his wife has been cheating on him. Blue Skies, The Blue Dahlia: two films that offered an almost manic-depressive vision—one, skies of blue (following a light rain); the other, stormy weather.

They were templates of the ideology of the postwar cinema, but 'The Blue Dahlia' presaged a series of crime films, later dubbed films noir, that would more deeply echo the American unconscious between 1945 and 1950. Paul Fussell writes in 'Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War' that people in America hadn’t been told about even 10 percent of the horror of this war: “The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted... America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”

As a Marxist, Polonsky preferred to attribute the sense of jeopardy, uncertainty [of film noir], to capitalism. French critics like Frank, Borde, and Chaumeton, writing more from an aesthetic or philosophical perspective, tended to see it as a surreal or existential state of humankind. It produced the popular mood of those early postwar years, 1945–50, which I call “the noir forties” and other historians have labeled “the age of anxiety,” “the age of doubt,” “postwar blues,” “triumphalist despair.” These moods and emotions were the mass psychological subsoil in which sprouted the nation’s politics and culture at the time. But during and after the war, leading jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charles Mingus moved into bebop, a more cerebral, avant-garde form.

'The Lost Weekend' (1945) was shot by Charles Seitz in the documentary style he had used in 'Double Indemnity' mixed with subjective scenes of horror using expressionistic techniques. Harrowing shots of Third Avenue, which was then a drab street in the shadow of elevated tracks lined with pawnshops and sleazy bars, are used as a backdrop for Birnam’s agonized odyssey.

The nightmare vision was of  "‘domineering’ women and economic insecurity, all waiting to overwhelm the returning veterans hoping to get their jobs and their ‘girls’ back," writes the feminist historian Elaine Tyler May. This negative image infiltrated popular culture. In films noir she is a femme fatale; while in the best-selling adventures of Mickey Spillane’s private eye Mike Hammer, she is the sexy temptress who turns out to be a Communist spy.

If men’s fashions were aimed at the new company man, women’s fashions affirmed the glamorous but nonworking wife. Because of fabric shortages, women’s wartime fashions had been comparatively simple, eschewing frills and furbelows. But after the war the image of the patriotic, cloth-saving working woman who still looked pretty for her soldier boy gave way to conspicuous consumption, decked out in the “new look,” a style created by the Paris designer Christian Dior. He swathed women in voluminous fabrics, long skirts with amphora waists.

A rare film with an identifiable working-class hero was 'The Long Night' (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak with a script by John Wexley, a veteran noir writer with leftist views. Rather than simply reviving Carné’s saga, however, Litvak revealingly transformed it into a story of hope and (very subtly) struggle.

What is generally called the 'blacklist' —referring to a policy of not hiring Communist sympathizers —was adopted by the eight largest studios in a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in late 1947 presided over by Eric Johnston (head of the Motion Picture Producers of America). An idea of Johnson’s standards can be gleaned from his statement to a group of screenwriters not long after the 1947 HUAC hearings: “We’ll have no more 'Grapes of Wrath,' we’ll have no more 'Tobacco Roads,' we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain.” Films noir were also on the list. Average weekly attendance fell from its 1946 peak of 90 million [moviegoers]. In that year an average of 80 percent of the public attended a movie at least once weekly; that number would decline to around 36 percent in 1950 (with only 3.6 million TV sets in homes).

The atmosphere of suspicion and distrust created by HUAC and the blacklist also played a role in the rise of Hollywood noir. 'Naming Names' author Victor Navasky commented, “The blacklist itself has a noir quality since there was no literal, physical blacklist, and you can add in the role played in enforcing it by ex-FBI guys and clearance mechanisms, Red Channels, etc. and the so-called graylist.” In 'Force of Evil' (1948), Polonsky went beyond existential dread to depict a city of corruption exemplified by the numbers racket but represented by the street sign flashed at the film’s beginning: Wall Street. In the ending, Joe (John Garfield)  finds in himself a nub of humanity and starts climbing back up to redemption.

-Kathleen (Lucille Ball): "But, remember I can get any new tough guy for a dime."

-Bradford (Mark Stevens): "I felt all dead inside. I’m backed into a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me." —The Dark Corner (1946)

Janey Place writes that the noir era “stands as the only period in American film in which women are deadly but sexy, exciting, and strong, not static symbols... intelligent and powerful if destructively so.” The emergence of this type of woman (different from the usually good-hearted gold diggers of the thirties) was unique to films noir. A typical noir with a poisonous female, Gilda (1946) was produced by Virginia Van Upp, the foremost woman movie executive of the postwar years. Like many women in movies and journalism, Van Upp had been given a chance because of the wartime manpower shortage.

The femmes fatales, like Joan Bennett, Jane Greer, Ann Savage, Yvonne De Carlo, and Rita Hayworth, -who exhibited varying degrees of destructiveness- reflect male ambivalence toward independent working women, an attitude compounded of their insecurity upon finding themselves back in a competitive civilian world, perhaps working for a large corporation.

California noir tended to show the visions of the German émigré filmmakers in Hollywood. The New York films, in contrast, emulated the [Richard] de Rochemont documentary model. -"The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War" (2013) by Richard Lingeman