Claire Trevor: B-Movies & Noir Heroine

"Girls, young women, or really any woman who trudges off to the theater can be expected to find a universe that looks much like their husbands, brothers, and sons, and ends right there, fifty percent of the way through real life. Could this be what’s causing the grand total of around five percent of women working behind the camera? If you grow up without heroes you can emulate on screen, wouldn’t you automatically turn to books, music, or another other art form where you felt you’d be heard? The fine folks who operate websites can cultivate female critics and commentary, reward diversity, and seek out dissenting opinions. We can use our own mental devices, such as avoiding marketing; to counter the tricks a billion dollar business is trying to pull on us. Millions of people are emotionally moved by film every day, let’s turn it back into a tool that moves the culture forward, presenting new ideas and ways of thinking, encouraging discussion about art. That tool is invaluable, and we’ve let most of it slip through our hands by supporting too much lesser cinema." -“How Studios Abandoned Women to Focus on Sequels and Superheroes And Why It’s Ruining Cinema” (2013) by Laremy Legel

Claire Trevor arrived in Hollywood after signing a contract with Warner Brothers in 1925. She had few stars in her eyes when she arrived as a girl living the ‘American Dream’, seeking success and willing to work long lackluster hours. Among her admirers were William H. Pine and William C. Thomas, also known as the ‘Dollar Bills’ because none of their films ever lost money. Unusually, because Trevor came to Hollywood directly from her first love, the theatre, she already understood that movie-making was not an art form, but an industry that existed to generate wealth.

She was a star who more than most represented the rapidly changing moods of her culture and time, moving easily along with her audience, between the high optimism and grandiose scale of Western frontier idealism to the forlorn desperation, depression, corruption and deep set shadows of Film Noir. She was the consummate actress of her generation, performing unerringly as the glamorous leading lady opposite every top male star from Robinson and Bogart to Tracy, Douglas and Wayne.

Claire Trevor in "The Amazing Doctor Clitterhouse" (1938) directed by Anatole Litvak

The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse was billed as a bizarre, exciting and amusing story, in which Robinson gave his greatest performance as a highly respected neurological surgeon whose interest in the mental and physical reactions of criminals at the moment they were engaged in illegal activities becomes an obsession. Eventually he decides to use himself as a guinea pig and he embarks on a career of ruthless crime.

The offers never dried up, but she continued to be treated as an asset rather than a fully-fledged and competitive star. The pattern repeated itself when, in quick succession she made The Velvet Touch, Corkscrew Alley and Key Largo. Again Hollywood shouted that Trevor would be tops, only for her once more to be forgotten.

Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor in the 1942 film "Street Of Chance."

Film Noir offered portraits of complex female characters. Here, she had the chance to exist as a champion alongside the biggest male stars of the day. In what were often shocking performances, Trevor could portray the darkest sides of the female. Her characters could be selfish, possessive, slovenly, calculating, callous and even masochistic, intelligent, shrewd and cunning, often lacking in morals, but always aware of her unique feminine tools.

From 1933 through 1938 Trevor starred in twenty nine films, often having either the lead role or the role of heroine and usually playing a sweet young woman in B movie potboilers and cheap westerns. Disillusionment swiftly crept.

Claire Trevor and John Wayne in "Stagecoach" (1939) directed by John Ford

Life was tough and uncomfortable for her at Fox. She, like many other female stars, found it excruciating to be out riding in the California sun in velvets and heavy costumes. None of the sound stages had air conditioning, “They had big fans to blow some air in but the stages would be red hot with the lights and especially if it was color because the lights they used for color were much more potent and radiated much more heat. And I didn’t like locations much more. You’d be traipsing around in forests and hills.”

William Wyler delivered a powerful adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s play, delving keenly into the social inequities of contemporary urban life and he successfully submerged Trevor’s fresh blonde beauty into the characterization of an unkempt hardened prostitute and former sweetheart of gangster Bogart. Under his tutelage she delivered a powerful electrifying performance as a downtrodden streetwalker opposite Bogart that lit up the sensitivity of both actors.

She also enjoyed working alongside Bogart and McCrea. “Joel was so nice and so handsome. I remember hearing him on the telephone outside my dressing room, calling Frances Dee, his wife. He was talking to her in just the sweetest way and I thought that girl is so lucky.”

Warner Bros had wanted her to sign up for a five year stint, telling her they wanted her to be their “Oomph Girl.” Although she turned them down, once more she later regretted it saying that Warners did make the kind of movies that suited her talents. “I was foolish and Ann Sheridan became the “Oomph Girl instead.”

"For some reason John Ford was interested in me as an actress, I couldn’t understand why, because I had nothing at Fox that would have shown any promise. You can imagine how thrilled I was when he sent me the Stagecoach script."

Later, Ford himself felt her performance in Stagecoach went largely unnoticed by the critics because she was so subtle in it. “At the end of the first rough cut, he told me that. He and I were good friends. We had a rapport. He said, ‘It’s going to be great. And you are so good in it, they’re not even going to realize how good you are’. That was a big compliment. And he didn’t give them out often."

Crack Up (RKO) 1946 was directed by Irving Reis. Here Trevor played a more sympathetic noire femme opposite Pat O’Brien, who Trevor later recalled as a “dear man, warm and wonderful off screen.” “I played villainesses in many films but it never entered my mind if people thought I was like the characters I played. If they did that was their hard luck. It never bothered me. You had to make those parts believable and some of them were not written in a way that was true to life. They were the concoctions of a dreaming author so that was the difficulty. Nothing is any good unless it’s believable.”

"Born to Kill" (1947) directed by Robert Wise, was critiqued as a “homicidal drama strictly for the adult trade” and a “sexy, suggestive yarn of crime and punishment.” A grim business about a killer, his marriage for money and his extra-marital yens and the reviewers also referred to “More Trevor neuroticism.”

Claire Trevor in "The Velvet Touch" (1948) directed by Jack Gage

Trevor had done plenty of good work in bad pictures but in 1948 she stormed into what was to be her last film noire, recapturing lost ground in Key Largo. A star of lesser caliber might not have wanted to take the risk that Trevor grabbed with this movie. Trevor turned in an extraordinary performance as washed-up, boozy nightclub singer Gaye Dawn opposite Edward G Robinson’s big time gangster. She stole the show as his long suffering moll who is now a fallen favorite with fading looks and who drinks to forget.

Hollywood Reporter: Trevor’s performance is one of those superlative jobs of acting that comes from this performer whenever she is given the opportunity. It is played thoughtfully and intelligently and reaches heights of pathos in the sequence wherein she tries to recapture the days of her singing career.

She won the Oscar for best supporting actress. Trevor said, “Bogie was over for dinner a couple of nights before the Awards and he told me that if I won I should get up and say that I wasn’t going to thank anyone, that I did it all by myself.”

Trevor and Bogart were already close friends, “I always felt like he was my buddy and I appreciated his humor. I called him ‘Bogart’ not ‘Bogie’ and no one called him Humphrey except as a joke.”

She herself could often be dismissive of her career and of Hollywood, saying that she felt films were not an art but a business and that anyone, given a chance, could do what she did. It was instinctive and she never really valued her own talent. She had steadfastly refused to knuckle down to standard Hollywood convention and didn’t seem to accept or respect the mythology surrounding the biggest stars of her era. Her artistic honesty might have been too much for the Hollywood star system.

“Looking back on Hollywood, I think the demise of the studio system is just too bad because they knew how to make stars. They weren’t business men like they are today. To be the head of a big corporation doesn’t mean you know anything about show business. They were showmen in those days and they were marvelous. I made mostly B pictures. I never had a Howard Hawks fighting for me, or a Von Sternberg like Dietrich had. Or a Mauritz Stiller, like Garbo had. And then it became just work. I am talking about making movies in eighteen days. I am talking about working Saturday nights. I am talking about doing three pictures at once. I worked hard – like a demon actually. I was paid nicely. But let’s face it, the parts I would have given my soul for - Bette Davis got.” -"Claire Trevor: Queen of the Bs and Hollywood Film Noir" (2013) by Carolyn McGivern

Happy 43rd birthday, Matt Damon!

Matt Damon takes the podium at the Education on the Edge Lecture Series held at California State University on Wednesday (October 2) in Northridge, Calif. The 42-year-old actor introduced the Former U.S. Assistant Secretary Of Education Diane Ravitch as speaker that day.

"Building a strong, solid, educated middle class is ultimately the best thing for America. Someone like FDR. There's a misconception that leaders lead. They don't. They follow. Every great movement has come from the bottom up." -Matt Damon (on what kind of political leadership he supports)

-You have four daughters. Do you enjoy being the only man in the house? Damon: -I’m lucky to be the only guy in the house. It’s a man’s dream. The testosterone deficit at home makes me very special: You learn a lot by looking at the world from their point of view. I’m now convinced we’re different species, more than I thought before.

-Do you feel women understand men? Damon: -Oh, I think they understand us totally. I just don’t think we can completely understand them. Source: www.redbull.com

Vanity Fair: -What do you consider your greatest achievement? Matt Damon: -My marriage, so far. Asked by Vanity Fair for their Proust questionnaire, when and where he was happiest, Matt answered: "In our bed, making our children, and in the hospital watching them being born." Matt also revealed his personal motto is "Don't be a d-bag." Source: www.gossipcop.com

Quietly and unexpectedly, Matt Damon has become the premier Hollywood actor of the past decade. He’s lent his minutely constructed, surprisingly athletic performances to the films of directors Steven Soderbergh, Gus Van Sant, Paul Greengrass, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, a roster that’s not coincidentally produced some of the most vital and successful films of the past ten years. His remarkable career isn’t simply a matter of a good agent. It’s all in the manner in which he so carefully adapts his particular skills to the roles.

Damon’s commitment is displayed on his body, which he relentlessly crafts to the specifications of each character — he’s almost the anti-movie star in his physical malleability.

Hailee Steinfeld and Matt Damon in "True Grit" (2010) directed by Ethan & Joel Cohen

Damon’s preferred personas: withdrawn nebbishes or moody muscular specimens. The first group would include the “Ocean’s” franchise, “Stuck On You,” “The Good Shepherd,” and “The Informant!”. The second contains “All the Pretty Horses,” the “Bourne” franchise, “The Departed” and the forthcoming “Invictus.” “Gerry” lies somewhere in between. But each extreme utilizes his physicality, with his literally weighty roles emphasizing the slapstick and satire of uncooperative bodies instead of the precise control of his action work.

Even in “The Good Shepherd,” Damon buries himself in a trenchcoat and wire-rimmed glasses, eschewing parody but emphasizing his CIA analyst’s passivity and hyper-intellectualism. The effectiveness of Damon’s portrayals isn’t simply achieved by his physicality, however, but by the subtle variations and tics he works into them.

Damon takes a similarly detailed approach to his signature role, Jason Bourne. It’s a streamlined take that only begins with the weight trainer. He deadens his voice and clips his delivery into staccato bursts, the mark of a man only concerned with how to stay alive for the next five minutes. He stands ramrod straight, and bores holes into people’s eyes, rarely blinking. It’s a coiled readiness that’s the inverse of Bob’s closed-off vulnerability. In fight or flight scenes, he pistons his arms and legs down with mechanical regularity, bulldozing through crowds with the same speed as director Paul Greengrass’ edits.

There’s always the presence of fleshly mortality in Damon’s work, from Bourne’s elusive brushes with death to the decadent decay of Mark Whitacre’s middle-aged body.

He and Casey Affleck play wandering fools both named Gerry, who drift around Utah’s national parks after their car breaks down. They exchange opaque bits of improvised dialogue as they slowly dehydrate and collapse in the salt flats.

Damon lopes through the movie with a self-confidence verging on psychosis, as the pair’s attempts at re-orienting themselves devolve into childish game playing. Their faith in play, re-shaping words and actions into little blackout sketches, is unerring until the last desperate shot of the duo, caked with dust and dying by the side of the road.

Damon’s work in “The Informant!” extends his interest in performance and self-delusion, but in the withdrawn nebbish mode. Mark Whitacre’s body is a walking punchline, a marvel of ill-fitting suits, manicured mustaches and rapidly expanding waistlines. He’s literally coming apart at the seams physically before he does it psychologically.

The whistleblower who brought down a price-fixing scheme at Archer Daniels Midland, Whitacre is also a classic American overachiever, raking in millions from an embezzlement scheme that he kept a secret from everyone, including himself. He proliferated so many lies he began to believe some of them, almost willing himself into bipolar disorder. Director Steven Soderbergh emphasizes the man’s duality through his use of voiceover, which features Whitacre’s perplexing digressions, constantly veering away from personal revelations to ponder the weather, food prices and polar bears.

Damon’s voice is slightly nasal, flat and disarmingly vulnerable. He’s at pains to make everyone love him, but his anxiety seeps in at the edges through his constant fidgeting with his glasses, his slightly stooped walk and the furtive tugs at his delicately poofy wig. It’s a finely wrought performance, which slowly reveals Whitacre’s duplicity while never abandoning the character’s pathos.

He’s an eminently likable pathological liar, a seemingly transparent dope who hides his pain in nervous twitches and brief explosions of self-doubt. His hesitation when an FBI agent uncovers his letter forgery is quietly devastating. You can see Damon’s eyes scan back and forth, looking to construct another rhetorical defense, but he’s finally pushed past his breaking point, and even his voiceover collapses and tells the truth: he didn’t have any answers. According to the real Mark Whitacre in the Decatur Herald and Review: “It's like I was two people. I assume that's why they chose Matt Damon for the movie, because he plays those roles that have such psychological intensity. In the ‘Bourne' movies, he doesn't even know who he is.”

Matt Damon: an actor of precise physical control and dense emotional shading, whose action heroes are given the same detailed treatment as his indie film grotesques, all of which are at the center of the most influential films of the decade. He’s a subtle miniaturist who also happens to be a gigantic star, a rare and wonderful thing. Source: www.ifc.com

Other than a famous guest spot in Sarah Silverman's video, “I'm fucking Matt Damon” on the Jimmy Kimmel show in 2008, his marriage has been as solid and dependable as his career.

He met Argentinian Luciana Barroso in a bar in Miami in 2003 (she was the bartender) and married her in 2005; the couple have three young daughters and Barroso has another, Alexia, from a previous relationship. Self-deprecation is clearly Damon's style. He once quipped that his scripts were “the cast-offs from Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio”.

Promised Land has been singled out for criticism for its portrayal of fracking, unsurprisingly by supporters of the method, but also by a group of farmers living near the real-life film set in Pennsylvania. They set up a Facebook group to accuse the film-makers of having “a condescending view of farmers”. When the film was released in the US in December 2012, the industry group Marcellus Shale Coalition was sufficiently perturbed to buy an onscreen advert to be shown in cinemas alongside the movie. So far the movie has made half of its $15m budget back – but in Europe it has been more favourably received, winning a Special Mention at the Berlin International Film Festival this year.

“I don't think it deserves this kind of withering attack,” says Damon. “There isn't a scene in the movie that I would change or do differently, but it didn't get the reception I hoped for. Sometimes people find movies later on, and I personally love it. I really don't understand the criticism that I've been hearing back.” The film explored something which is particularly on the actor's mind, namely “the American identity, and what will be left behind for future generations? It's a heart-breaking situation in rural America at the moment. You think a recession hits a city hard? Go to the countryside." Source: www.independent.co.uk

"The values that I have are the values I was raised with, from where I'm from, which is a middle-class place," Damon says. "So that informs everything about me, my politics and all that stuff. I mean, politically I vote against my own self-interest at every election. I actively ask these people to raise my taxes. But I believe a solid, really strong middle-class is the key to making the country in the best way."

"If you're trying to play an everyman, you've got to have the same concerns and be struggling with the same issues as the people who are coming to see the movie. A movie about a narcissistic, rich movie star would not work, unless you were making a take-down. If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them," says Damon. Source: www.theguardian.com

Matt Damon as Rudy Baylor: "Every lawyer, at least once in every case, feels himself crossing a line that he doesn't really mean to cross... it just happens... And if you cross it enough times it disappears forever. And then you're nothin but another lawyer joke. Just another shark in the dirty water." ("The Rainmaker," directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997)

Matt Damon as Will Hunting: "I look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play. I couldn't paint you a picture, I probably can't hit the ball out of Fenway, and I can't play the piano." ("Good Will Hunting" directed by Gus Van Sant in 1997)

Matt Damon as Private Ryan: "Hell, these guys deserve to go home as much as I do. They've fought just as hard. You can tell her that when you found me, I was with the only brothers I had left. And that there was no way I was deserting them. I think she'd understand that." ("Saving Private Ryan" directed by Steven Spielberg in 1998)

Matt Damon as Mike McDermott: "Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker." ("Rounders", directed by John Dahl in 1998)

Tom Ripley kisses Meredith, full of future, in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999) directed by Anthony Minghella

Tom Ripley: "I'm lost, too. I'm going to be stuck in the basement, aren't I terrible and alone and dark - and I've lied about who I am, and where I am, and so nobody can ever find me."

Matt Damon as Rannulph Junnah and Charlize Zeron as Adele Invergordon in "The Legend of Bagger Vance" (2000) directed by Robert Redford

Matt Damon as Rannulph Junnah: "You see every drink of liquor you take kills a thousand brain cells. Now that doesn't much matter 'cos we got billions more. And first the sadness cells die so you smile real big. And then the quiet cells go so you just say everything real loud for no reason at all. That'ok, that's ok because the stupid cells go next, so everything you say is real smart. And finally, come the memory cells. These are tough sons of bitches to kill."