A Dedicated Man: An Appreciation of James Stewart

"James Stewart, the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema"

—Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

For many years I took James Stewart (1908-1997) for granted. I never thought of him as n exceptional actor, as one of the great self-manufactured screen personalities like Cary Grant or one of the great emoters like Marlon Brando. He always struck me as a regular guy who appeared to be playing himself in every role. In the last few years, though, I have revised my opinion of him as an actor. This new appreciation came about partly from seeing him in pictures I hadn't seen before and partly from rewatching some of his performances I had seen years earlier but dismissed as unexceptional. I suddenly saw sides of him that I had never noticed before and subtleties that had previously escaped me. My present view of Stewart is that he is one of the great American actors, second only to Cary Grant in my own pantheon of the great actors of the studio era.

When Andrew Sarris referred to Stewart as an "actor-personality," he got it exactly right. Stewart was that rare breed of screen actor who in every role seems to be both the character he is playing and himself. Every character seemed a new incarnation of a familiar personality. On reflection, I think it is this combination of familiarity and continuity of personality that blinded me for so long to the true artistry of his acting. When he projected a heightened emotional state, it didn't seem like acting at all, but like the wholly natural outgrowth of a familiar and normally staid personality pushed to its limits.

That personality, the one we automatically think of when we think of James Stewart, is one of comfortable ordinariness. If ever there was a screen personification of the American Everyman, it was James Stewart. He suggested none of the uniqueness or quirkiness of Cary Grant or the barely contained passion of Marlon Brando. His personality was always exactly life-sized, never larger than life. His screen presence was closer to that of Spencer Tracy, Joel McCrea, or his lifelong friend Henry Fonda—all, like Stewart, masters of understatement and invisible technique. Just watch one of Stewart's performances with the sound off and observe how subtly yet clearly his body language and especially his facial expressions register his emotions.

But the screen personality known as James Stewart did have one individual trait that persisted from movie to movie. Call it steadfastness, tenacity, constancy, perseverance, loyalty, or even stubbornness—these are all aspects of the quality that Stewart consistently projected and around which he fashioned each performance. Although modified to suit the needs of the role, this quality was the constant that set him apart from the truly ordinary man, that gave him the quiet individuality it took me so long to recognize and appreciate.

In his early romantic roles, Stewart's devotion is to someone he loves. In You Can't Take It with You (1938), the breakthrough role that made him a star just three years after his first credited part, his allegiance is to Jean Arthur. Despite her unconventional family and the disapproval of his stern and narrow-minded father, a banker and industrialist, he remains true to Arthur, even sacrificing his career and inheritance (in the middle of the Great Depression). In The Mortal Storm (1940), one of four films he made with his friend Margaret Sullavan, he risks his life to help Sullavan escape from Nazi Germany. Later in his career, in the whimsical Harvey (1950) he never loses faith in the existence of his imaginary friend, a 6-foot tall rabbit. And in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), as another ordinary man, a dentist from Indiana, he must use his wits and rise to heroism to rescue his kidnapped son from terrorists.

In many movies Stewart's commitment is to a principle or ideal. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) it is to the ideals of democracy and honesty in government. In Destry Rides Again (1939), in which he plays the inexperienced sheriff of a lawless Wild West town, it is to the notion that law enforcement can be practiced without the use of firearms. In Call Northside 777 (1948), as a reporter, it is to his belief that an imprisoned killer is innocent. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in which he plays a criminal lawyer, it is to the legal principles of presumption of innocence and that every accused person is entitled to the most effective representation. In John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) it is again to the rule of law, non-violence, and the ideals of American democracy. In The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) it is to his unshakable faith that if he can keep the crew of the crashed plane united in their purpose, they will somehow overcome all obstacles and get that plane in the air again.

From 1941 to 1945 Stewart left pictures and served in the U.S. Army. An aviation enthusiast, he had earned his pilot's license in 1935 and even had a commercial pilot's license. During World War II he flew many combat missions over Europe. When Stewart returned to making movies after the war, he seemed different. The boyish charm that had been a big part of his screen presence was still there but seemed somehow muted, with an undercurrent of sadness that hadn't been there before. And he looked different. The skinny boy now looked looked older and a bit worn. He had been absent from the screen for only five years, but when he returned he looked closer to fifteen years older.

Stewart's first movie after the war was Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Surprisingly, Stewart was not Capra's first choice to play George Bailey in the film; Cary Grant was. Today it's hard to imagine anyone but Stewart in the role. This is a part that required him to play a tormented and disappointed man, a man shattered by self-doubt who has given up all hope. Considering the upbeat and optimistic streak that runs through Stewart's prewar performances, it is perhaps understandable that Capra did not immediately think of him for the part. Possibly Capra eventually realized that the role would not be too much of a stretch for the actor who in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington played a man so committed to his principles that in the end he drives himself to physical exhaustion and comes close to a nervous breakdown.

Contrary to what one might have expected from Stewart's prewar performances, his depiction of George Bailey's despair is almost overpowering in its intensity. And when Bailey is saved at the end, his sense of joy and relief is almost tangible. It's enough to persuade even the most obdurate cynic to accept the movie's simple premise that every human life, no matter how ordinary, has meaning and value. And it's hard to believe that any actor but James Stewart could have communicated such a premise with so much conviction.

It's a Wonderful Life liberated the dark side of the American Everyman by showing that the adherence to a belief that typified Stewart's characters, in this case his unswerving belief in his own worthlessness, could when taken to extremes result in destructive obsession. But it was not by any means the last that moviegoers would see of this side of James Stewart. His dark side was most fully mined in Stewart's collaborations with two great directors in the 1950's.

Between 1950 and 1955 Stewart made several Westerns directed by Anthony Mann. Considering the series of stark low-budget films noirs that Mann made in the late 1940's, it is not surprising that his Westerns of the 1950's would have darker overtones and greater emphasis on character psychology than the typical studio Western of the time. In The Far Country (1954) Stewart plays a character motivated solely by self-interest. He lets nothing stand in the way of his goal of making a fortune in the Gold Rush-era Yukon and returning to the U.S. with his loyal pal to buy a ranch. He refuses to intervene as a sadistic and power-crazed local boss terrorizes and exploits the inhabitants of the mining village where he has staked his claim. It is only after his friend is killed and their gold stolen that he takes action and defeats the villains. In The Man from Laramie (1955) Stewart plays a man consumed with finding those responsible for his brother's death. He endures extreme physical suffering and eschews all intimate human contact in his relentless pursuit of revenge.

Perhaps the greatest of the Stewart-Mann collaborations is The Naked Spur (1953). Here he plays a man obsessed with capturing a dangerous outlaw, not out of any sense of justice, but strictly to claim the reward money that will allow him to buy back the farm he lost through betrayal by a woman while fighting in the Civil War. He is a man driven by a compulsive pursuit that he believes will correct the injustices of the past and restore what he has lost, and his obsession causes the death not only of the outlaw but also of every other person in his party except for the outlaw's girl friend. It is only the promise of her love that in the end breaks the hold his anger and disappointment have over him and allows him to escape his past and move on to a new future.

The other director who used the darker implications of Stewart's dedication to purpose to its full advantage was Alfred Hitchcock. Rope (1948) first hinted at the dark themes that Stewart's covertly obsessive persona was capable of catalyzing. In this movie Stewart plays a rather smug teacher who purports to believe in the Nietzschean proposition that laws and morality are mere human inventions and that some people are above them, even the ultimate prohibition against murder. For him this is strictly an intellectual proposition. He never imagines that two of his former pupils, taking his teachings literally, will put them into practice by murdering an unpopular former schoolmate. His smugness becomes horror as he gradually sees the destruction his adherence to a wrong-headed concept has inspired.

Hitchcock took the dark component of Stewart's screen persona even further in Rear Window (1954). In this movie Stewart's character, a news photographer temporarily confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, idly begins spying on his neighbors. What begins as an amusing pastime quickly takes over his life and becomes an obsession. Without professional constraints, Stewart's desultory curiosity grows into full-blown and dangerous voyeurism that places himself and his fiancée at considerable risk from a ruthless murderer.

But it was in Vertigo (1958) that Hitchcock gave Stewart's embodiment of all-consuming obsession its ultimate expression. What begins as a scheme to exploit former detective Scottie Ferguson's (Stewart) fear of heights in order to disguise a murder as suicide grows out of control when Scottie falls in love with the woman he has been hired to follow, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). The long sequence in which he tails her around San Francisco in his DeSoto—without dialogue, filled with swooping camera moves, Bernard Herrmann's alternately pensive and majestic music, shots of the most picturesque locations in San Francisco, and close-ups of Stewart's reactions as he spies on her, and ending with Stewart pulling her from the Bay at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge—is one of the great sequences in modern movies. But it would be far less effective without Stewart's wordless reactions conveying the transformation of professional detachment to romantic curiosity and finally helpless love. This is the intersection of brilliant, showy filmmaking with subtle, expertly calibrated acting.

Believing that Madeleine has died as a result of his paralyzing phobia, Scottie is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and loss. When by chance he encounters her doppelganger, he loses all control as he obsessively molds her into the image of his lost love. This is the closest Stewart ever came to playing a villain (save for 1936's After the Thin Man), and Hitchcock is merciless in his treatment of Stewart's obsessiveness. In Vertigo there is no final reprieve by the acceptance of love, no saving change of heart, no last-minute pulling back from the abyss for Stewart. His obsessiveness results both in his losing his beloved again and in his own psychological destruction. To see the very quality that made Stewart the All-American Everyman become so distorted that he is transformed into an agent of destruction is a devastating thing to watch.

After Vertigo Stewart seemed to regain some of the easygoing charm that had been so much a part of his early work, while still retaining the gravitas that his screen persona had acquired in the postwar roles. That same year he starred again with Kim Novak in Bell, Book, and Candle, a delightful light comedy that is in a different world altogether from Vertigo. The very next year he gave what is my favorite performance of his career in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in a role that achieved the perfect equilibrium between the two sides of his screen personality. His Paul Biegler is completely focused on the task at hand—defending a soldier on trial for murder—yet he never allows the case to skew his perspective on life. At the end of the movie he is able to let go of the case and simply go fishing.

When I think of James Stewart, that is the way I like to picture him: balancing serious dedication to a purpose with an innate sense of enjoyment of life, and keeping each in its proper proportion.


I don't think Stewart ever gave a bad performance, and his presence makes any movie worth watching. But here are my ten favorite performances by James Stewart:

1. Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
4. Rear Window (1954)
5. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
6. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
7. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
8. Destry Rides Again (1939)
9. The Naked Spur (1953)
10. Harvey (1950)

Psycho Killer Night on Turner Classic Movies

Is there anybody who hasn't seen Psycho (1960), the landmark shocker directed by Alfred Hitchcock? If not, it is being shown on the Turner Classic Movie channel on Saturday, October 25, at 5:00 p.m. (PDT). This is the movie that created a new genre, the slasher film, the movie that in one brilliant sequence—the infamous shower sequence that lasts less than three minutes and is composed of more than fifty different shots (the exact number is still being debated)—opened the door for filmmakers to depict violence more graphically and blurred the distinction between art and sensationalism. And in the conclusion, when the origins of Norman Bates's psychosis are explained by a pompous psychiatrist, erotic perversion became an acceptable subject for titillating escapist entertainment.

But whether you watch Psycho again or not, be sure to catch two other movies being shown that same night that are essential complements to the Hitchcock film. At 12;45 a.m. (PDT), technically on October 26, TCM is showing schlockmeister William Castle's Homicidal (1961). Many believe that this film is a rip-off of Psycho made solely to capitalize on the success and notoriety of Hitchcock's film. In truth, Homicidal bears fewer resemblances to Psycho than some of Brian de Palma's later Hitchcock pastiches and is an immensely entertaining movie well worth watching in its own right.

The similarities to Psycho are clear, although in reality few of the elements that Homicidal emulates were completely innovative when Hitchcock used them, although admittedly he did so in more imaginative and more visually artful ways. Homicidal opens with an enigmatic sequence in which a mysterious young woman checks into a hotel and pays the bellman, a complete stranger, to marry her. At the end of the wedding ceremony, without warning or apparent motive she pulls out a knife, brutally stabs to death the justice of the peace who has just married her, and flees. She drives to the small town of Solvang, where she lives in a creepy, isolated mansion with an elderly woman who is wheelchair-bound and mute. She is in reality Emily, already the wife of a young man named Warren, who after many years in Denmark has just returned to his childhood home to claim the fortune he will shortly inherit. The paralyzed woman is Helga, Warren's childhood nurse who had accompanied him abroad and returned with him and his new wife.

The viewer is given to understand that Emily is a mentally disturbed homicidal maniac. While Warren is absent on business, she terrorizes and threatens the helpless Helga. Also menaced by her are Warren's half-sister Miriam and Miriam's pharmacist boyfriend. Before the movie's end the plot also includes the wanton vandalizing of Miriam's florist shop, her false implication in the murder of the justice of the peace, and a gruesome decapitation. At the end of the movie Warren and Miriam drive to the mansion. Warren goes into the house to confront his deranged wife while Miriam stays in the car. When he doesn't return, she decides to enter the house to look for him.

When Miriam hesitates at the door, Castle reveals his obligatory gimmick, in this case a "fright break," a short pause in which the audience is given time to reflect on the significance of what has happened in the movie and predict what will happen when she finally opens that door and enters. I will not disclose what happens when she goes inside except to say that the ending of the movie makes plain that nothing is what it seemed and leaves the viewer with a final ambiguity: Is the villain really a psychopath or just a greedy schemer trying to gain control of the fortune through an elaborate and clever conspiracy?

Homicidal has many things to recommend it. The movie makes excellent location use of Solvang, California, in its pre-Sideways days before it became a yuppie destination for wine tourists. In those days it was a kitschy, Disneylandish Danish-themed tourist village known for its ornamental windmill, Danish bakery, and Andersen's Pea Soup restaurant. The photography by the masterful Burnett Guffey (with two Oscars to his credit, for From Here to Eternity and Bonnie and Clyde) is first-rate. The performances by Jean Arless and Eugenie Leontovitch are outstanding, and television stalwarts Glenn Corbett and Patricia Breslin are well cast as the "normal" young couple drawn into the perverse situation. This is the best William Castle movie I've seen, successful both as sheer entertainment and as a comparison to the better-known Psycho.

If Homicidal predictably cannot match the level of artistry of Hitchcock's Psycho, it does come close to matching its hyped-up element of shock. In comparison, the great British director Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960), which is being shown on TCM directly after Psycho at 7:00 p.m. (PDT), easily equals and possibly exceeds Psycho in both of these areas. This is the notorious film that when released so alienated critics with its perverse and sensational subject matter—child abuse, voyeurism, sexual fetishism, and serial murder—that it essentially ended the commercial career of a great film artist. The movie was rediscovered in the late 1970's when a group of admirers led by Martin Scorsese arranged for it to be shown at the 1979 New York Film Festival. Peeping Tom is, to put it briefly, a bona fide masterpiece and nothing like Powell's earlier, more dignified films such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes.

In the movie, Carl Boehm plays Mark Lewis, a studio cameraman who carries a home movie camera around with him and obsessively films aspects of his daily life. But he takes his activities much further than that, secretly filming not only the quotidian but also the unsavory and hidden aspects of life. At one point early in the movie he hires and films an attractive young woman who slowly turns her head to reveal a hideous disfigurement on one side of her face. But Mark's worst obsessions are even more shocking.

He gets his biggest kicks from compulsively repeating the same murderous scenario, from luring or hiring a woman to be filmed and then performing the same perverted ritual again and again. His camera mounted on a tripod, he moves in to film a tight close-up of his victim's face. As he approaches, he slowly raises the front leg of the tripod to an upright position. As the model realizes that she is about to be impaled on its deadly-sharp tip, her expression becomes one of terror. It is the capturing on film of this expression of the model's fear at the realization of her impending death, as well as the exact moment of her death, that is the object of Mark's prurient fetish. In a room in his childhood home, where he still lives, he archives these snuff films and rewatches them repeatedly. The phallic and erotic implications of the erect leg of the tripod and its penetration of the model are unmistakable, and critics and audiences of 1960 must have found these implications quite unsettling.

Unlike Hitchcock or Castle, Powell withholds none of this from the viewer. His object may be to shock, but after the first killing he is not interested in surprising or mystifying the viewer. Peeping Tom is from the beginning more of a case history than either Psycho or Homicidal. Later in the movie the origins of Mark's psychopathology are revealed. From childhood, Mark was the object of his twisted father's behavioral experiments, in which he clinically and dispassionately documented on film Mark's entire childhood and the psychological effects on the boy of this continuous surveillance.

Mark, the victim of incessant voyeurism, has as an adult become a filmic voyeur himself. He displays many symptoms of autism—ritualistic or compulsive behavior and problems both with social skills and with communication. (At this time, autism was commonly believed to be the result of lack of affection in childhood, a theory since completely abandoned. Today autism is thought to have a genetic component, and Mark's father's treatment of him as an object rather than a person might be interpreted as an indication of autistic tendencies in the father as well.) His cinematic activities have become a substitute for life, for social interaction and sexuality. And he uses his camera to explore his own particular obsessions, fear and death.

The screenplay of Peeping Tom is much richer thematically than that of Psycho. In Psycho Norman Bates is clearly The Other, a scary freak to be feared by the viewer, not identified with. Peeping Tom, by contrast, forces the viewer to become complicit in Mark's activities: It requires that the viewer reconsider the implications of the act of moviewatching, for Mark's behavior is by extension the activity of the moviegoer carried to its furthest imaginable extreme. Mark's snuff films are both an escape from life and an attempt to explore some of its most incomprehensible mysteries, and isn't this exactly what the best movies do? To add another layer of complexity, Powell refuses to exempt the filmmaker from this self-examination. In the sequences that show home movies of Mark's father filming the young boy, the father is played by Powell himself.

At one point in Peeping Tom Mark and another employee of the film studio are sitting next to each other, waiting to be interviewed by the police in another room. Mark actually has his camera with him and tells his friend that he plans to film the interview. "Are you mad?" the colleague asks. "Yes," Mark answers, giggling nervously. "Do you think they'll notice?" The police might not notice right away. Mark is, after all, a boyish, reserved, and polite young man who seems eccentric but harmless. By this point the audience know differently but have likely developed an ambivalent attitude toward him, for Mark is himself a childhood victim of extreme psychological abuse and is driven by uncontrollable compulsions. Peeping Tom does what few movies have ever succeeded in doing, creating a sympathetic monster.

Be sure to catch the psycho killer triple feature—Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Homicidal—on Turner Classic Movies this Saturday. Psycho is a keeper, a movie to rewatch and savor, to marvel at its unforgettable set pieces that transcend the movie's rather lurid plot, to admire how skillfully Hitchcock manipulates audience response and stealthily insinuates his bizarre sense of humor into a basically grim situation. Homicidal is a movie that aspires to do nothing more than thrill and entertain while being viewed, and it does this quite successfully. Peeping Tom is a movie to ponder during and after watching, a work satisfyingly rich in thematic resonance, a self-referential exploration of the deeper meanings of the art of making movies and the act of watching them.

Britney Spears Teen People Magazine Photoshoot

Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses

They played the best friends or parents of the handsome hero or glamorous heroine, their loyal sidekicks, the bystanders making wry comments and wisecracking from the sidelines. In romantic films and musicals they might play the humorous second leads, the kind of roles that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers played in their first movies together. In more serious movies they were the slimy villains menacing the hero or heroine. They could be eccentric, flamboyant, or even insane. No matter what role they played, no matter what the movie, their character didn't vary a great deal from film to film. From their first appearance on screen, you knew exactly what to expect. These were the character actors and actresses of the American studio movies of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

The roles they played correspond to what E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel calls "flat characters" in literature: "Flat characters [are] called 'humorous' . . . and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed around a single idea or quality." Forster goes on to describe how "they are easily recognized when they come in . . . and easily remembered." Shakespeare's comedies and even some of the tragedies are rich in such characters—Falstaff, the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the pompous Polonius in Hamlet, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night—as are the works of Dickens. Mr. Micawber (David Copperfield), Miss Havisham (Great Expectations), Smallweed (Bleak House), Sairey Gamp (Martin Chuzzlewit)—the novels of Dickens are largely populated by flat characters. Similarly, the character actors of the classic American cinema also represent types with a single easily identifiable personality trait, and they too are easily recognized and easily remembered.

The great character actors were more often than not middle-aged or older. Occasionally starring actors would become character actors as they aged, but most often the great character actors started out as such and remained that way for their entire career. Their task was to lend support and, with their unambiguous and more colorful and oversized personalities—the kind of character that is most effective in small doses—supply contrast to the often younger and more attractive stars of the picture.

In recognition of their importance to the industry and their popularity with moviegoers, in 1936 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created two new award categories, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. For the most part the people nominated in these categories were character actors performing in character roles. The list of nominees and winners from 1936 to 1960, roughly the end of the studio system, reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood's greatest character actors.

These performers were largely a product of the Hollywood studio system. Under contract to one studio, they often made several pictures a year. Typecasting was the rule for these performers. Once the studio's casting directors found a successful niche for the character actor, one that resonated with audiences, the character actor generally found himself or herself playing the same kind of role in the same movie genre in film after film. Why tamper with a successful formula? was the tenet that drove the career of the perennial studio character actor. Powerful directors like Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Preston Sturges assembled what amounted to their own repertory company of character actors and used them in one movie after another.

Because they were so closely linked with the Hollywood studio system, the end of the era of the career character actor coincided with the decline of the studios in the early 1960's. Too, the increase in sex and violence in the American movies of the 1960's, the blurring of the once clearly delineated boundaries between the traditional movie genres, and the desire of American filmmakers to emulate the more adult and overtly artistic films of Europe made the type of movie that required character actors seem old-fashioned and outdated. Their kind of movie no longer appealed to younger and hipper audiences.

This was especially true of the movie comedy, the genre that gave these performers the bulk of their work. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and One, Two, Three (1961) and the Doris Day movies of the early 1960's were some of the last American movies that were out-and-out comedies untinged with melancholia or serious undertones, the kind of movie that the great character actors were best suited to. The old style of movie comedy seemed effete and anachronistic compared to the darker comic sensibility of films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Graduate (1967), or MASH (1970), with their trenchant social and political satire, frank approach to sex, and flippant black humor.

In the 1950's the great character actors who once populated the studio genre movies began to turn to television, where their type of role and acting style were still the norm. By the end of the 1960's the migration to television was nearly universal for those still working.

Taking their place in feature films was a new generation of supporting performers. These actors were comfortable in both supporting and lead roles and did not approach the two types of role differently. They applied the same serious and professional approach to both lead and supporting parts, made determined efforts to avoid typecasting, and attempted to give contours and depth to every role whether large or small.

What follows is a set of personal lists of my own favorite character actors and actresses, both classic and contemporary, along with a favorite role for each, indicated by a *.

CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTORS

1. Walter Brennan. The quintessential character actor, he appeared in more than 200 feature films (many of his earliest performances uncredited) and worked with some of the major directors, including Howard Hawks (in six films), John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir. He even appeared in an Astaire-Rogers movie (The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, 1939). *The Westerner (1940), as the notorious Judge Roy Bean, successfully combining his usual cheerful folksiness with psychotic megalomania.
   
2. Charles Coburn. He made a career of being irascible but lovable. Although he played many dramatic roles, it was in his comedy roles that he really shone. *The More the Merrier (1943), as the mischievous matchmaker Benjamin Dingle.
3. George Sanders. He was typically unctuous and disreputable, the embodiment of the scurrilous scoundrel . *The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), in which he played a character clearly modeled on Oscar Wilde himself and spouted witticisms taken directly from The Importance of Being Earnest.
4. Claude Rains. The most versatile of the lot and possibly the most gifted. *Notorious (1946), in which he was quietly menacing but ultimately pathetic.
5. Frank Morgan. An MGM contract player, he got the part of The Wizard of Oz after W. C. Fields turned it down. *The Shop Around the Corner (1940), as the comically overwrought and suicidal owner of the store where James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan worked.
6. Robert Ryan. He was one of the character actors who specialized in sinister roles, and his evil was most convincing. *The Naked Spur (1953), as James Stewart's nemesis.
7. Arthur Kennedy. He could play victims or villains and was equally effective in both modes. *Champion (1949), as the devoted kid brother betrayed by the ruthlessly ambitious Kirk Douglas.
   
8. William Demarest. An expert at expressing comic frustration and stubbornness, he made humorlessness seem funny. *The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), the most memorable of his eight performances for Preston Sturges.
9. Barry Fitzgerald. The master of Irish blarney, which in Going My Way (1944) reached its fullest expression and earned him an Oscar. *The Naked City (1949), the police procedural/film noir in which he gave one of the least typical performances of his career—and perhaps the most interesting—as the lead detective investigating a murder.
10. Tony Randall. The poor man's Jack Lemmon, he became best known for assuming Lemmon's film role as the fussy Felix in the TV sitcom version of The Odd Couple. In feature films he was most memorable as Rock Hudson's foil in three Hudson-Doris Day movies. *Lover Come Back (1961), in which he played Hudson's boss and his rival for Day.

MODERN CHARACTER ACTORS

1. Dennis Hopper. More often nutty than normal, he could be one scary dude. *Blue Velvet (1986), in which he gave an unforgettable performance as the drug-sniffing, psychotic, mommie-obsessed criminal Frank Booth, a character over-the-top even for a David Lynch movie.
2. Tommy Lee Jones. How can somebody so down-to-earth be such a great character actor? It must have something to do with his intensity and focus and with the feeling that the characters he plays conceal nothing: What you see is what you get. *No Country for Old Men (2007), as the stoical sheriff who just can't understand the sociopathic modern criminal.
   
3. Tom Wilkinson. Another actor of great versatility. But like Tommy Lee Jones he's best at playing it sincere. *The Full Monty (1997), as the former factory manager who reluctantly becomes the head of a troupe of male strippers.
4. Steve Buscemi. He can play a great range of types, but he puts his distinctive stamp on every role. *Ghost World (2000), as the lonely, record-collecting oddball Seymour.
   
5. Morgan Freeman. Adept at playing characters of great sincerity, integrity, and gravitas. *Se7en (1996), as the no-nonsense police detective pursuing a psycho killer with Brad Pitt.

CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTRESSES

1. Thelma Ritter. I once devoted an entire post to Thelma Ritter titled "The Greatest Character Actress. *Pickup on South Street (1953), one of her rare serious parts, as the fatalistic and doomed Moe, a small-time street peddler and police informant.
2. Agnes Moorhead. She was as cold as the snow outside the window in her debut in Citizen Kane (1941) and on fire as the neurotic Aunt Fanny in her follow-up role in Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). In the next 30 years she successfully played everything in between. *All That Heaven Allows (1955), as Jane Wyman's loyal friend and confidante.
3. Eve Arden. The self-sufficient strength of her characters was masked by wry asides and arch wisecracks. And nobody cracked wise better than Eve Arden. *Mildred Pierce (1945), as the troubled Joan Crawford's steadfast friend.
   
4. Mary Astor. She could play good or bad, selfless or self-centered, erotic or maternal with equal conviction. *The Maltese Falcon (1941), as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the archetypal femme fatale of film noir.
5. Dame May Whitty. The embodiment of the genteel British dowager. *Night Must Fall (1937), as the rich, crotchety old lady manipulated by smooth-talking Robert Montgomery, a psycho killer who carried his victim's severed head around in a hatbox.
6. Angela Lansbury. She was sassy and flirtatious as the teenaged maid in Gaslight (1944) and touchingly fragile singing "Yellow Bird" in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). By the late 1940's she was playing middle-aged women while still in her early 20's. *The Manchurian Candidate (1962), as the most unwholesomely possessive mother ever to appear on the screen.
7. Elsa Lanchester. She was equally at ease playing normal or eccentric, but nobody did eccentric like Lanchester. *The Big Clock (1948)—one of a dozen movies in which she appeared with her husband, Charles Laughton—in which she made a big impression with very little screen time as a flighty, temperamental artist.
8. Ethel Barrymore. The archetypal kind-hearted elderly lady. *The Farmer's Daughter (1947), as Joseph Cotten's rather regal mother who befriends and acts as mentor to Loretta Young, the family's Swedish American maid.
   
9. Joan Blondell. She was a big star in the early 1930's but spent the rest of her 50-year long acting career in supporting parts. *Nightmare Alley (1947), a sizzling performance as the charlatan psychic and fortune teller in a circus sideshow.
10. Gloria Grahame. The epitome of the good-bad girl. *The Big Heat (1954), as sadistic gangster Lee Marvin's moll. Who could forget those scenes with the coffee pot?

MODERN CHARACTER ACTRESSES

1. Anjelica Huston. Her career seriously took off with her Oscar-winning turn in Prizzi's Honor (1985), which she followed up with several amazing supporting performances. *The Dead (1987), in which she played Greta Conroy in her father John Huston's last film, an adaptation of the great James Joyce short story from Dubliners. Her last scene in the movie is stunning and absolutely heartbreaking.
2. Dianne Wiest. A favorite of Woody Allen, who brings out her funny side. *Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), in which she impersonates the ultimate flake.
3. Maggie Smith. She won a Best Actress Oscar for 1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but her forte has always been smaller character roles. *A Room with a View (1985), as Helena Bonham Carter's strait-laced Aunt Charlotte, who ultimately reveals herself actually to be a repressed romantic.
4. Frances McDormand. She also won a Best Actress Oscar (for Fargo, 1996) but like Maggie Smith is at heart a character actress at her best in supporting roles. *Almost Famous (2000), as the hilariously overbearing mother of a teenaged aspiring rock journalist.
5. Patricia Clarkson. Her amazing range allows her to be equally effective as kooks, strong women, and vulnerable characters. *The Station Agent (2003), a subtle and very moving performance as an emotionally wounded woman yearning for friendship and connection.

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Click here to read my follow-up post "More of Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses."

Bringing Up Baby: The Funniest Screwball Comedy

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Howard Hawks. A dog, a leopard, and a dinosaur bone. Charlie Ruggles, May Robson, and Barry Fitzgerald. Some of the most hilarious visual and verbal comedy ever put on film. These are the main ingredients of the funniest example of screwball comedy ever made: Bringing Up Baby (1938).

I've written previously of the classic elements of screwball comedy ("An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy"), and Bringing Up Baby fulfills the definition of the genre in every respect. Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a paleontologist engaged to be married the next day to his assistant Alice Swallow, an unromantic, bossy, and humorless woman ("I see our marriage purely as a dedication to your work," she tells him at the beginning of the movie). David himself is only slightly less rigid and conventional than his fiancée. He is a dedicated careerist who seems less excited by the prospect of his imminent marriage than by the news that the last missing bone of the brontosaurus skeleton he is erecting has been discovered and will arrive shortly.

But first he must meet and play golf with the lawyer who represents a potential benefactor, Elizabeth Random (May Robson), a rich woman who is considering donating one million dollars to David's museum. It is at the golf course that he has his first unfortunate encounter with a scatter-brained and impetuous heiress named Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a character for whom the term "madcap" might have been invented. She appropriates his golf ball and his car and wrecks both the car and, at least temporarily, David's chances of getting the donation. Unknown to David, Susan happens to be the niece of Mrs. Random, so it is inevitable that their paths will cross again . . . and again . . . and again. In fact, once he meets her a second time that evening in a night club, where he has gone (carrying with him the box containing his precious dinosaur bone) to meet the lawyer and try to salvage his chances for the donation, he is trapped with her in a hellish and hilarious relationship that lasts for the rest of the movie, a relationship that involves him not only with Susan but with her aunt, her fox terrier George, a pet leopard named Baby, and other assorted eccentric characters including a tipsy gardener (Barry Fitzgerald), a befuddled big-game hunter (Charles Ruggles), a self-important psychiatrist, and an officious small-town sheriff.

In truth, this impromptu relationship is the result of Susan's almost instant decision that she is in love with David and that to get him she will do anything to prevent him from making it to his wedding the next day. (I said she was impetuous, didn't I?) As in many screwball comedies of the 1930's and early 1940's, the man is the reluctant object of romantic desire, and the woman is the single-minded pursuer. In Bringing Up Baby it is inarguable that Susan's determination to snare David is the initial force that sets in motion the machinery of the plot. And the plot of Bringing Up Baby is indeed a complex and finely tuned machine that, once started, hurtles forward at breakneck speed and propels the viewer to everything else that happens in the movie.

What I refer to as everything else is so complicated that it is impossible to summarize briefly. As in the best silent comedies, from a prime situation—here the random encounter at the golf course—the narrative builds in a headlong, unpredictable, and intricate way that defies synopsis or even concise description. Just when you think the inventory of comic conventions has been exhausted, that every conceivable comic complication has been laid on, Hawks piles on yet another one. The film is virtually an encyclopedia of movie comedy. It contains everything: pratfalls—on a slippery Martini olive, into poison ivy, down a hillside, into a river, even from the scaffolding of David's brontosaurus skeleton—verbal miscommunication and talking at cross-purposes, mistaken identity, impersonation, comic deception, even a doppelganger in the form of a second (but feral) leopard. Everything in the movie becomes fodder for comedy: clothing, automobiles, golf, gangsters, circuses, academia, psychiatry, law enforcement. Nothing is too serious or too sacred to be spared Hawks's acerbic, limitlessly inventive imagination. The pace is relentless, leaving the viewer not only breathless but overcome with laughter.

Bringing Up Baby is quite simply the funniest movie I have ever seen. The long sequences in which David and Susan follow George the dog, trying to find where he buried that crucial dinosaur bone he has stolen, and in which David and Susan try to capture the escaped leopard using a croquet mallet and a fish-landing net are deliriously funny. And when virtually the entire cast, including the leopard, converges on the local jail and Susan pretends to be the hard-boiled leader of a gang of bank robbers, the movie has so far departed from any semblance of reality, logic, and normal human behavior that it seems to inhabit a universe of its own, not unlike one of the more outlandish Marx Brothers movies or plays of Oscar Wilde: silliness so sublime that it is elevated to art.

You might think that with all these mad plot complications, and with all this hilarious physical and verbal comedy going on, the characters would take a back seat. Yet that is not the case, for the characters of Susan and David as impersonated by Hepburn and Grant are the glue that holds the movie together. They are the force that moves the film from the clever mechanics of comedy to the humanity of an evolving romantic relationship.

In a recent blog ("The Definitive Screwball Comedy") I described how the main characters in another screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, a married couple who separate and then reconcile at the last moment, were ideally suited to each other all along and that their notions of incompatibility are nonsense. In Bringing Up Baby the situation could hardly be more different. In this movie Susan and David are complete opposites and truly seem to be wholly unsuited to each other. Yet it is precisely their opposite temperaments that, paradoxically, make them the ideal match. Susan, like her pet leopard, is untamed, unpredictable, and predatory. (Her pursuit of David might today be referred to as "stalking.") Compared to Susan, David, like his dinosaur, is ossified, without flesh and blood, and lacking animation. She is emotional; he is rational. She is all impulse; he is all control. To put it in Freudian terms, if she is ruled by her id, then he is ruled by his superego. Separately, each is an incomplete personality. Each needs the other to supply the missing parts of his or her temperament, for only together will each become a complete and balanced personality. To accomplish this, Susan has to gain self-control and gravity, and David must learn to loosen his self-control and let himself go.

This is exactly what happens at the end of Bringing Up Baby. Susan applies herself to seriously looking for the missing bone and when she finds it a few days later contritely delivers it to David at the museum. The now subdued Susan tells him that her aunt gave her the million dollars and that she in turn has decided to donate it to the museum herself. And when she apologizes for her behavior, David, who earlier had told her, "Our relationship has been a series of misadventures from beginning to end," finally thaws. "I just discovered that was the best day I had in my whole life," he confesses. "I never had a better time." When the dinosaur skeleton collapses in the last scene and David lifts Susan to the now isolated platform overlooking a pile of dinosaur bones and embraces her, it is more than just another hilarious sight gag. It is the visual evidence that Susan has finally succeeded in her pursuit of David and has now conquered the last remaining rival for his affection—his obsessive devotion to his work.

Regular readers of this blog may well be wondering why, having already named The Awful Truth as the definitive screwball comedy, I am writing about Bringing Up Baby as though that title belonged to it. The truth is that each of these movies is, in its own way, a definitive version of the screwball comedy. But the two films are so different that any consideration of the two movies together results in the proverbial Apples and Oranges situation: yes, they are both fruit, but they are otherwise so unalike that any attempt at comparison would seem impossibly problematic .

One comparison that is possible, though, is that of methods. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby represent opposite approaches to the same end—the classic screwball comedy dilemma of showing how two people who believe they are unsuited to each other discover that this is not the case at all. The Awful Truth exhibits all the Apollonian virtues. It is controlled, balanced, ordered, and temperate. In contrast Bringing Up Baby exhibits all the characteristics of the Dionysian sensibility. It is spontaneous, chaotic, and anarchic, intoxicated with the passion and excess of its own exuberant absurdism. Each is a perfect exemplar of its chosen approach. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby—for me these are the twin stars around which the galaxy of screwball comedy orbits.

Apples or oranges? I'll have one of each, please.