Sarah Jessica Parker 
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Pictures of Famous Actresses Sarah Jessica Parker Wednesday, April 29, 2009
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Monday, April 27, 2009
Hiroshima, Mon Amour: The Necessity of Remembering
Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour—along with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless—is one of the three films that in 1959 launched the French New Wave movement in cinema. Although lumped together as New Wave films, each has a distinct character that expresses the personal vision of its director, an illustration of the auteur theory the New Wavers believed in so ardently. But as different from each other as these movies are, what they all have in common is the way they take the conventional elements of film narrative and synthesize them in unconventional ways—if you will, the way they take the language of movies and rearrange its syntax in unexpected and inventive ways.Truffaut's The 400 Blows is in style the most conventional of the three. Godard's Breathless is more daring in its startling modulations of tempo: uptempo passages of rapid action filled with jump cuts are juxtaposed with mid-tempo passages of long, fluid tracking shots and slow, nearly static passages consisting largely of lengthy conversations between Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Of these three seminal films, Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the most innovative departure from cinematic conventions and the most highly stylized.
The movie concerns a French actress (she is never named) played by Emmanuelle Riva, who is in Hiroshima, Japan, to play a nurse in a movie about the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of the city, and the brief romance—two nights and one day—she has with a Japanese architect (also never named) played by Eiji Okada. In the first section of the movie, Resnais, at the time a well-known maker of documentary films, creates a long montage composed of several elements: tight close-ups of the intertwined limbs and torsos of Riva and Okada, archival newsreel-style footage of the ruined city (along with what appears to be some re-creations, possibly intended to be from the movie Riva is making), documentary shots of the victims of the bombing—burned, maimed, and deformed from birth defects as a result of the radiation—more documentary shots of the historical museum and its exhibits of the effects of the bombing on the city and its inhabitants, and shots of the modern city taken from a moving vehicle.
During this section of the movie, Riva narrates in voice-over the horrifying details of the bombing, which were followed in the days afterward by spontaneous demonstrations by the residents of Hiroshima, in which she says they expressed their "anger against the inequality advanced by one people over another . . . by certain races against other races . . . by certain classes against other classes." These sentiments, taken with the scarifying images of the devastated city and the horribly mutilated victims of the bombing, leave no doubt about the anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons sentiments of Resnais and Marguerite Duras, who wrote both the screenplay and the novel on which it is based.
It is only well into the movie that the camera finally pulls back to reveal the faces of Riva and Okada; until this point they have existed only as isolated body parts and disembodied voices without identity. This second section of the film, which begins around daybreak, concentrates on the romance between its two main characters, and gradually something resembling a plot begins to emerge. The next morning they breakfast, bathe, dress, and leave the hotel together—she in her costume, a nurse's uniform—for the movie set, where it is her last day of filming. Later that day they return to the hotel, and during this third section of the film we learn from their pillow talk much more about the two characters.
From this point on, the focus of the movie becomes Riva's character. Earlier that morning, just after she got out of bed but while Okada was still in bed, she walked back into the room and saw him lying stretched out on the bed. Just for an instant we saw, from her point of view, another man stretched out in the same position, this time clothed and with what appeared to be blood on him. Now as the two lovers spend their last day together in the hotel room, we begin to learn more about Riva's past as she tells Okada about herself, her reminiscences initiated by the confession that she once had a nervous breakdown.Scenes from the present in the hotel room alternate with scenes from Riva's past as a teenager in rural France during World War II. The scenes set in the present are presented chronologically, while the scenes from the past are presented in a non-linear, stream-of-consciousness order. The details Riva tells Okada about her past allow the viewer to piece together incrementally a complete backstory that explains her present psychological state. Resnais and Duras do this in such a way that what might have been a confusing jumble slowly becomes a coherent narrative as bits and pieces of her experiences are revealed.
Today such an approach doesn't seem all that startling; it's even seen in more artistically daring television shows. But when this movie was made, it must have seemed a radical experiment. Movies had been starting at the end of the story, using frame stories and flashbacks, and jumping back and forth in time for quite a number of years. (Think of Le Jour se Lève and Citizen Kane, the more intricate screenplays of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, or any of a number of movies from the 1940s.) But such shifts were carefully cued to viewers by devices like voice-over narration, slow fades or dissolves, the image going out of focus, montages, or superimposed titles. Hiroshima, Mon Amour was perhaps the first movie to expect the viewer to follow the spontaneous stream-of-consciousness shifts of twentieth-century literature.
The character Riva plays is a fascinating and complex one. As she reveals more about herself, she becomes more agitated and more disinhibited, and we are able to see that she is a mercurial person subject to sudden moodswings and that the origins of her present emotional instability lie in her wartime experiences. Her intimacy with Okada and her presence in Hiroshima have liberated buried emotions and allowed her to relate them, possibly for the very first time, to another person. Like the city of Hiroshima itself, she is still suffering the devastating aftereffects of almost unimaginable wartime trauma.
The ultimate revelations—which involve a love affair with a German soldier, his killing by the Resistance, her discovery of his body (the brief flash we saw earlier), being shunned by the villagers as a collaborator, having a nervous breakdown, and being locked in a cellar—are made to Okada that night in a tea room in the city. During this episode, the film reaches its climax when Riva becomes hysterical and begins to lose control of herself. Up to this point, Okada has been essentially a passive character, acting as a catalyst to encourage Riva to tell her story and confront the horrific memories that have had such a devastating effect on her. Now he takes an active role to prevent her from going over the edge into madness again.
In desperation, he suddenly reaches out and gives her two sharp slaps on the face. These slaps resound on the soundtrack like thunderclaps. and at that moment all the ambient sounds of the tea room—the noises from the kitchen, the conversations of the other patrons, the juke box, the street noises from outside—are suddenly heard at quite loud volume. We realize that during the last parts of this sequence the only thing on the soundtrack has been Riva's voice. In a kind of aural equivalent of the subjective camera technique, where the camera shows the viewer what a character is seeing, the soundtrack has taken on the aural subjectivity of Riva. So hypnotized has she become by the experience of finally telling her story that she has withdrawn completely into her memories. With the slaps that break her reverie, we literally hear her re-enter the present, the here and now.
The concluding section of the movie shows the aftermath of the experience in the tea room. Shattered and disoriented, Riva wanders the nighttime streets as Okada follows her. For the last day he has been imploring her not to return to Paris but to stay in Hiroshima with him, and she has consistently refused. Around dawn she returns to her hotel room, where Okada finally catches up with her. Here she confesses to him that losing him would have as profound an effect on her as losing her first lover did; in a way, her emotional state has taken on a circular aspect, her emotional past merging with her emotional present.
In the enigmatic final scene, the couple are finally given identities of a sort: he says that he will call her Nevers (the name of the French village she came from), and she says that she will call him Hiroshima. Is it possible that the emotional gulf she has placed between them is at last closing? Whatever else this exchange may mean and whatever it may foreshadow for the future of the couple, it clearly indicates that at last they grasp the point Resnais and Duras have been aiming for: that we are—each of us—our own past, that our present identities are inseparable from our past experiences.
To say that Hiroshima, Mon Amour is about recovering repressed memories would, I think, be an oversimplification. It is more accurately about finding memories that have been lost, about rediscovering memories that have been forgotten. "Like you," Riva says to Okada at one point, "I have struggled with all my might not to forget. . . . I forgot." In the years since the events of her girlhood, Riva's traumatic memories have been assimilated and relegated to the background. But the experience of being in Hiroshima, where the reality of the past is inescapable, compels her to see that the same is true of her own life, that her past will always coexist with her present. "Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?" she asks.
This is why the idiosyncratic style of Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not just a contrived stunt. Resnais's blending of documentary and fictional film and his non-linear and non-logical intermingling of events from Riva's present and her past replicate the subject and theme of the movie. Whereas Truffaut and Godard looked to American movies for inspiration, Resnais looked to literature. Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a very conceptual and very literary movie. It attempts to translate the literary techniques of the writers of the French nouveau roman movement, with their extreme authorial subjectivity and stream-of-consciousness fusion of past and present, into cinematic terms. Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay for Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), was the initiator of the movement, and Marguerite Duras one of its best-known practitioners. There is moreover a history of preoccupation with the nature of time and memory in both French philosophy (Henri Bergson) and French literature (Marcel Proust).
Hiroshima, Mon Amour was not the first film in which Resnais explored the way the past coexists with the present and constantly exerts influence on it. His best-known earlier documentaries Night and Fog (1955) and Toute la mémoire du Monde (1956) explored variations of this theme: the former in its examination of the Holocaust as viewed from a contemporary perspective, the latter in its examination of the Bibliothèque Nationale of France in its role as repository of the history of written knowledge. Nor would Hiroshima, Mon Amour be the last film in which Resnais dealt with the complicated relationship between past and present, forgetting and remembering.
With its unexpected shifts in time and place, tone, emphasis, and style, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not a movie to watch casually. The only way to watch it is to surrender yourself to the film, to let it carry you along until you become acclimated to its style and rhythms and its story begins to emerge. This is not a filmmaking approach I would care to see often, particularly in less capable hands than those of Resnais. Occasionally both the forcefulness of the style and the sometimes overwrought pitch of the narration do threaten to overwhelm the emotions expressed in the story. But it is a unique movie, a real one-of-a-kind, a movie which is not only part of a historically important movement in film, but which has in its own right had great influence that can still be seen in movies today. As such, it should be watched by anyone seriously interested in film as an art form.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Fairy Tales Can Come True
"There was nobody like her before or since. . . . In talent, in looks, in character, in temperament. Everything. . . . And very early it became obvious she was a brilliant actress."
The actress Margaret Sullavan starred in only seventeen movies in her screen career, all but one of them released in the ten years between 1933 and 1943. I first saw her in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) a comedy in which her accomplished performance—she expertly suggests the seemingly contradictory character traits of confidence and vulnerability, strength and fragility, maturity and innocence—completely won me over. I thought I knew the great American actresses of the 1930s studio era, but I had barely even heard of her and never before seen her in anything. I did know she had won the New York Film Critic Circle award for best actress for her performance in Three Comrades (1938) and had also been nominated for an Oscar for that performance (her only nomination).
So more than twenty years later, when I got the chance to see Three Comrades I made a point of not missing it. It is indeed a great performance in which Sullavan expresses many of the same paradoxical character qualities as in The Shop Around the Corner, but in a completely different context and to very different effect. Three Comrades is no charming Lubitsch confection, but rather an ultra-romantic tragedy directed by the master of such movies, Frank Borzage, for whom Sullavan made four pictures all together. Like Greta Garbo in Camille, Sullavan plays the mistress of a wealthy older man (although the movie is coy about the exact nature of their relationship) who falls in love with an innocent young man played, as in Camille, by Robert Taylor. Like Garbo in that film, Sullavan is a doomed tragic heroine dying of consumption. And she is very, very good. The entirely natural charm and undertone of wistful melancholy she projects makes it utterly believable that all three war buddies of the title would fall in love with her. Since then I've made an effort to see her in every movie of hers shown on TCM. Recently I was able to catch one of her earliest, The Good Fairy (1935), Sullavan's third movie.
The Good Fairy is, like The Shop Around the Corner, a comedy set in Budapest and also based on a play, this time by Ferenc Molnár. In it, Sullavan plays Luisa Ginglebuscher, a young woman plucked from an orphanage to work as an usherette in a large movie palace. Her character is immediately established as the personification of naïveté. She is first seen exuberantly telling a fairy tale—complete with a wicked fairy and a good fairy—to the youngest residents of the orphanage. She takes completely to heart the simplistic moral instruction she has received at the orphanage, including the admonition to perform one good deed a day, and sees herself as a real-life good fairy helping others realize their wishes. Few actresses could have made such a child-like character so convincing without making her seem childish, but Sullavan does.
No sooner is she out in the world than she is besieged by lecherous men seeking to take advantage of her obvious inexperience and vulnerability. Accosted outside the cinema one night by a glib would-be lothario (Cesar Romero), she escapes by claiming to be married and seizing as her mock-husband the first innocuous-looking man she sees walking down the street (Reginald Owen). He turns out to be a waiter at a grand hotel who, charmed by the girl, gets her an invitation to a ritzy ball at the hotel. Here she is approached by a horny millionaire (Frank Morgan) who immediately sets out to try to seduce her. When, with the help of her self-appointed protector the Waiter, she finally catches on to his intentions, she repeats the trick of claiming to be already married and while Morgan is out of the room picks the name of a lawyer, Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall), at random from the telephone book.
I have so far described only the first fifteen minutes or so of the movie. For the rest, suffice it to say that the situation Luisa has created quickly lurches out of control, snowballing into a series of deceptions, misunderstandings, and impromptu coverups that keep the complications coming without letup. Luisa is required to keep all these multiple fictions spinning in the air like balls while at the same time falling in love with Marshall, following her philosophy of doing good deeds, being a good fairy by attempting to engineer happy outcomes for those in whose lives she has become involved, and preserving her virtue by evading the sexual advances of the various men pursuing her. The plot might sound like Lubitsch, but the result is like a Lubitsch movie on speed.
The screenplay is based on a translation of a play by Ferenc Molnár, whose novels and plays were the basis of many, mostly light-hearted, movies, including The Guardsman (1931), starring Lunt and Fontanne, Rogers and Hammersein's Carousel (1956), The Swan (1956) with Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness, and Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961). But for the screenplay of The Good Fairy, the material was considerably reworked by Preston Sturges, and it is his hand more than any other that comes through in the final film. This is a movie driven not by a genteel Eastern European sensibility but by pungent, wit-drenched dialogue, double-entendre (when Luisa talks about leaving "the asylum," nobody realizes she's referring to the orphans' asylum), farcical misunderstandings, risqué sexual innuendo, and a frenetic pace that resembles the most breathless of Howard Hawks's screwball comedies.
One episode that bears the unmistakable stamp of Sturges occurs in the movie theater where Luisa works. After showing a couple to their seats, she is so captivated by the movie, which is already playing, that she sits down and starts watching it. This movie-within-a-movie is a hilarious send-up of an overwrought tearjerker, complete with edits and tracking shots. The scenes we are shown consist of a distraught upper-class woman being separated from her child and evicted from their sumptuous apartment by her stiff-necked husband for some unstated moral transgression. As she pleads with him not to reject her, he sternly repeats one word over and over: "Go!" Always pointing to the door, he says this at least twenty times—never altering his delivery or intonation—until it becomes absurdly funny. The scene has Luisa in tears, but the viewer in stitches.
The director, surprisingly, is William Wyler, whose specialty was adaptations of novels (by authors including Sinclair Lewis, Emily Brontë, Theodore Dreiser, Somerset Maugham, even John Fowles) and plays by heavyweight dramatists like Sidney Kingsley and Lillian Hellman. By their nature, then, these were quite serious movies. This makes it all the more amazing that The Good Fairy, about the only outright comedy he ever directed, is such a funny movie.
Wyler was not associated with any one studio. Instead he worked at various studios and with various producers (he was for many years closely associated with the producer Samuel Goldwyn before he began producing his own pictures in the late 1940s) and thus had an unusual amount of control over his projects. This control meant he was able to use the best technicians, writers, and performers available, and there is no doubt that, as with his best work, the success of The Good Fairy is in large measure the result of this knack for assembling and presiding over the right personnel for the movie. I have already mentioned the contribution of Preston Sturges to the film. But even a script by a genius like Sturges achieves its full expression only with the right actors delivering those brilliantly written lines, and this movie is blessed with an exceptional cast.
Herbert Marshall was for several years in the 1930s a romantic leading man before moving on to supporting character roles. (Wyler himself would later use Marshall in this way in The Letter and The Little Foxes.) In Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) he was a debonair conman romancing both Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis, in Blonde Venus (1932) Marlene Dietrich's husband, and in The Painted Veil (1934) Greta Garbo's husband. In The Good Fairy he gives a wonderful leading performance first as Luisa's dupe and then as the object of her romantic feelings. Under Luisa's influence, his pompous moralizing and emotional remoteness eventually give way to an unexpected capacity for warmth, humor, and affection, rather like the transformation effected by Katharine Hepburn's ditzy heiress on Cary Grant's uptight paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby. Marshall succeeds so well in his role not by trying to be funny but by playing it straight, by finding and bringing out the humor in the character rather than imposing it on the role with overtly comic mannerisms.
The supporting cast, on the other hand, is filled with character actors who rely on a comic persona, the kind of supporting players who contribute immeasurably to the pleasure the best American comedies of the 1930s and 1940s bring to viewers. Eric Blore, so memorable in the Astaire-Rogers movies and in The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels for Sturges, is great fun in the early section of the movie, especially in his tipsy scene. For once he plays not a butler or valet, but a government minister. Alan Hale has only a few scenes but leaves a distinct impression as the eccentric who hires Luisa as a movie theater usherette. Reginald Owen is by turns solicitous and overbearing as Luisa's protector the Waiter, who might just have romantic designs on her himself.
Best of all is the splendid Frank Morgan as the business tycoon chasing Luisa. He is really the prime mover of the plot; most of the things she does are in response to his actions. As for his pursuit of her, he is more a blustering, flustered big pussycat than a sly predator, a character not too dissimilar to the one he played in the greatest role of his career, Matuschek in Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner. In fact, I would say that his performance in The Good Fairy—the role is really quite large; he has nearly as much screen time as Marshall—is in my estimation exceeded only by his performance in that Lubitsch masterpiece.
That brings us back to Margaret Sullavan, the one person above all others who with her charming and radiant performance as Luisa makes The Good Fairy such a special film. Brooke Hayward, Sullavan's daughter, describes her mother in a way that I think applies equally to her performing style in this movie and others: "She didn't seem to talk, like other people, but to communicate information physically, as if she were leaning into whatever she was saying, not only with her voice—which even in a whisper crackled with electricity—but her entire body."
Earlier I wrote of the way Sullavan embodied in her film roles seemingly opposite qualities of character. Her life off-screen was typified by contradictions as well, specifically the conflict between her attitude to her personal life and her attitude to her professional life.
The slender, petite Sullavan (she was 5 feet 2½ inches tall) was born in Virginia in 1909. Originally she wanted to be a dancer before drifting into acting. She was by all accounts an active, athletic, tomboyish woman (she sometimes rode a motorcycle to the studio) described by her friend James Stewart, with whom she made four movies, as having "great humor." Henry Fonda (to whom she was married briefly, for about two months, in the early 1930s) agreed, calling her a "fun-loving" woman that "everybody loved": "There sure wasn't anybody who didn't fall under her spell."
Yet she had a very serious attitude toward her acting. She seemed to be driven more by a sense of professionalism than by personal ambition and found the trappings of celebrity a bothersome intrusion in her life. Her interest in movie acting apparently ended when the scene was finished; she never watched the daily rushes and never saw any of her completed movies. When her children insisted on seeing her last movie, No Sad Songs for Me (1950), she drove them to Radio City Music Hall in New York, where the film was playing, and waited for them outside the theater until the movie was over.
In 1934, during the filming of The Good Fairy, Sullavan eloped with her director, William Wyler. Quickly realizing the marriage had been a mistake, they divorced a little over a year later. In late 1936 she married Leland Hayward, a high-powered New York and Hollywood talent agent who had been her own agent since 1931. Between 1937 and 1941 they had three children, and in 1943 Sullavan retired from the screen to concentrate on her family. Hayward was apparently a compulsive workaholic, and his devotion to work placed a certain amount of strain on the marriage, with Sullavan feeling that he favored his career over her and the children.
After she stopped making movies, Sullavan's life was not always a happy one. The sense of fun that James Stewart and Henry Fonda noted sometimes crossed the line into capricious behavior, as her impetuous early marriages to Fonda and Wyler suggest. In 1945, against the wishes of her husband, she bought a ninety-five acre farm in Connecticut and moved the family there, isolating her husband, who hated the farm, in California for long periods of time. Then in 1947, ignoring the advice of friends who were aware of problems in the marriage, she suddenly decided to do a six-month tour of England in The Voice of the Turtle, a play she'd had great success with on Broadway a couple of years earlier. During this time Hayward, left alone, began an affair with the ex-wife of Howard Hawks, and after Sullavan returned from England they divorced.
Besides the end of her marriage to Leland Hayward, Sullavan experienced several other setbacks in her personal life in the late 1940s and 1950s. She suffered from a hearing disorder called otosclerosis, which, although treated surgically, still led to progressively greater hearing loss. Two of her three children suffered psychological troubles, evidently exacerbated by the divorce, and were at times hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. As teenagers these two became estranged from their mother, who had doted on them when they were younger, and chose to live instead with their father.
Although Sullavan appeared in several successful plays in the 1940s and 1950s, notably John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle and Samuel Taylor's Sabrina Fair, she became more and more ambivalent toward her profession and no longer found in it sufficient inspiration for the total commitment she felt was required. This growing disenchantment with performing ("I loathe acting," she is quoted as saying when she began rehearsals in late 1959 for what would have been her last Broadway play)—along with increasing problems with her hearing and what her daughter Brooke Hayward calls "the terrible anxiety that she had failed as a mother"—led to years of worsening insomnia and depression. Margaret Sullavan died of an overdose of barbiturates on New Year's Day 1960. There were indications that the overdose was unintentional, enough so for the coroner to rule her death accidental.
I think Henry Fonda was right when he described Margaret Sullavan as "unique," something that comes through clearly in the characters she played in her brief movie career. Perhaps because Sullavan's later life was so sad, The Good Fairy seems all the more special. In this movie she is exuberant and fresh, genuinely so, almost beyond what is called for in her role. The innocent, optimistic character of Luisa was the ideal showcase for the youthful sense of fun and energy that those who knew Margaret Sullavan described her as having as a young woman, enchanting qualities that are on full display in The Good Fairy and that make the movie so delightful.
All the quoted material and much of the biographical information come from the memoir written by Margaret Sullavan's daughter, Brooke Hayward, Haywire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
—Henry Fonda on Margaret Sullavan
The actress Margaret Sullavan starred in only seventeen movies in her screen career, all but one of them released in the ten years between 1933 and 1943. I first saw her in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940) a comedy in which her accomplished performance—she expertly suggests the seemingly contradictory character traits of confidence and vulnerability, strength and fragility, maturity and innocence—completely won me over. I thought I knew the great American actresses of the 1930s studio era, but I had barely even heard of her and never before seen her in anything. I did know she had won the New York Film Critic Circle award for best actress for her performance in Three Comrades (1938) and had also been nominated for an Oscar for that performance (her only nomination).So more than twenty years later, when I got the chance to see Three Comrades I made a point of not missing it. It is indeed a great performance in which Sullavan expresses many of the same paradoxical character qualities as in The Shop Around the Corner, but in a completely different context and to very different effect. Three Comrades is no charming Lubitsch confection, but rather an ultra-romantic tragedy directed by the master of such movies, Frank Borzage, for whom Sullavan made four pictures all together. Like Greta Garbo in Camille, Sullavan plays the mistress of a wealthy older man (although the movie is coy about the exact nature of their relationship) who falls in love with an innocent young man played, as in Camille, by Robert Taylor. Like Garbo in that film, Sullavan is a doomed tragic heroine dying of consumption. And she is very, very good. The entirely natural charm and undertone of wistful melancholy she projects makes it utterly believable that all three war buddies of the title would fall in love with her. Since then I've made an effort to see her in every movie of hers shown on TCM. Recently I was able to catch one of her earliest, The Good Fairy (1935), Sullavan's third movie.
The Good Fairy is, like The Shop Around the Corner, a comedy set in Budapest and also based on a play, this time by Ferenc Molnár. In it, Sullavan plays Luisa Ginglebuscher, a young woman plucked from an orphanage to work as an usherette in a large movie palace. Her character is immediately established as the personification of naïveté. She is first seen exuberantly telling a fairy tale—complete with a wicked fairy and a good fairy—to the youngest residents of the orphanage. She takes completely to heart the simplistic moral instruction she has received at the orphanage, including the admonition to perform one good deed a day, and sees herself as a real-life good fairy helping others realize their wishes. Few actresses could have made such a child-like character so convincing without making her seem childish, but Sullavan does.
No sooner is she out in the world than she is besieged by lecherous men seeking to take advantage of her obvious inexperience and vulnerability. Accosted outside the cinema one night by a glib would-be lothario (Cesar Romero), she escapes by claiming to be married and seizing as her mock-husband the first innocuous-looking man she sees walking down the street (Reginald Owen). He turns out to be a waiter at a grand hotel who, charmed by the girl, gets her an invitation to a ritzy ball at the hotel. Here she is approached by a horny millionaire (Frank Morgan) who immediately sets out to try to seduce her. When, with the help of her self-appointed protector the Waiter, she finally catches on to his intentions, she repeats the trick of claiming to be already married and while Morgan is out of the room picks the name of a lawyer, Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall), at random from the telephone book.
I have so far described only the first fifteen minutes or so of the movie. For the rest, suffice it to say that the situation Luisa has created quickly lurches out of control, snowballing into a series of deceptions, misunderstandings, and impromptu coverups that keep the complications coming without letup. Luisa is required to keep all these multiple fictions spinning in the air like balls while at the same time falling in love with Marshall, following her philosophy of doing good deeds, being a good fairy by attempting to engineer happy outcomes for those in whose lives she has become involved, and preserving her virtue by evading the sexual advances of the various men pursuing her. The plot might sound like Lubitsch, but the result is like a Lubitsch movie on speed.
The screenplay is based on a translation of a play by Ferenc Molnár, whose novels and plays were the basis of many, mostly light-hearted, movies, including The Guardsman (1931), starring Lunt and Fontanne, Rogers and Hammersein's Carousel (1956), The Swan (1956) with Grace Kelly and Alec Guinness, and Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three (1961). But for the screenplay of The Good Fairy, the material was considerably reworked by Preston Sturges, and it is his hand more than any other that comes through in the final film. This is a movie driven not by a genteel Eastern European sensibility but by pungent, wit-drenched dialogue, double-entendre (when Luisa talks about leaving "the asylum," nobody realizes she's referring to the orphans' asylum), farcical misunderstandings, risqué sexual innuendo, and a frenetic pace that resembles the most breathless of Howard Hawks's screwball comedies.
One episode that bears the unmistakable stamp of Sturges occurs in the movie theater where Luisa works. After showing a couple to their seats, she is so captivated by the movie, which is already playing, that she sits down and starts watching it. This movie-within-a-movie is a hilarious send-up of an overwrought tearjerker, complete with edits and tracking shots. The scenes we are shown consist of a distraught upper-class woman being separated from her child and evicted from their sumptuous apartment by her stiff-necked husband for some unstated moral transgression. As she pleads with him not to reject her, he sternly repeats one word over and over: "Go!" Always pointing to the door, he says this at least twenty times—never altering his delivery or intonation—until it becomes absurdly funny. The scene has Luisa in tears, but the viewer in stitches.
The director, surprisingly, is William Wyler, whose specialty was adaptations of novels (by authors including Sinclair Lewis, Emily Brontë, Theodore Dreiser, Somerset Maugham, even John Fowles) and plays by heavyweight dramatists like Sidney Kingsley and Lillian Hellman. By their nature, then, these were quite serious movies. This makes it all the more amazing that The Good Fairy, about the only outright comedy he ever directed, is such a funny movie.
Wyler was not associated with any one studio. Instead he worked at various studios and with various producers (he was for many years closely associated with the producer Samuel Goldwyn before he began producing his own pictures in the late 1940s) and thus had an unusual amount of control over his projects. This control meant he was able to use the best technicians, writers, and performers available, and there is no doubt that, as with his best work, the success of The Good Fairy is in large measure the result of this knack for assembling and presiding over the right personnel for the movie. I have already mentioned the contribution of Preston Sturges to the film. But even a script by a genius like Sturges achieves its full expression only with the right actors delivering those brilliantly written lines, and this movie is blessed with an exceptional cast.
Herbert Marshall was for several years in the 1930s a romantic leading man before moving on to supporting character roles. (Wyler himself would later use Marshall in this way in The Letter and The Little Foxes.) In Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) he was a debonair conman romancing both Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis, in Blonde Venus (1932) Marlene Dietrich's husband, and in The Painted Veil (1934) Greta Garbo's husband. In The Good Fairy he gives a wonderful leading performance first as Luisa's dupe and then as the object of her romantic feelings. Under Luisa's influence, his pompous moralizing and emotional remoteness eventually give way to an unexpected capacity for warmth, humor, and affection, rather like the transformation effected by Katharine Hepburn's ditzy heiress on Cary Grant's uptight paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby. Marshall succeeds so well in his role not by trying to be funny but by playing it straight, by finding and bringing out the humor in the character rather than imposing it on the role with overtly comic mannerisms.
The supporting cast, on the other hand, is filled with character actors who rely on a comic persona, the kind of supporting players who contribute immeasurably to the pleasure the best American comedies of the 1930s and 1940s bring to viewers. Eric Blore, so memorable in the Astaire-Rogers movies and in The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels for Sturges, is great fun in the early section of the movie, especially in his tipsy scene. For once he plays not a butler or valet, but a government minister. Alan Hale has only a few scenes but leaves a distinct impression as the eccentric who hires Luisa as a movie theater usherette. Reginald Owen is by turns solicitous and overbearing as Luisa's protector the Waiter, who might just have romantic designs on her himself.
Best of all is the splendid Frank Morgan as the business tycoon chasing Luisa. He is really the prime mover of the plot; most of the things she does are in response to his actions. As for his pursuit of her, he is more a blustering, flustered big pussycat than a sly predator, a character not too dissimilar to the one he played in the greatest role of his career, Matuschek in Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner. In fact, I would say that his performance in The Good Fairy—the role is really quite large; he has nearly as much screen time as Marshall—is in my estimation exceeded only by his performance in that Lubitsch masterpiece.
That brings us back to Margaret Sullavan, the one person above all others who with her charming and radiant performance as Luisa makes The Good Fairy such a special film. Brooke Hayward, Sullavan's daughter, describes her mother in a way that I think applies equally to her performing style in this movie and others: "She didn't seem to talk, like other people, but to communicate information physically, as if she were leaning into whatever she was saying, not only with her voice—which even in a whisper crackled with electricity—but her entire body."
Earlier I wrote of the way Sullavan embodied in her film roles seemingly opposite qualities of character. Her life off-screen was typified by contradictions as well, specifically the conflict between her attitude to her personal life and her attitude to her professional life.
The slender, petite Sullavan (she was 5 feet 2½ inches tall) was born in Virginia in 1909. Originally she wanted to be a dancer before drifting into acting. She was by all accounts an active, athletic, tomboyish woman (she sometimes rode a motorcycle to the studio) described by her friend James Stewart, with whom she made four movies, as having "great humor." Henry Fonda (to whom she was married briefly, for about two months, in the early 1930s) agreed, calling her a "fun-loving" woman that "everybody loved": "There sure wasn't anybody who didn't fall under her spell."
Yet she had a very serious attitude toward her acting. She seemed to be driven more by a sense of professionalism than by personal ambition and found the trappings of celebrity a bothersome intrusion in her life. Her interest in movie acting apparently ended when the scene was finished; she never watched the daily rushes and never saw any of her completed movies. When her children insisted on seeing her last movie, No Sad Songs for Me (1950), she drove them to Radio City Music Hall in New York, where the film was playing, and waited for them outside the theater until the movie was over.
In 1934, during the filming of The Good Fairy, Sullavan eloped with her director, William Wyler. Quickly realizing the marriage had been a mistake, they divorced a little over a year later. In late 1936 she married Leland Hayward, a high-powered New York and Hollywood talent agent who had been her own agent since 1931. Between 1937 and 1941 they had three children, and in 1943 Sullavan retired from the screen to concentrate on her family. Hayward was apparently a compulsive workaholic, and his devotion to work placed a certain amount of strain on the marriage, with Sullavan feeling that he favored his career over her and the children.
After she stopped making movies, Sullavan's life was not always a happy one. The sense of fun that James Stewart and Henry Fonda noted sometimes crossed the line into capricious behavior, as her impetuous early marriages to Fonda and Wyler suggest. In 1945, against the wishes of her husband, she bought a ninety-five acre farm in Connecticut and moved the family there, isolating her husband, who hated the farm, in California for long periods of time. Then in 1947, ignoring the advice of friends who were aware of problems in the marriage, she suddenly decided to do a six-month tour of England in The Voice of the Turtle, a play she'd had great success with on Broadway a couple of years earlier. During this time Hayward, left alone, began an affair with the ex-wife of Howard Hawks, and after Sullavan returned from England they divorced.
Besides the end of her marriage to Leland Hayward, Sullavan experienced several other setbacks in her personal life in the late 1940s and 1950s. She suffered from a hearing disorder called otosclerosis, which, although treated surgically, still led to progressively greater hearing loss. Two of her three children suffered psychological troubles, evidently exacerbated by the divorce, and were at times hospitalized in psychiatric institutions. As teenagers these two became estranged from their mother, who had doted on them when they were younger, and chose to live instead with their father.
Although Sullavan appeared in several successful plays in the 1940s and 1950s, notably John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle and Samuel Taylor's Sabrina Fair, she became more and more ambivalent toward her profession and no longer found in it sufficient inspiration for the total commitment she felt was required. This growing disenchantment with performing ("I loathe acting," she is quoted as saying when she began rehearsals in late 1959 for what would have been her last Broadway play)—along with increasing problems with her hearing and what her daughter Brooke Hayward calls "the terrible anxiety that she had failed as a mother"—led to years of worsening insomnia and depression. Margaret Sullavan died of an overdose of barbiturates on New Year's Day 1960. There were indications that the overdose was unintentional, enough so for the coroner to rule her death accidental.
I think Henry Fonda was right when he described Margaret Sullavan as "unique," something that comes through clearly in the characters she played in her brief movie career. Perhaps because Sullavan's later life was so sad, The Good Fairy seems all the more special. In this movie she is exuberant and fresh, genuinely so, almost beyond what is called for in her role. The innocent, optimistic character of Luisa was the ideal showcase for the youthful sense of fun and energy that those who knew Margaret Sullavan described her as having as a young woman, enchanting qualities that are on full display in The Good Fairy and that make the movie so delightful.
All the quoted material and much of the biographical information come from the memoir written by Margaret Sullavan's daughter, Brooke Hayward, Haywire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
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Kathleen Turner Pictures
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