Since Joan Fontaine turned 90 last Monday, on October 22, 2007, perhaps this is an appropriate moment to re-evaluate some of her work. I find her to be a truly interesting actress in a few films, some of which are little seen now.

Despite a shaky career start, (compared to that of her sister Olivia de Havilland, at least), as the monotonously sweet heroine in B movies at RKO in the ’30s, and a marked tendency to rely on her considerable ladylike hauteur in later roles, Joan Fontaine appeared to exceptional effect in a handful of films in the 1940s.

When Fontaine had the opportunity to work with imaginative directors with a distinctive point of view, she had a run of movies that captured something poetic and yet fiercely determined in her characters. Few other actresses had quite her luck, or her ability to communicate the foolhardy romanticism and vulnerability that can live inside a young woman, teetering on the brink of maturity and self-knowledge.

Mention the name of Joan Fontaine today, and you’ll most likely evoke an extreme reaction from classic movie spectators. The actress may be reviled by those who find Fontaine to be coldly elegant and for many she may be more well-known for an alleged “feud” with her sister, Olivia de Havilland than for her own dramatic work. Others may cherish her work from Rebecca (1940) on, despite, or because of the remarkably uneven nature of her career. I find her most appealing films to be among her least seen by the general public. For the purposes of this brief article, I’ll concentrate on three films that deserve mention, which are This Above All (1942), The Constant Nymph 1943), and Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948). Only the last film is readily available on dvd, and I have not seen it on broadcast cable in some time.

A friend once told me that he disliked her because “she plays such a human doormat” in so many allegedly “weepie” movies. Hmmm, has he seen Born to Be Bad or Ivy, in which Fontaine attempted to tailor her proper appearance into that of a noirish bad girl and a rather complex, gothic vixen? His comment reminded me that her somewhat tattered reputation may be affected by the fact that the world has definitely moved on since her best films were made. (It also made me wonder if a good dose of estrogen might be a prerequisite for enjoying her films?). At her best, Fontaine often seems to have been playing women not just as the movies allowed us to idealize them. A feisty Katharine Hepburn or a fast-talking Rosalind Russell may be more remembered now, but Joan Fontaine‘s seemingly placid, passive characters, who, beneath the surface, are also flawed human beings, trapped by society’s definitions of the female role and often only dimly aware of and vexed by her own turbulent nature and longings. This contradictory figure that she could embody so well has ceased to be dramatically viable, but I’m not sure if it is still a valid creation, reflecting society and nature.

Indeed, a strong case could be made that Joan Fontaine‘s early screen persona as the fair flower of English womanhood reflected a Victorian ideal which had already passed out of reality by the time Hollywood Anglophiles tried to bring this type to the screen in numerous American films glorifying the British Empire, such as The Lives of the Bengal Lancer, Wee Willie Winkie and one of Fontaine’s better early films, Gunga Din (1939), directed by George Stevens. Her role as the human monkey wrench being thrown into the well-oiled adventures of Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. is negligible, except for the director’s devotion of a few moments of film time to some rapturous closeups of Fontaine and Fairbanks, (which would, as film historian Rudy Behlmer pointed out, provide Stevens with a template for the Montgomery Clift-Elizabeth Taylor extreme closeups in the memorable A Place in the Sun years later.).

Fontaine, (born Joan De Beauvoir De Havilland), came by her air of aristocratic refinement and insecurity naturally through her parents’ ancestry (which included 2 English kings), and her parent’s divorce and eventual second marriages, which contributed to the very rough childhood of the two sisters in Japan (where the girls were born) and California, (where their formidable mother married a dictatorial martinet when they were still very young). Joan Fontaine‘s slight blonde prettiness combined with a hesitant manner suggested some unanswered yearning within her that made several of her characters particularly memorable. Oddly, it seems to have also led to her being cast in roles in which she is often described as “plain”. Well, maybe that was true by the flashier standards of old Hollywood. Perhaps it’s the contrast between the composed surface that Fontaine could show to the world and the turmoil beneath this veneer that made her an effective figure. What one critic has termed “her curious passivity as a female figure” allowed the actress to convincingly play roles as varied as a naïve gamine to an icy bitch when directed by a Hitchcock, George Cukor, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Edmund Goulding, Robert Wise, Ida Lupino, Nicholas Ray and Max Ophüls.

One director who managed to bring out the banked fires in the actress by exploiting the apparently sophisticated young woman’s insecurities was Alfred Hitchcock during the filming of Rebecca(1940). The director’s “divide and conquer” tactics, encouraging Fontaine to believe that she was an “outcast from the Hollywood British colony” and David O. Selznick‘s exacting demands as producer, as well as the notoriously brusque treatment she received from a disgruntled Laurence Olivier, who would have preferred Vivien Leigh in the part, combined to make Fontaine feel as though she was the nameless central character of Daphne du Maurier’s novel. Apparently, Hitchcock found that Joan was a suitably malleable actress and he had her repeat his idea of another not entirely cool blonde in the less successful adaptation of Frederick Iles novel, Suspicion (1942). Joan Fontaine received an Academy Award for this performance, (though arguably she deserved it more for Rebecca than Suspicion).

Actually, as iconic as her characters could be, the rather naïve, tentative characters that Ms. Fontaine sometimes played best, were, in some ways, passé even then. Looking back on that period, it occurred to me that the best remembered films of that war torn era often showed women as strong and independent partners with men.

Fontaine‘s only real war movie, This Above All(1942), directed by Anatole Litvakand based on a fairly adult novel by the author of the Lassie series, Eric Knight, paired her with a class conscious deserter (played by Tyrone Power, who, you will pardon my observing, is at his most earnestly puppyish here, with just a hint of the Larry Darrell to come in The Razor’s Edge in ’46). The film presents pure Joan as Prudence Cathaway—oh, that name(!)—an embodiment of valiant English womanhood, whose eloquently expressed love for him inspires Power to return to the call of his country. In a well written and beautifully delivered wartime propaganda speech, Fontaine points out that the England Power loathes also made him. In order to have a chance in the future to take on the inequities of the society, she finds herself urging him to fight against the greater evil of fascism, despite the fact that she knows he stands a good chance of being killed. Fontaine fully communicates this awareness via the break in her voice as she mouths the words, steeling herself to be alone, trying to convince herself as well as her lover of the necessity of her valediction.

Despite this apparent contradiction in her behavior, the sincerity of Fontaine‘s performance grounds the movie and contributes to its more moving moments, especially when she finds herself, against her personal interests, pointing out to Tyrone Power that they happen to have been born in a time when the common good is more important than personal satisfaction. She imbues her most touching scenes with a tragic understanding of the transience of life, and a determination to cherish the ephemeral moments as they pass by. It is a soap opera, but one with more than a grain of real feeling, enhanced by the glorious black and white cinematography of the masterly Arthur Miller and Alfred Newman‘s sweeping musical score.

The film that Joan Fontaine made immediately after This Above All would prove that the sensitivity she displayed since Rebecca were not entirely a fluke, or a well-packaged Hitchcock product, but evidence of a gifted actress. The Constant Nymph, which was directed by Edmund Goulding in 1943, was later recalled by the actress as “the happiest motion-picture assignment of [her] career.”

The closed set, the attention to detail, the luxury of rehearsal time, a fine cast, as well as her clear affinity for the character that she played blended together to make an intensely felt movie. The Constant Nymph (1943) is probably Joan Fontaine‘s least known film today, despite the fact that the actress received an Oscar nomination for the role. Due to the terms of the author Margaret Kennedy’s will, this Warner Brothers film has been mired in litigious limbo for decades. The generosity of a friend who lives abroad enabled me to view a dvd-r of this movie recently.

The book of “The Constant Nymph”, which has been filmed three times, (including once with Fontaine’s first husband, Brian Aherne in the Charles Boyer role in an English production in 1934), is concerned with a family of bohemian musicians, the Sangers. The character of Tessa, embodied beautifully by Fontaine, is a teenage girl with a heart condition who has been hopelessly in love with an older, self-absorbed family friend since childhood. The excellent cast of the film is led by Charles Boyer as the oblivious composer, Alexis Smith as his aristocratic, neglected wife, and in a welcome, if brief, benign part, Peter Lorre, is glimpsed playing a generous family friend who marries one of Joan’s sisters in the film (Brenda Marshall).

Fontaine, who played a convincing near child, received enormous support from Goulding during the production. Goulding was described by the director’s biographer, Matthew Kennedy, as often having sat next to Fontaine at the rehearsal table, and when “discussing a scene, he said tenderly, ‘There are women in the audience who will know and understand.’ That was all she needed to hear to deliver the desired effect.”

In sharp contrast to the insecure shadow of a character in Hitchcock’s Rebecca and the paranoid wife in Suspicion, Fontaine‘s Tessa is endearingly fey, blissfully and enthusiastically unaware of her wild hair or ragamuffin appearance and full of tenderly expressed, unrequited love for Boyer. The only other actress who even came close to this kind of unself-conscious abandon to the world’s expectations, (and certainly to Hollywood’s expectations), might possibly be Audrey Hepburn in a very different film, Roman Holiday.

Bringing this novel to the screen, of course, forced the filmmakers to allude to the emotions and half-realized desires of the characters. The book could be much more explicit about the implications of what today would probably become a Lolita-like story, but at the time the Production Code standards may actually have enhanced the romantic theme of the film. The restrictions on the storytelling and the taste with which Goulding and his co-workers used in bringing this story to the screen helped to underline the spiritual element of the tale.

The secret bond that Boyer and Fontaine form as she gradually becomes his muse, inspiring him to write a surpassingly beautiful work, parallels the girl’s evolution from child to young woman. All the characters’ conflicting emotions, including those of Alexis Smith, whose role as a catalyst for the revelation of hidden emotions, are carefully nuanced. Smith, who does what may be the best work of her career in her confrontation scenes with Boyer and Fontaine brings unexpected force and poignancy to her part of the rejected spouse.
The discretion forced on Edmund Goulding and his actors actually intensifies the emotional crescendo of the story, which is magnified by the beauty of Korngold‘s lush score, particularly during the climactic symphonic tone poem, entitled “Tomorrow”.

Charles Boyer, whose character up until the tragic denouement is fairly sketchy, comes to life in the last scenes when he realizes too late that Tessa (Fontaine) is the love of his life, despite the gulf between them of years and experience. It’s clear that Joan Fontaine had an affinity with her character and her director throughout this film.

As she said once, “Eddie knew the problems of actors and he solved them—the need for reassurance, to feel a part of the whole. To be cosseted, to be aware of the subtleties of the role, to be gently, kindly guided. He did this for me in ‘The Constant Nymph’.” The legal obscurity that keeps this film from exhibition on television and in commercial dvd is truly unfortunate. As one commentator noted, “it may be one of the most truly romantic movies of the 1940s.”

The final film in our trilogy may also be the most satisfying artistically and emotionally. Directed by Max Ophüls, Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948) begins around 1900 with a Viennese man (Louis Jourdan) preparing to leave before a dreaded duel in the morning. He receives a letter from a woman (Joan Fontaine) he doesn’t know, stating that “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead…. If this reaches you, you will know how I became yours when you didn’t know who I was or even that I existed.”

Based on a novella by Austrian Stefan Zweig, this film explores how the idea of love and the longing for it have warped the life of the Lisa character (Fontaine) since childhood. Told episodically in evocative flashbacks framed by Fontaine’s voiceover, it is a portrait of a girl’s and later a woman’s devotion—or is it enslavement?—to an abstract ideal of romantic love begins when an adolescent Lisa is beguiled by her new neighbor’s luxurious looking furniture as it is moved into the house next door. When she first hears him playing the piano next door, and before she sees Stefan (Jourdan), she is smitten and immediately concerned that she sensitively perceives him to be an unhappy man. As Lisa embraces her fantasy of love for this unseen neighbor, Fontaine, using her beautifully modulated voice in narration of the letter, explains that “as hard as it may be for you to realize, from that moment on I was in love with you. Quite consciously, I began to prepare myself for you.” Eventually, this illusory commitment to Jourdan extends to a refusal of a proposal from a likely suitor, since, as Lisa explains, she is already spoken for.

Each episode after this follows Lisa as she pursues the jaded pianist, projecting on him her yearning for a romantic ideal, which may be unattainable and may be illusory. She eventually becomes involved with him, relishing every moment of her time with Stefan, which to him is nothing but another diversion, almost a one-night stand. Lisa never fully faces the reality of her situation, even when her beloved leaves her coldly and she marries another man hurriedly when she finds herself pregnant. All this, in less skilled hands than Ophüls, wouldn’t have achieved the level of film artistry without the director’s sympathetic, yet critically roaming eye follows his characters relentlessly, particularly the woman incarnated by Fontaine. The beautiful adaptation of the source material by Howard Koch helps to lift this movie above the ordinary level of a “woman’s picture, as does the exquisitely detailed art direction by Alexander Golitzen and cinematography of Franz Planer, so evident in such scenes as when Stefan and Lisa take a ride on an amusement park “train trip” with a man cranking a roll of scenery mimicking the unfurling of various illusory landscapes for the couple who are self-consciously beginning their pretense (for him, at least), of a romantic involvement.
As one essayist wrote in analyzing Ophuls’ film, “Letter From an Unknown Woman is at once an elegy to the tragic waste brought about by this immersion in an impossible dream, and a celebration of the triumph of the dream over time; in the paradox lies the film’s poignance” This illusion gives shape to Lisa’s life while it robs it of any reality. Only at the end of the film do we realize that the letter that she has sent to her dissolute former lover is meant as a cri de coeur: a final plea that her existence should finally be acknowledged by this vain and shallow man, who cannot remember ever knowing her. His lack of realization of her love for him, and his complete inability to give love is a fact that, in the end, kills her.

The demure, old fashioned, almost Victorian persona that Joan Fontaine had honed for a decade on film before this project found full flower in this movie.

Her depth of characterization is complete here, expressed in her rigid body language, her almost fearful glances at Stefan in one of the few actual encounters she has with him, and her self-aggrandizing yet heartbreaking expression as she sees him leaving on a train. Joan Fontaine had a gift for expressing the foolishness of the all too hasty heart.

As Hollywood changed, Fontaine never again had an opportunity to explore the depth of her talent as she did in Letter from an Unknown Woman, and slipped back into playing stock bad girls, pleasant companions, idealized heroines, and dissatisfied women with sharp tongues in such films as Born to Be Bad, September Affair, Ivanhoe, and Tender is the Night. This film, which like the other two films discussed here had, according to producer John Houseman, a mixed critical reception and was not a financial success at the time of its release. Since then, this movie has found an audience and is the widely available on dvd. Maybe someday, even those who think they don’t like Joan Fontaine as an actress will discover these movies. Each offers a more complex and varied portrait of a woman in conflict with reality.

Sources:
Behlmer, Rudy, Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century Fox, Grove Press, 1995.
Fontaine, Joan, No Bed of Roses, Morrow, 1978.
Houseman, John, Front & Center 1942/1955, Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Kennedy, Matthew, Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory, Univ. of Wisc.Press, 2004.
Pye, Douglas, Falling Women and Fallible Narrators, (Criticism of Max Ophuls Work), CineAction, Spring, 2002.