Her features were always considered too large to fit the Hollywood studio mold of prettiness, yet artist Isamu Noguchi sculpted a bust of uncommon beauty of her head and the elegant Cecil Beaton thought that what some have described as “melancholy features” made a fine photographic subject. The serene maternal warmth of her smile could shift into a dour and sometimes acerbic look but she could never, ever look dumb. When a role needed to convey a weariness of soul as well as body, along with a healthy streak of sarcasm, wise filmmakers sent for Aline MacMahon. One Hollywood casting director once placed Miss MacMahon “among the 10 smartest actresses, in a class with Miss Hepburn and Helen Hayes” in the 1930s. Maybe that sharp mind and knowing look she cultivated scared the Hollywood types off. “Brains” rarely seems to be the top criterion for casting in Hollywood in the ’30s, though MacMahon certainly gave movies a good try in that decade–fortunately for us.

Of Irish-English-Russian heritage, the New York born actress was the daughter of William MacMahon, for decades an editor of Munsey’s Magazine. Her mother, Jennie Simon MacMahon*, with the encouragement of her daughter, also took up acting in the 1930s at the age of 53. Aline was educated at Barnard College, the progressive women’s college that fostered many of New York’s brightest women. After college she studied drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse . Already acclaimed for her work on stage in everything from Shubert musicals such as Artists and Models (1925) to Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon (1926), MacMahon was a professional with a solid reputation, and a marriage to noted New York architect and innovative city planner, Clarence S. Stein, who was 18 years her senior. They had wed in 1928 after an extended courtship that began in her early twenties.

Hollywood did send for MacMahon in 1931. They hired her to transfer her role as a former vaudevillian teaching the silent stars to speak in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart‘s 1930 satire on the excesses and eccentricities of the Hollywood crowd, called Once in a Lifetime. For whatever reason, that film production was delayed until 1932. Sadly, this film, which was broadcast on PBS about 30 years ago, remains largely unseen to this day. Having seen it once on that occasion on public television, I remember it as one of the funniest movies ever, (along with another movie from the same era that cast a similarly jaundiced eye on most human activity, Million Dollar Legs).

Since Warner Brothers never wished to have one of their contractees idle, they cast her opposite their new star, Edward G. Robinson in Five Star Final (1931), one of the darkest films about journalism ever made. The still powerful, sadly relevant story was based on a play by Louis Weitzenkorn, the managing editor of the notoriously lurid New York Evening Graphic who exposed the scurrilous practices of that era’s “paparazzi” press in the drama. MacMahon, as Robinson‘s conscience as well as his secretary, continuously plants seeds of doubt in her boss’ path, even as she protects him from the chaos around him. When, under pressure from the owner and publisher to increase circulation, Robinson decides to expose the life of a woman who committed a crime two decades before by dredging up her trial and conviction in the paper, MacMahon has a line that rings true to this day: “I think you can always get people interested in the crucifixion of a woman.” Aline, with a modicum of dialogue and plenty of attitude, presents a character who is both sensible and sensitive to the damage being done to both the public and the worthwhile man she loyally works for on the paper. She is disturbed by his self-disgust and his drinking, but is unable to reach him enough to change his behavior. Philosophically opposed yet resigned to the things people do to make a living, she is not unaware of her own guilt either.

Plainly enamored if disapproving of her boss’ tactics, MacMahon exhibited a directness in her first film role that would often be characteristic of her no-nonsense characters throughout her career. When an increasingly stressed Robinson finally asks her for some of her wisdom, she matter-of-factly tells him “If you want my opinion, take me to a speakeasy. I’m not working for you then.” How fortunate for the actress that she would find herself in the fast company of Robinson and under the sharp, concise direction of Mervyn LeRoy in her first film. After Five Star Final opened to good reviews, and proved to be a box office winner as well as an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture in 1932, Warners offered MacMahon a long term contract at this time, reportedly offering her possible stardom after she scored with critics and audiences as the secretary (again) to Warren William‘s scalawag attorney in The Mouthpiece (1932) .  Even better was her sly turn as the grifter “Countess Barilhaus” (aka Barrel House Betty) in the underrated director Tay Garnett‘s bittersweet romance, One Way Passage starring William Powell and Kay Francis as doomed lovers. Given an opportunity to act in well written Robert Lord scripted scenes with such seasoned players as Powell, Frank McHugh and a subdued Warren Hymer as a cop she falls for, Aline‘s comic timing and gift for conveying emotional yearning complemented the wistful note of this very entertaining movie. Perhaps this very intense period of work (she made 7 movies in 1932 alone) seemed to indicate that Warners would build her career as a character leading lady. Yet, when an interviewer in the 1970s mentioned that she spurned stardom and pursued artistry instead, MacMahon scoffed gently. Explaining that luck and personal circumstances played a role in her career too, was stardom something she wanted? “Of course I did, dear.” she quietly confirmed, though studio publicity at the time claimed that the actress preferred her supporting parts, even when this meant that she was paired ten times with much older character actor Guy Kibbee in a slew of sometimes very good, occasionally forgettable films. Aline’s authoritative yet warm manner and statuesque appearance gave her the gravitas to play the blustering, pixiesh Kibbee‘s foil, despite the fact that their pairing led to MacMahon‘s being typecast as older than she was throughout her early Hollywood career. Often she was consigned to playing a harried wife and mother to a working class family of near caricatures, as one can see in this clip from The Merry Frinks (1934), but Aline remained a calm central focus of each scene, deftly mining what humor and truth she could from the sometimes hackneyed screenplays, despite the hubbub around her. Perhaps the Kibbee-MacMahon team had their best moments on screen together in Gold Diggers of 1933, another film directed by Mervyn LeRoy in his early career style, telling his story at a breakneck speed that is highly entertaining and often pointedly realistic.

It is also one of the films in which, as critic Molly Haskell pointed out, “the gold diggers…were played by smart, snappy actresses like Joan Blondell… and Aline MacMahon, [and they] set out to make their way in a man’s world but on their own terms… This is one of the few genres and occasions where there’s a real feeling of solidarity among women.” Whether stealing milk from their neighbors to avoid starving or pooling their wardrobe to give one girl a decent outfit to seek out work, they work together, looking out for each other whenever possible.

Aline MacMahon, as Trixie Lorraine, plays the toughest of the chorines. Awaking to no work, few prospects and little food, she asks her room mates to “Excuse me while I fix up the old sex appeal. The way I feel this morning I’ll need a steam shovel.” As a somewhat older, world-weary chorus girl rooming with Joan Blondell and Ruby Keeler in companionable penury, Joan and Aline eventually zero in on the hapless Kibbee and Warren William, two stuffed shirt bankers trying to “save” songsmith Dick Powell from a life of sin in show biz. At first this is a form of diversionary revenge for their interference with the inevitable Powell-Keeler romance, but the girls are not above relishing a night out on the town with the suckers, even if it means playing up every cliché about show girls. We also have those bizarre yet fascinating Busby Berkeley Depression-minded musical sequences on film, including the relentlessly cheery “We’re in the Money” and the compelling dirge-like “The Forgotten Man”, though Aline is only featured in the downright creepy “Pettin’ in the Park” musical sequence. Neither the silly story nor the kaleidoscopic musical numbers take the edge off the painful edge of real Depression era poverty that gives the film its underlying extra power. Aline MacMahon‘s tart delivery of pointedly timely lines gives the film some real grounding in reality. When rich boy Dick Powell threatens to walk out on the show that is employing many desperate show folk, she makes sure that he knows that the show closing without him would mean that a lot of girls would be forced to do things that she “wouldn’t want on my conscience.”

During the 1930s Aline MacMahon appeared in 29 feature films including many that are best forgotten or that I cannot do justice to in one article, though movies such as Heroes for Sale (1933), Ah, Wilderness (1935) and Kind Lady (1935) have, happily stood the test of time and are occasionally broadcast on TCM. Among the five films that she made with Mervyn LeRoy in this decade, one particular film stands out for me.

Heat Lightning (1934), which is showing on TCM on April 18th at 11:15AM ET, features one of Aline‘s best early performances as Olga, a woman whose disappointments in life have led her to deny every vestige of conventional femininity. Operating a gas station in New Mexico, the woman MacMahon plays has turned her back on love, and all its conventional trappings. She wears overalls, and mocks her lonely sister’s longing for a relationship, explaining that “Whatever I was before, I’m different now. I started fresh and clean.” Being conventionally female, looking for men and dressing to catch their eye used to be her “racket”, but now her strong, capable character believes that desire destroys her chance at independence. By withdrawing from the world to a place so arid of company, (save her sister Ann Dvorak), that she shuts all thought of it out of her mind, she believes that she is at peace when she sheds any semblance of flirtatiousness and spends her days fixing cars.

Yet, she isn’t free, of course. For a fast 63 minute movie set in a godforsaken outpost in the desert, it fairly teems with characters (and some good actors), as the isolated gas station/greasy spoon restaurant is soon boiling over with trouble from a divorcee (Ruth Donnelly), her wisecracking chauffeur (Frank McHugh), and her pal (Glenda Farrell). Jane Darwell & Edgar Kennedy show up as a serio-comic couple who are living examples of the kind of marital fate that Aline is attempting to avoid. You can see a bit of the intensity that Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak brought to their roles in Heat Lightning in this trailer:

Most significantly, Preston Foster & Lyle Talbot pop up as troubling males, reuniting her with one who stirs Aline’s once repressed desires. Acknowledging defeat, MacMahon barely conceals her self-contempt as she dons a dress and makeup and unties her mane of hair and asks him if “A few duds make quite a change in a woman, don’t they?” Though this slice of desert life illuminates one of the dilemmas of the New Woman of that period, (and preceded Robert E. Sherwood’s very similar The Petrified Forest on Broadway and in the movies by several years), it is characteristic of Aline MacMahon‘s screen persona. Blunt, bright and bound to some degree to the patriarchal world that she thought she might escape.

While she was under contract at Warner Brothers, Aline lived largely on the West Coast while her husband Clarence Stein pursued his career in New York and Washington, where he worked as an adviser to the Roosevelt administration on community redevelopment and the introduction of the “greenbelt” concept in public housing projects during the New Deal, along with his innovative colleague, Lewis Mumford. Lonely and overworked, frustrated by the sometimes conservative bureaucracy he had to contend with in hsi job, Stein, it is indicated in his letters, began to suffer from debilitating bouts of what may have been a form of manic-depression in her absence. His wife and he tried to spend more time together away from their demanding careers and his strength gradually returned.

Aline and Clarence travelled and, partly preparation for a hoped-for part in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth being planned at MGM, they visited China together just a year before the Japanese invasion. Aline did not win that part, perhaps in part due to the sheer number of appearances made in mediocre Warner Brothers products. She did return to the New York stage in the forties and in 1944, almost made up for that film role that got away by her Academy Award nominated appearance as a Stoic Chinese matriarch in Dragon Seed opposite Walter Huston. Today we may be puzzled by the casting of Western actors in such movies, though author Pearl Buck, (who was appalled by some of the liberties taken with Chinese customs by stars such as Katharine Hepburn and by the set designers), found MacMahon, and real life Asian actors Philip Ahn and Benson Fong (in small roles in the film) to be quite credible as the characters she knew so well. Critics also voiced concern over the casting choices, but generally were kindest toward Aline and Huston as the elder dogged and brave peasants. Dragon Seed (1944) will be shown again on TCM on June 12th at 10:30PM ET as part of the network’s showcase on Asian themed films during the month of June.

The best film role of the forties for Aline, however, may have been her role as Mrs. Mallory in Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948). As the careworn, professional but compassionate volunteer who attempts to help Ivan Jandl find his mother and who unwittingly tries to help his grieving mother give up searching for her child since their separation during the Holocaust she is a vital supporting character. Never an actress given to over-emotionality, she underplays her role but makes her character an unforgettable individual in all her brief scenes, particular those between her and Montgomery Clift in one of his earliest and very best performances on screen. One contemporary observer wrote in Sight and Sound after seeing this film that “although she is a secondary observer, one is always curious to know more about her”…”She brings a nobility to the part, a kind of native sagacity that lingered in my childhood impressions of her as one of the sharp-tongued, brittle Gold Diggers of 1933…”

Her moving scenes, particularly as she strove to help Clift, Jandl and Jarmila Novotna as the boy’s inconsolable mother, were, as always with Aline MacMahon, economical, precise and memorable, suggesting deep wells of emotion rather than acting them out externally. This film, which I hadn’t seen until recently in many years, seems to grow in power. Despite the fact that critics still often seem to dismiss the cinematic style of Fred Zinnemann‘s movies, I find this one more affecting now than when I first saw it. Clift‘s fresh, unmannered performance and the heartrending rapport he develops with the haunting Ivan Jandl combine with Aline’s matter-of-fact style to produce one of the best movies of that period. The Search (1948) will be shown again on TCM on April 26th at 6:00AM ET.

Unfortunately, after appearing in what would prove her best film of her career, MacMahon‘s film career suffered a blow. As with many individuals involved in art and politics in the thirties and forties, Aline MacMahon (and her architect husband Clarence Stein) became tainted by the Hollywood Greylist during the McCarthy era. Though she was able to secure strong supporting roles in such films as The Flame and the Arrow (1950) and The Man From Laramie (1955), her movie roles were curtailed. With her usual commonsense approach and strong stage training, Aline found ready work on stage, as well as in the less rigidly blacklisted live television productions of the early to late fifties. She earned particular raves for her performances in plays by T.S. Eliot, Sean O’Casey and in an adaptation of James Agee‘s brilliant, poetic story A Death in the Family, which became All the Way Home on stage. When she transferred her role to the screen in 1963 Aline was singled out for praise by critics.

Aline “retired” from films, assisting supporting many relief and theatrical charities. She joined New York’s Lincoln Repertory troupe and appeared in several distinguished productions there until 1975, when appropriately, she appeared for the last time professionally in Pinero‘s valentine to the hurly-burly of the theatrical life, Trelawney of the Wells, which also happened to be the first play Ms. MacMahon had first performed on stage over half a century earlier. at a production staged at Aline’s alma mater, Barnard College. In the cast was a young actress whose career would soon take off: Meryl Streep, who may have learned a few things from the elder actress.

In 1991, at the age of 92, after outliving her beloved husband for 17 years and her mother for another 6, Aline MacMahon died of pneumonia. 70 years before an awestruck Alexander Woolcott was taken with her “extraordinary beauty and vitality and truth” and Noel Coward found her “astonishing, moving and beautiful.” In another time, we’d never have a clue as to who or what qualities they were reacting to then. Isn’t it fine that we live in a period when we can still know someone’s work thanks to the movies?

*Aline MacMahon‘s mother appeared in small stage roles under the name Jennie Mac and in several films directed by her nephew and Aline’s cousin, S. Sylvan Simon, who was a contract director at MGM for several years during the studio’s heyday. In one film, the delightful Tish [1942], about a gaggle of eccentrics raising an orphan, Jennie Mac appeared in an uncredited role on screen opposite her daughter, Aline. The cast was led by Marjorie Main and rounded out by Zasu Pitts, Aline and Susan Peters as the orphan. Jennie Simon MacMahon lived to be 107, dying in 1985, seven years before her talented daughter.

Sources:

Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1970, Wesleyan University Press, 1995.

Navasky, Victor, Naming Names, Hill and Wang, 2003.

Shipman, David, The Great Movie Stars, Crown Publishers, 1978.

The Clarence S. Stein Papers at Cornell University.