I’ve been taking a break from this entertaining site for a while, but I didn’t want to completely disappear during Academy Award time.  As the Morlocks have each explored their varied and fascinating takes on the season over the past few weeks, I tried to rustle up some photos on the theme.  You know how winners are supposed to always be kissing their Oscars, giving thanks to the gold statuette after they win?  The action has evolved into a glorious pop culture cliche, but if an internet photo search is any indication, either the kisses have been highly over-reported or they’re nearly mythical.  Where are all those kisses, anyway?

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Gladys Cooper was a bit of a snob.

Not in the usual social way that you may infer from that remark, but as a working woman she had an attitude that hers was a job, like any other, a way of making a very good living at times.  Sometimes it meant acting in The Letter, or The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, or even Peter Pan at the age of 35. She was unacquainted with idleness, revelations of inner torment, and too many expressions of emotion off stage, taking pride in her toughness and the pleasure she derived from her work and her family.  Wearing Molyneux gowns and hawking some bloody face cream with her name on it was all part of the game, giving her an independence that very few women of her time would ever know. It also gave her a chance to do much more than the average woman as well–including bringing up her children, helping her extended family and friends, and having some very good times indeed traveling and indulging her greatest pleasure of creating a comfortable home wherever she was at the time.

At other, more meager times, being an actress was a discipline to be endured and “gotten on with” rather than analyzed or draped in much mystery. As a result of this refreshing no-nonsense attitude and the fact that she was her own producer for so many years when she ran her Playhouse in London, challenging plays and classical roles were not in her background as they were for her contemporaries Sybil Thorndike and Edith Evans. Her fellow actress, Dame Edith once confessed envy of her peer, commenting that she used to stand in the wings just to watch her face under the lights on stage, transfixed by Cooper‘s youthful beauty that was, she claimed, essentially unphotographable but  “enough to stop a bus”.

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In the second of four weeks devoted to character actors in classic films, my blog this week looks at an actor who had the authenticity of a pair of old shoes, but whose versatility indicated a man with a strong commitment to his art:

I had to laugh a bit when I saw Of Mice and Men (1939) on TCM recently. My amusement was not because of the still tender spot that this very American story touched on in the course of the film. Themes of loneliness, the longing for new beginnings and a home of one’s own are evergreen, but few would have predicted that this seventy year old tale is still controversial. The film, based on the novella and play by John Steinbeck, was critically hailed when it first came to theaters, receiving four Academy Award nominations, including that of Best Picture in that celebrated movie year of 1939.

At the same time, in its day, the novel, play and film were all dismissed by one unnamed critic in the conservative publication, The Catholic World, who wrote that “The first few pages nauseated me [so much] that I couldn’t bear to keep it in my room over night.” In June, 1939, the Providence, Rhode Island’s police bureau refused to license the film for exhibition in that city, describing the story as “lowdown”. A Christmas Eve showing of the movie at Ft. McClellan in December, 1939 prompted an Army chaplain to condemn this story as “morbid and degenerate”.  February, 1940 saw Of Mice and Men banned from the entire continent of Australia. Even in the 21st century, Steinbeck’s story Of Mice and Men is still being banned periodically by some library system or school board. A high school in St. Louis recently discussed the removal of the book from their reading lists because the language in the book included words that we would describe as “politically incorrect” today.  I couldn’t help wondering how amused one of the actors in this film, Roman Bohnen, (seen at left) a veteran of one of the more politically controversial acting troupes in American history up to that time, might have been to see this fresh controversy. Swimming against the prevailing tide was all in a day’s work for Bohnen.

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As TCM winds down a month featuring one of the greatest character actors who ever stole a picture, (Claude Rains, the September Star of the Month),  my appetite for  character actors in the spotlight has been whetted. Partly in response to repeated requests from those interested readers who frequent these pages, I thought a deserving glimpse of more supporting players might enliven the month of October. Each week this month, I’ll focus one of those actors who may not have been the stars of the show, but whose work invariably stood out from the crowd of “5000 others”. This week, I thought I’d tip my hat toward at least one of the gifted Russian émigrés who trained at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Maria Ouspenskaya, whose talent came out of that creative seedbed for some of the finest actors and boldest hams, stands out among them, despite being under five feet tall. Many of her colleagues lent their credibility and indelible gifts to Hollywood, but she may be the most readily identifiable of the bunch. While hightailing it away from the Cossacks, the Whites, the Reds, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, the anarchists and the fascists who made life a bit too “interesting” in the first half of the 20th century from Siberia to the shores of Ellis Island, several of these actors found a pretty fair living in Hollywood, among them Akim Tamiroff, Olga Baclanova, Vladimir Sokoloff, Leonid Kinskey and Konstantin Shayne. They may never have felt completely at home in what sometimes seemed the Babylonian splendor of “barbaric” American culture in the studio era. Cut off from their cultural roots and often having lost their families and nearly their lives during the revolutionary times they lived in, these actors often proved their strength of character and professional versatility when asked to play characters of almost every class and ethnicity in American movies.

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Who might have believed that one of the more unusual bits of movie star ephemera is making a vibrant comeback?  Movie star paper dolls, once a popular marketing tool (only they called it publicity back then) designed to satisfy the audience’s desire to get close to their favorite performers, were big sellers to little and not-so-little girls back in the day.  The popularity in the late 1950s of fashion dolls like Barbie was tied to the demise of the celebrity paper dolls as a big moneymaker, and so they fell out of style.  Collectors always sought out the vintage movie star collections, but it was the incredible skill and excellent timing of artist Tom Tierney which precipitated the revival of this charming art form.  Remembering the paper dolls his mother had collected and kept, in the mid-1970s Tom created his first movie star paper doll which led to a long-standing relationship with Dover Publications.  The rise of interest in classic movies which occurred at that time (That’s Entertainment, et al) provided the perfect opportunity for these unique paper dolls to catch on and he’s been going strong ever since, joined by other artists who have all helped revive this lovely tradition.

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Today would have been the 98th birthday of beloved actress and comedienne Lucille Ball, who died a little over twenty years ago.  Of course it’s almost impossible to believe that we no longer have Lucy with us, because she’s around us every day, as solid a piece of pop culture as there is anywhere.  Even if you haven’t watched an episode of I Love Lucy in years, when you do go back it’s like visiting with an old friend.  I recently watched a few on TV and honestly was completely charmed again — they retain every bit of their comedy bite and brilliance.  Though perhaps her television credits somewhat eclipsed her movie work in the minds of the public at large, Lucille Ball started in motion pictures as a chorus girl beauty in the early 1930s, and made 80 or so films before revolutionizing television comedy twenty years later.  In honor of the great Lucy, let’s look at some clips to remember and celebrate the redhead who was as funny as she was beautiful, and a hell of an all-around actress. 

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“Maybe all that I am in this world and all that I have been and done comes down to nothing more than being a touch of color in a prosaic world. Even that is something.” ~ Errol Flynn, writing in My Wicked, Wicked Ways

Well, no. It can’t be possible. Errol Flynn at 100 is unimaginable. Yet, as of Saturday, June 20th, the great swashbuckler of the sound era passed the one hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1909 in Tasmania. It may seem impossible that such a milestone has been reached without a bigger celebration in Flynn‘s adopted homeland of America. However, ask yourself: For true classic movie fans, haven’t we continued to celebrate and rediscover Errol Flynn and his evergreen films over and over in the years since he left this world?

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It would figure that one of my favorite MGM musicals is one of the least traditional of that studio’s output.  I absolutely love 1955′s It’s Always Fair Weather, and particularly the sly, larger-than-life, screen-busting performance of Dolores Gray as Madeline, the late-night television hostess.  Though she only co-starred in four major films, the iridescent Gray offered her formidable array of talents without reservation in all her roles, her effervescence cascading off the screen in roles that depended on her commanding presence.  Dolores was born on June 7, 1924, and passed away on June 26, 2002, her seventy-eight years filled with memorable performances that never failed to delight her fans and captivate the critics.

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