#second sight cinema

Post under construction: It will be live on Saturday, please come back then, thanking you! 

Notorious is one of Hitchcock’s greatest films, an espionage thriller and romance that rewards multiple viewings and can stand multiple readings. When I was younger, what stood out for me was the onscreen chemistry between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, both at their most devastatingly attractive, and the swoonworthy kissing scene set on the terrace of Alicia’s (Bergman’s) apartment in Rio. Since they met in scene 2, Alicia and Devlin (Grant) have been circling each other warily and hungrily, Flashes of desire and distrust, feints and taunts, punctuate Ben Hecht’s perfectly pitched dialogue. 

This post was written for the ‘Til Death Do Us Part blogathon, July 24, 2017, hosted by CineMaven’s Essays from the Couch. Go see the other excellent submissions here.

Yes. We do love each other. We’ve loved each other all our lives, and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.”

Still putting together this post, but please come back later today and read about this extraordinary romantic fantasy. Thank you for your patience, it’s been kind of nuts around here! 

  “Peter, listen to me! Don’t you understand? We’re dreaming together, just as we did once before.”

“But…it isn’t real.”

“Who is to say what is real and what is not real? We’re dreaming true, a dream that is more than a dream.” 

      This post was written for the 2017 CMBA Spring Blogathon. Read all the other posts here. 

Flicker Alley and a group of amazing sites for fans of silent and classic film are proud to bring you this giveaway for Behind the Door (1919) on Dual-Format Edition Blu-ray/DVD.

Legendary producer Thomas H. Ince and director Irvin V. Willat made this—͞the most outspoken of all the vengeance films according to film historian Kevin Brownlow—during the period of World War I-inspired American patriotism. Hobart Bosworth stars as Oscar Krug, a working-class American, who is persecuted for his German ancestry after war is declared. Driven by patriotism, Krug enlists and goes to sea. However, tragedy strikes when his wife (Jane Novak) sneaks aboard his ship and is captured following a German U-boat attack. Krug’s single-minded quest for vengeance against the sadistic German submarine commander (played with villainous fervor by Wallace Beery) leads to the film’s shocking and brutal climax.

This newly restored edition represents the most complete version of the film available since 1919,thanks to the collaboration of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Library of Congress, and Gosfilmofond of Russia. Sourced from the only two known remaining prints and referencing a copy of Willat’s original continuity script, this edition recreates the original color tinting scheme and features a new score composed and performed by Stephen Horne. Flicker Alley is honored to present Behind the Dooron Blu-ray and DVD for the first time ever.

Bonus Materials Include:

Original Russian version of Behind the Door: The re-edited and re-titled version of the film that was distributed in Russia, with musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne.

Original Production Outtakes: Featuring music composed and performed by Stephen Horne.

Restoring Irvin Willat’s Behind the Door:An inside look at the restoration process with the restoration team.

Kevin Brownlow, Remembering Irvin Willat: Directed by Patrick Stanbury, an in-depth interview with renowned historian and honorary Academy Award® winner Kevin Brownlow on the career of director Irvin Willat.

Slideshow Gallery: Original lobby cards, production stills, and promotional material.

12-page Booklet: Featuring rare photographs and essays by film historian Jay Weissburg, film restorer Robert Byrne, and composer Stephen Horne.

  Official Release Date: April 4, 2017 Pre-order now at the special sale price of $29.95 for a limited time!

Giveaway Hosted By: Flicker Alley

Co-Hosted By: Nitrateville Silent Era Once Upon a Screen Silent-ology Ferdy on Films Caren’s Classic Cinema Toronto Film Society Spellbound By Movies A Classic Movie Blog Second Sight Cinema Sister Celluloid Cinematic Catharsis Classic Movie Man Old Hollywood Films Thrilling Days of Yesteryear True Classics

One lucky winner will receive a copy of Behind the Door (1919) on Dual-Format Edition Blu-ray/DVD from Flicker Alley! Giveaway is open to residents of U.S./Canada and ends on April 12, 2017.

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Please watch the trailer above and let me know what your favorite part was in the comments below!

I had the extraordinary pleasure of my first viewing of Children of Divorce

I had no expectations before seeing Children of Divorce—I had never heard of it. Gary Cooper was the featured star at Capitolfest 2016, where old movie fanatics gather for a few days each August to watch silent and early sound films in a dilapidated movie palace with a fantastic pipe organ for live accompaniment. When I slipped into my seat

A passion for old movies and the people who made them can be consuming.

There was a show called Divorce Court on daytime TV when I was a kid in the ’60s. The opening credit was an illustration of a kid kneeling by his bed, hands clasped, praying, with a voiceover something along the lines of, “And please…make Mommy and Daddy stop fighting.”

Children of Divorce is the story of three kids whose parents did not stop fighting, and whose lives have been as a consequence uprooted. Kitty, the youngest, will grow up to be Clara Bow, with everything that entails. Ted (CK) grows into tall drink of water Gary Cooper, just beginning his long career as a major star, and Jean turns into Esther Ralston, of whom I knew nothing until seeing her her.

Children of Divorce is one of those wonderful surprises. It’s not a masterpiece, an “important” film. That is, unless you love old movies and enjoy stepping into a past that feels phenomenally remote, seeing stars you may know from their later work when they were just starting out (Gary Cooper), rising to their peak (Clara Bow) or already moving toward the end of their Hollywood career (Esther Ralston, **CK**).

In addition to all the usual stuff that strikes us in movies—acting, screenwriting, direction, set and costume design, cinematography—in old films we **enter** the past in a more fully dimensional way than we do in the imaginative act of reading, or looking at art from another time, or even speaking with our elders about their experiences in the past, that remote country. When we become open to old movies, when we fall in love with these visits to a past that is at once impossibly foreign and has brief moments that could be happening **right now**, time does not move relentlessly forward for us as it does in real life. Or at least we get to enjoy little respites from the grind of 21st century life.

Kitty’s end is dictated by her character. That’s what drives the plot. Another person in her situation might have reacted differently. She could have left Cooper, either with or without their daughter. She could have stayed, knowing that Jean and…Ted? love each other but are too honorable to give in to their love. Or she could have taken the road she chose, the only one she was able to see. Thing is that scene—it has a visual motif that I know from the famous Kane shot after he busts up Susan’s room, where he walks through a series of doors, becoming more and remote all the time. And I thought, Wait a minute—this scene is way more arty and stylish some of the rest of the movie. And it turns out there’s a reason for that.

Turns out that the execs or preview audiences decided that as directed by DIRECTOR TK, Children of Divorce was a stinker. At which point Schulberg (CK) brought in the young Turk Josef von Sternberg to reshoot the picture. Small detail: He would only be able to shoot for three days.

You know how Abbey Road kept these incredibly precise records of recording sessions, so that we have extraordinary detail about how the Beatles records came together? Who did what, when, how many times. How things changed.

That’s the film historian’s dream, records like that, which document the process of making the film. Who did what, when, how many times. How things changed.

Children of Divorce opened April 25, 1927. Place that in time: Two years before the Crash of 1929, and at the moment when sound was very new but starting to become a thing (CK).

“Grand Hotel…always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.”

courtesy Pre-Code.com

Grand Hotel took home the Best Picture Oscar for MGM in 1933, beating another MGM release, The Champ, as well as Samuel Goldwyn’s Arrowsmith, Fox’s Bad Girl, First National’s Five Star Final, and three films from Paramount—One Hour With You, The Smiling Lieutenant, and Shanghai Express, the only movie to out-earn Grand Hotel at the box office that year. Both films feature an ensemble cast in a story set primarily in a single setting, but while Shanghai Express has a fabulous cast headlined by Marlene Dietrich at the height of her pre-Code magnificence, Grand Hotel‘s ensemble is all-star, a concept Irving Thalberg invented for this movie.

In Cedric Gibbons’ opulent Art Deco settings, Adrian’s stunning costumes, William Daniels’ glamorous cinematography, Edmund Goulding’s sure-handed, sophisticated direction, a clever script (adapted from MGM’s successful Broadway adaptation of Vicki Baum’s novel), and first-rate performances by its stellar cast, Grand Hotel is one of those films that displays the glories of the studio system, bringing together top talents in all areas of production, all excellently coordinated by those in charge of the project. It’s funny, romantic, tragic, camp, and always entertaining. It’s also very much a pre-Code movie, despite its plush trappings. But if you want to go a little deeper to enrich your viewing experience, here is a primer on its making, which is a pretty good story itself.

  Origins, development, the producer

Menschen im Hotel was German writer Vicki Baum’s tenth novel, an instant sensation when it was serialized in Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, so popular that enraged readers wrote to protest the death of one of the characters. It was immediately adapted for the Berlin stage, the production directed by Max Reinhardt (many of whose actors went on to illustrious Hollywood careers). MGM bought the rights for $35,000 and then had another theatrical adaptation written for a Broadway production to test the material. This was an Irving Thalberg project, and Thalberg would use a similar method four years later with the Marx Brothers’ before shooting their first MGM feature, A Night at the Opera, sending the brothers and other cast members out on the road to perform scenes from the script in front of live audiences.The show was a success, resulting in a $55,000 profit, so MGM was $20K to the good before the movie was even produced.

MGM’s creative chief, Irving Thalberg, was extremely enthusiastic about Grand Hotel. It was his pet project in the early ’30s, and he lavished time and care on it. Since Thalberg had to oversee all MGM productions he made producer Paul Bern his supervising producer/point man to handle day-to-day production issues. Bern is sadly most remembered for his death a few months after marrying Jean Harlow later in 1932.

Though Garbo and Crawford were locks for the leading ladies, MGM whispered rumors all over town about possible casting for the male roles, including the possibility of Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, Edmund Lowe, Ramon Novarro, and best of all John Gilbert (heavily lobbied for by Garbo) as Baron von Gaigern, a gambler, failed jewel thief, and Garbo’s lover. Mayer, however, wasn’t having it, and John Barrymore got the part. He was fresh from playing a more successful aristocratic jewel thief in Arsene Lupin, in which he had for the first time shared the screen with his older brother, Lionel. Pairing the two again made good sense. Preysing, the incompetent industrialist, bully, snob, and hypocrite, was perhaps to be played by (again) Gable, or Warner Baxter, or Jean Herholt, who would end up in the smaller role of Senf, the porter half-crazed with worry about his wife, who is giving birth in a clinic while he works. Director Edmund Goulding had wanted to cast Buster Keaton as Senf, but he did not prevail, and years later he remembered how awful it was to call Keaton with the bad news, for which Keaton thanked him, followed by a silence, then hung up. In the end it was Wallace Beery, riding high on Min and Bill and The Big House, who played Preysing. He would almost reprise the role in MGM’s followup all-star movie, Dinner at Eight, in 1933: Dan Packard, the vulgar, ruthless tycoon, is Preysing’s American cousin. And the indispensable Lewis Stone, an MGM mainstay, completed the ensemble of principals as melancholic Doctor Otternschlag, the WWI veteran with half his face shot off, Grand Hotel‘s Greek chorus. It is Otternschlag whose utterance (see quote at top) is both prologue and epilogue to Grand Hotel’s several stories as well as the many others that take place behind closed doors, which we do not witness.

Here is Fortune magazine on Irving Thalberg’s arrival at his office: 

He enters—a small, finely-made Jew of about thirty-three, changeable as the chameleon industry in which he labors. He is five and one-half feet tall, and weighs 122 pounds after a good night’s sleep. This lightness, in calm moments, is all feline grace and poise. In frantic moments he appears as a pale and flimsy bag of bones held together by concealed bits of string and the furious ambitiou to make the best movies in the world. He seat himself, in his moderne, beaverboard office, at a massive, shiny desk, in front of a Dictograph which looks like a small pipe organ and partially hides a row of medicine bottles. Before him are huge boxes of cigarettes, which he never opens, and plates of apples and dates into which he sometimes dips a transparent hand. Squirming with nervous fervor in the midst of his elaborate apparatus, he speaks with a curiously calm, soft voice as if his words were a sort of poetry. He describes parabolas with one hand and scratches his knee with the other. Rising, he paces his office with stooped shoulders and hands clasped behind him. This reflective promenading he learned from Carl Laemmle, Sr., who discovered Irving Thalberg when, recently released from a Brooklyn high school, he was an office boy in the Broadway shop of Universal Pictures.

The Director

Edmund Goulding’s name isn’t one of the better-remembered directors of his era, but he was a fine director who left us some memorable films including Dark Victory (1939), The Constant Nymph (1943), Nightmare Alley (1947), and The Razor’s Edge (1946). He was also a standard-bearer for an extravagant lifestyle, famous for his lavish parties/orgies, his bisexuality, his heroic alcohol and drug consumption, and his kind, gentle nature. Thalberg tapped him for Grand Hotel partly because Goulding had previously worked with both Garbo and Crawford, and both actresses would need strong support, a director they could trust. Also, Thalberg felt Goulding had the proper combination of artistic ideas, the authority to bring in a large, complex project on time and within budget, and the personal relationships with Grand Hotel’s leading ladies necessary to coax from them their very best performances. 

Here is Mark Alan Vieira on Goulding and Grand Hotel, from Sin in Soft Focus: 

Edmund Goulding, who directed the film, was probably one of the “perverts” [Joseph] Breen mentioned. “Eddie” was too careless to cover his indiscreet drinking, drug-taking, and homosexuality, and too absent-minded to remember the dazzling ideas he devised, so Thalberg had them transcribed. This excerpt is from the murder scene: “Flaemmchen looks this way and that. After all, it is Flaemmchen and not Lillian Gish running across the ice in “Wah Down East”—it is Flaemmchen, the Berlin girl. She pauses to try and clear her brain. ‘What the hell is this—what is it?’ The impulse naturally is to scream in alarm. She doesn’t—Flaemmchens don’t.”

Grand Hotel was convincing because of the way it handled its adult themes. During an early story conference, Thalberg told Goulding how to rewrite the scene of the Baron watching Grusinskaya undressing: “When he’s on a sex thing, he’s perfectly within his rights. When he has seen a naked woman, he can suddenly, very honestly, have a sex desire come over him…. Why does a man want one woman and another man [want] another? That’s the kick of it, God damn it!” 

Goulding worked closely with Thalberg, Bern, and Vicki Baum on the script. 

Matthew Kennedy writes in Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory: Hollywood’s Genius Bad Boy that

“On the first day of shooting, Eddie strode onto the stage and climbed a sixty-foot steel crane to address his already assembled cast from high above the set. It was an irresistibly dramatic touch that quickly established order. “No one on the set without felt slippers throughout the shooting,” he announced with his strong baritone. “The only voices I want to hear are those of Mr. Stone, the Barrymores, Miss Crawford, and Mr. Hersholt. Miss Garbo will be in the scene but she will not speak. As she passes through the lobby, glance at her. She is a great dancer leaving for the theater. Are you ready? Start your action.”

Eddie was exacting in what he wanted. He frequently assumed actors’ places before the camera and marked the floor with chalk. His white handkerchief came in handy when he wanted to measure heights for camera angles. Then he would act the scenes as he wanted them played, as was his custom. He most often played the woman. Such was the case when he was caught in an embrace with John Barrymore. As they moved closer, Barrymore said, with breathless sincerity, “I love you.” Eddie’s head tilted so that his lips could meet Barrymore’s at any moment. A watching Garbo broke the tension by asking, “Vel, Eddie, vat are you waiting for?” Laughter cooled the scene immediately. 

Goulding’s careful preparation paid off in a smooth shoot, truly remarkable given the five stars on a single set, most of them shooting other films at the same time as this one. In the whole 49 days of shooting the press did not report a single problem on the set, and Goulding was justly proud. “When the film began rolling, general peace and calm prevailed on the set,” [Goulding] recalled. “All Hollywood said, screamed, and prophesied that all hell would break loose on the first day of shooting, there would be recasting and a new director assigned. Thank God no temperamental firecrackers exploded.” (per Kennedy)

The art director

Cedric Gibbons’ extraordinary set design for the Grand Hotel were exquisite and vast, sprawling over six of the studio’s largest sound stages. They covered 16,000sf, a massive space that created exactly the world Goulding wanted to create, first for his actors and then for the movie’s audience. 

The actors

Garbo’s performance is eccentric, and while her melancholy scenes, solo emoting her despair, are not always easy to watch, her scenes with Barrymore are spectacular. Grusinskaya is transformed by love, brought back to life. When she takes Barrymore’s face in her hands, murmurs his mother’s pet name for him, smiles tenderly, and kisses him, you can feel the warmth flooding her body and spirit. Barrymore is perfect in his performance and seems Grusinskaya’s soulmate. Their brief scene on the bed has a real erotic charge, and I wanted the scene to last a little longer. 

Crawford’s Flaemmchen is rather strange, at least at first. She comes to the hotel to do some stenographic work (hard as it may be to imagine from the 21st century, people used to hired others to do their typing and other clerical work) for Preysing, and she reports to his room. Finding the door open, she goes in (already weird), then, seeing Preysing through the open bathroom door, just out of the shower, wrapped only in towels, doing some painful-looking stretches, she walks in on him. She acts like this is natural, normal. Preysing is uncomfortable, asks her to please wait outside. She looks like, Okay, whatever, but takes her sweet time leaving the room. What’s up with that? I’m not sure what they’re trying to tell us about Flaemmchen here. If it’s that she’s been around the block a few times, it still seems kind of peculiar. We learn what we need to in her first scene with the Baron, flirting outside Preysing’s room. We learn that she’s not averse to being picked up by the right man, that she can’t support herself on her wages and relies on men friends to buy her the nicer things. She’s a little bit hard, but just a little—she’s a city girl; it’s her way. But as their conversation reveals that the Baron understands her situation but doesn’t look down on her, she falls a little bit in love with him. 

Lionel Barrymore’s Kringelein took the longest for me to warm to. On my first viewings, his whininess worked my last nerve. But I have come to admire Kringelein’s open-heartedness, his naivety, his real pleasure in his first taste in his 46 years of pleasure and good things. He is a good soul, a good friend. He would do anything he could to help his friend the Baron. At the beginning of Grand Hotel, Kringelein is exhausted, fretful, but willing to stand up for himself, to insist that they give him a proper room. He hates Preysing, his old boss, who personifies Kringelein’s life as a nebbish, never considered or treated with any respect or kindness. But in the end it is Kringelein who calls Preysing to account, and Kringelein finds companionship with beautiful Flaemmchen, no longer distressed by his mortality but thrilled: “I never thought anything so beautiful would come to me.” 

  This is part of Hot & Bothered: The Films of 1932 blogathon, hosted by the delightful Theresa at Cinemaven’s Essays from the Couch and Aurora at Aurora’s Gin Joint. Click the links to see more of the excellent entries. 

Oyez, oyez!

Welcome to Day 3 of our courtroom extravaganza! In the first two days we saw posts on lynching (Fritz Lang’s Fury), Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Pandora’s Box, Kramer vs. Kramer, and the Three Stooges—from the tragic to the sublime to the ridiculous, and now we swing into Sunday with lots of good stuff still to come, including a lesser-known Hitchcock and Mae West cross-examining witnesses. Leave your link in a comment with your blog name and movie title below this post or tweet it @zleegaspar and I’ll add it to the roster of live links. We’ve had a few last-minute sign-ups and guest posts, and we’re thrilled you chose to get into the act! 

We appreciate all of the writers taking the time to participate! Please be sure you’ve included one of our banners (from either of our websites) in your post, and link it back to the day’s host post with that day’s roster (that would be me today, while Cinemaven takes over tomorrow, our final day in court). And don’t forget to to stop by the other writers’ websites and have a look at their posts over at my delightful cohost’s place, Cinemaven’s Essays from the Couch!  We’ll be posting a full-event wrap-up with the whole roster on Tuesday, June 14. 

Court will continue in session today, June 12, and tomorrow June 13.

Sunday, June 12

The Ox-Bow Incident / Sometimes They Go to Eleven 

The Crucible / Moon in Gemini

The Mouthpiece / Pre-Code.com

Attorney for the Defense / Immortal Ephemera 

  “McPherson, if you know anything about faces, look at mine. How singularly innocent I look this morning. Have you ever seen such candid eyes?” 

“Laura considered me the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting man she’d ever met. I was in complete accord with her on that point. She thought me also the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world…. McPherson, you won’t understand this, but I tried to become the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.”

“Have any luck?”

“Let me put it this way. I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbors’ children devoured by wolves.”

Laura is a stealth movie. It sneaks up on you. It’s so beautifully made, its elements so seamlessly woven together that it’s possible to watch it a number of times and enjoy it for its formal components—Joseph LaShelle’s Oscar-winning cinematography, with its impeccably composed shots and gorgeous lighting; the sharp, clever dialogue of Jay Dratler, Betty Reinhardt, and Samuel Hoffenstein (adapting Vera Caspary’s novel), delivered by the uniformly excellent ensemble; Bonnie Cashin’s costumes, so flattering and chic on both Gene Tierney and Judith Anderson; David Raksin’s evocative score, most famous for its haunting title theme; and Otto Preminger’s brilliant direction—without feeling the undertow of its subterranean pull. Laura’s flawless surfaces are seductive, but that’s the point: The milieu of careless affluence and privilege carries with it a kind of rot that infects its characters.  Laura’s distinctive finish, like that of its characters, conceals the murky depths beneath so successfully that you can love it without letting yourself be pulled into its deeper mysteries. 

Waldo between Laura and Shelby, eating his liver

I’m assuming that you, Gentle Reader, have some knowledge of the film, but if you don’t, be advised that there are spoilers a-plenty. If you need a plot synopsis you can find one here.  

Waldo Lydecker is our guide to Laura’s underworld, the urgent, unexamined desires that drive its characters and story. And it is Waldo, the wasp-tongued columnist and radio commentator, who bookends the movie, which ends with his last gasp and begins with one of the greatest opening lines ever:

“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died.” 

If the movie itself is very close to impeccable, the characters are all flawed. Nobody in Laura is clean. Even Laura Hunt herself, played by Gene Tierney as a photographic negative of the gorgeous monster she portrayed a year later in Leave Her to Heaven, is not completely clean, though she certainly sits at the virtuous end of the continuum along which the other characters are arrayed, with Waldo at the far end and McPherson, Ann Treadwell, and Shelby Carpenter somewhere in between. Laura’s sin is one of omission, and it kills Diane Redfern and in the end almost kills Laura as well. She couldn’t bring herself to turn away from Waldo, who had done so much for her. It would have been awkward within their shared social circle. And as Laura knows all too well, Waldo does not let his enemies go in peace. So she tried to find a middle path, to begin to build a life for herself while keeping Waldo as a close friend.  

Let’s talk about Waldo. He’d like that. Waldo talks a great deal about himself. He also thinks a lot about himself, his obsession with Laura, Laura’s obsession with handsome men, how he can disentangle her from the latest one, and how he can restore their normal routine, an unending series of evenings alternating between him squiring her to openings, parties, and restaurants, and quiet little dinners at his apartment, just the two of them listening to his records or better, her listening to him read his latest column—he says the way she listens is more eloquent than speech, and he loves her best as a passive listener with no needs, desires, or voice of her own. 

Laura as Waldo likes her best: silent, appreciating him

Within the action of the movie, that is, in the wake of Laura’s murder, Waldo has new concerns: fingering Shelby for the murder and getting back his clock from Laura’s apartment before McPherson finds the murder weapon Waldo stashed inside its hidden compartment after shooting Laura/Diane. 

Here’s a central question from which a great deal of bad analyses flows: Is Waldo gay? If we answer Yes, the story doesn’t make any sense. Robert Ebert’s analysis goes down this road and comes back empty, with Ebert concluding that the movie is all style, with which I respectfully disagree. 

I too was an unexamined Yes to this question until I read Despina Veneti’s and Olivier Eyquem’s reflections on Waldo at their website Preminger Film Noirs. Some writers go a lot further, suggesting that both Shelby Carpenter and Ann Treadwell are also gay, while Foster Hirsch says that Laura herself may have some “sexual surprises” up her sleeve. Of these last there is not a single shred of evidence in the movie, and even Waldo’s assumed homosexuality hangs on rather flimsy premises. That Clifton Webb himself was gay is not in dispute. At the time of his star-making turn in Laura, Webb was a 55-year-old Broadway veteran, a musical comedy star with no significant experience in movies or playing drama. Webb had appeared in a few silents and was briefly under contract to MGM in the ’30s, but they let him languish until his contract ran out, and he went back to New York, back to the stage. But to conflate Webb’s sexual orientation with Waldo’s is an error, as Despina points out. Yet that one fact about the actor and a single line in the film, addressed to Laura just before Waldo tries to kill her for the second time (“The best part of myself, that’s what you are”) are the poor shreds of evidence that support the idea that Waldo is gay, and while the first is simply irrelevant, the second doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny. 

Waldo giving Laura bad news about her fiancé

If Waldo wanted to be Laura, that wouldn’t indicate that he’s gay—gay men don’t want to be women. Nobody has yet suggested that Waldo was transgender, but I’m sure that notion is already in some critic’s pipeline. No, Waldo wants to be the person he thinks Laura thinks he is—“the kindest, gentlest, most sympathetic man in the world”: He knows he’s none of those things, but under Laura’s compassionate gaze he can pretend that he is both lovable and capable of loving. As long as Laura stays within the airless precincts of their relationship, Waldo can perpetuate his illusion that she is his creation rather than an autonomous person whose feelings he cannot control. But while Preminger’s Laura, lighter than air and very different from the character as Caspary originally wrote her, has less substance than any of the movie’s other principal characters, she still has desires of her own, and these threaten Waldo enough to go on the attack. The first threat was Jacoby, the handsome artist who painted Laura’s portrait and fell in love with her. Waldo dispatched him via a hatchet job in his column. Waldo’s second rival, Southern ne’er-do-well slime ball Shelby Carpenter, offers abundant dirt for Waldo to use against him, but Laura doesn’t ditch him fast enough, and Waldo’s frustration and bitterness finally boil over into homicidal rage. 

“I shall never forget the weekend Laura died”

Reflect for a moment on that line, Gentle Reader. Remember that it is spoken by her scorned Pygmalion, the man who went to her apartment, rang the bell, and emptied both shotgun barrels of buckshot into her face at close range. It is, oddly, spoken onto a black screen, and it hooks us instantly and totally, plunging us into the story. But when you stop and think about it, the line raises questions, such as, When and where does he say it, and Who is he talking to? 

The screen lightens to reveal Waldo’s living room, his art collection prominently displayed. The clock that is one of the film’s central images and that figures so prominently in the plot is shown at the back of the frame, its top cut off by a glass shelf displaying Waldo’s glass collection, but we do not yet know the significance of the clock, so we see it only as another piece in Waldo’s extensive art collection. 

“A silver sun burned through the sky like a huge magnifying glass. It was the hottest Sunday in my recollection. I felt as if I were the only human being left in New York. For with Laura’s horrible death, I was alone. [dramatic pause] I, Waldo Lydecker, was the only one who really knew her, and I had just begun to write Laura’s story when another of those detectives came to see me. I had him wait. I could watch him through the half open door. [the clock chimes; McPherson walks to it to look it over] I noted that his attention was fixed upon my clock. There was only one other in existence, and that was in Laura’s apartment, in the very room where she was murdered.”

McPherson takes in a little art in Waldo’s living room before their initial interview in the bathroom

McPherson isn’t the only one interested in that clock, or rather its twin in Laura’s apartment. Next time you see Laura, notice that Waldo keeps showing up at the Laura’s apartment trying to retrieve the clock, which he claims he only loaned Laura. He drops in several times a day, hoping either to get the clock out when McPherson isn’t there or to blackmail the detective into letting him have it back. Waldo is very clever, so in each visit he assesses the current situation with McPherson and his investigation, and Waldo only brings up taking back the clock back if he thinks it’s safe to do so in that moment, that it won’t arouse McPherson’s suspicions. 

One key to Waldo is that he is first, last, and always a writer. He thinks in sentences, always planning his next column or essay. Waldo Lydecker’s life is a story he is always writing. At the end of Caspary’s novel, the dying Waldo continues to write out loud, in the third person, until his last breath. Waldo’s ongoing, endlessly revised story about his life occasionally intersects with reality, but much of what he chafes against is the world’s stubborn refusal to conform to his version of it. When McPherson points out to Waldo that two years before, Waldo had reported in a book review that a man was murdered by the same means as Laura, a double barrel of buckshot to the face, but that the guy was actually killed with a sash weight, Waldo says, “How ordinary. My version was obviously superior.” That’s how it is with him—the reality of being Waldo is unendurable, so he obsessively rewrites reality. And the imaginary life he chronicles is as fragile as his priceless collection of glass.  

Suspect meets detective

Just after Waldo’s opening narration, we finally get our first glimpse of him. He is soaking in the bathtub of his “lavish” bathroom (Waldo’s term, of course; it is roughly the size of my New York apartment). There he sits on this blazing Sunday, up to his chest in tepid water, writing on a desktop. He is middle-aged, thin, pasty, sunken-chested, graying, with a face that is not handsome but memorable, theatrical, and easy to caricature, and a voice vibrant with malice, curiosity, and disdain. He entertains McPherson from the tub the same way LBJ held conferences from the toilet, to assert his dominance, and then rises from it without embarrassment, giving McPherson the Full Waldo. We know this because we hear the splash of Waldo’s getting up in the tub, and a brief smirk crosses McPherson’s impassive face. Waldo’s second purpose here is to graphically demonstrate to the detective that he has nothing to hide.

Laura expanded the landscape of film noir into the upper class, and Preminger shows the moral rot beneath the well-maintained veneer with clear, understated references to decadence and corruption: Shelby, engaged to Laura while living off Ann and shtupping Diane Redfern; Waldo’s bathtub interview with Detective McPherson; the two quick and scattered references to the fact that when Waldo shoots Diane Redfern in the face, she is in Laura’s apartment with Laura’s fiancé, wearing Laura’s mules and negligee—Shelby certainly lives up to his own description of himself as “not the conventional type”: He’s not just cheating on his fiancée, and not just in Laura’s own bed, not just with a colleague who Laura herself hired, but he’s got her in Laura’s lingerie. Excuse me, I need a quick shower…. 

Waldo collapses when he sees Laura alive

The other surfaces of note in Laura are those of the characters’ faces. In a standard movie convention, all of Laura‘s main characters have secrets they are at pains to protect. Even Bessie, Laura’s loyal, adoring housekeeper, destroys evidence in hopes of protecting her beloved boss’s privacy from the prying of the police and the press. Preminger uses this, revealing character by monitoring how successfully each manages their emotions and maintains their secrets. For example, McPherson’s little toy, which he pulls out whenever he wants to rattle Waldo; McPherson pulling out the bottle of cheap scotch Shelby had brought to Laura’s for his meeting with Diane and offering Shelby a drink from it; Waldo showing Laura the results of his private investigation of Laura, then taking her to Ann’s, where he knows they will find Shelby having dinner; Waldo initiating a party to celebrate Laura’s return without first checking with either Laura or McPherson. 

Preminger was adamant that Waldo had to be a new face, somebody the movie audience had no preconceptions about. Having worked as a director in New York before coming to Hollywood, Preminger knew that Clifton Webb was not only unknown to film audiences, he was exactly the kind of dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker Preminger needed to ensure that Laura not feel like Los Angeles, that the rarified Manhattan milieu would saturate every frame of the film. Creating a sense of place is one of the mysterious elements of filmmaking. Mean Streets only shot in New York for a few days. Ditto The Apartment, and Rear Window was shot entirely on that extraordinary set at Paramount. But all of them evoke New York. It took some fancy stepping to sell Zanuck on Webb, but as Preminger so often did, in the end he won. 

Clifton Webb, 1930s, during his brief time at MGM

Caspary’s Waldo is as physically different from Clifton Webb as two men could be. Caspary’s Waldo weighs 250 pounds and has a Van Dyke beard. Laird Cregar was the obvious actor to play Waldo when 20th-Century Fox bought the rights to Caspary’s book in June, 1943, and the studio’s press release announced Cregar and George Sanders for the leads. But a lot happened between then and the movie Laura eventually became—for a long time Preminger was the only person who really believed in the project, but he marshaled his enormous energy, will and vision and against formidable odds and obstacles somehow managed to make Laura the film he wanted to make. His Waldo was the haughty, cadaverous Webb. Caspary’s Waldo is as insulting as Preminger’s, but not as succinct. Caspary sometimes said Waldo was partly modeled on Algonquin Round Table regular Alexander Woollcott, a pasty, rotund columnist, radio commentator and all-around character in the New York theatrical and literary scene, he was also the inspiration for Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner; on other occasions she denied it. But Caspary’s Waldo sounds like Woollcott, his rhetorical style flowery and ornamented. Preminger credited one of his screenwriters, the poet Samuel Hoffenstein, with transforming Caspary’s wordy Waldo into the movie’s terser but no less self-dramatizing version of the character. 

To me Waldo seems asexual rather than homosexual, a man so estranged from his own body, so disconnected from normal physical sensations that he is disgusted by even the suggestion of the sex act. “I hope you’ll never have reason to regret what promises to be a disgustingly earthy relationship,” he sneers at Laura when she tells him she’s going to be seeing McPherson romantically and that she doesn’t think she and Waldo should see each other again. Also, if Waldo were gay, wouldn’t he evince some desire for the handsome fellas Laura favors? Maybe, but Waldo would have to be at least emotionally functional enough to experience his own desire, and clearly he is not. 

Waldo sizes up his new rival

Waldo really believes he loves Laura. When she asks him why he’s doing this, as he reveals the results of his private investigator’s report on Shelby, he says, “For you, Laura.” He tells her this days only one day before shooting her (he thinks) in the face at close range. While Waldo’s dirt on Shelby drives Laura to reconsider marrying him, it also reminds her of Waldo’s last foray into controlling her romantic life, and she now doubts both Shelby and Waldo—with good reason: Shelby thinks Laura is guilty, and while Waldo vows to mount a vigorous defense of her in his column, it is as likely that he will use his platform to reinforce the evidence against her. This is what sets Waldo off, bringing his latent violence to the surface in the most brutal way. Brutal—that’s what the newsboys outside Laura’s apartment shout the day after the shooting—”Brutal slaying! Brutal slaying!” 

Waldo is weary from the burden of his self-hatred. His constant need for attention, whether acclaim or shock, is his way of compensating and distracting himself from his ever-present awareness of his inadequacies as a man. Waldo’s feelings for Laura flower not when he meets her and sees her extraordinary beauty but when she tells him she feels sorry for him: “You’re a poor man.” She has glimpsed him through the monumental edifice of his narcissism, and he feels a bond with her that he feels with no one else. 

With the men in her life: the murderer, the mooch, and the cop

Naturally, he sets out to make her a more suitable companion for his celebrated self. When she introduces herself to him as he eats his lunch at the Algonquin she is an untarnished 17, and he undertakes a makeover, changing her hairstyle and advising her on clothes. He also mentors her into a successful career in advertising and a place in New York society. Waldo’s Laura is no less his projection than Judy is Scottie’s in Vertigo—the girl he adores is the one he has created, the one he can control. 

Waldo’s Laura is a dream, and the reality of Laura creates a conflict for Waldo that he cannot resolve. When McPherson falls in love with Laura the murder victim, his infatuation is first kindled via Waldo’s seductive depiction of her, then by McPherson’s fetishistic investigation of Laura’s personal effects in her apartment. It would be routine for the detective to read the victim’s correspondence, but McPherson indulges his burgeoning feelings with less ethical investigation, taking the top off a bottle of her perfume and inhaling it, obviously fantasizing about her. Thus, as Veneti points out, Laura is “a shared dream between two men.” 

In the end Waldo is as tragic as he is dangerous, and that’s what makes him so compelling. His whole life is built on the fragile structure he has constructed, a huge collection of priceless glass, and his dream of Laura is central to that structure. Without her as his muse to see him as so many things he suffers from knowing he is not—a kind, gentle, sympathetic person, and a man—the whole thing collapses. His life becomes unbearable, and he has no option but to end it and to take his creation with him. The idealized relationship he spins to McPherson is a living death, a closed system in which he and Laura forever remain frozen in place. Laura is too much alive to submit to this static condition. Waldo, speaking of McPherson, tells Laura: “I don’t deny that he’s infatuated with you in some warped way of his own. But he isn’t capable of any normal, warm human relationship.” That is, he thinks he’s talking about McPherson, but we know what Waldo, as clever as he is, cannot see: He’s really describing himself.

“Goodbye, Laura…. Farewell, my love”

“He’ll find us together, Laura, as we always have been, as we always should be, as we always will be”—nothing less than that, a static eternity, will satisfy Waldo. Those are his last words before he lifts the gun to take one more crack at the woman he “loves.” In a few seconds he will be fatally shot by one of McPherson’s men, and his own last shot will miss Laura and McPherson but smash the clock’s face.  Waldo slumps, defeated, dying. Laura and McPherson move past the camera to go to Waldo, and the camera moves forward, coming to rest on the destroyed face of his priceless clock.

Again, as at the beginning, we hear Waldo’s voice offscreen: “Goodbye, Laura…. Farewell, my love.” 

This post is an entry in The Great Villain Blogathon, hosted by Speakeasy, Silver Screenings, and Shadows and Satin. Click the links to read more about great villains. 

Cotten as Holly Martins in The Third Man (1949)

Joseph Cotten, who was born May 15, 1905, appeared in some of the best films of the 1940s, including Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Shadow of a Doubt, Gaslight, Portrait of Jennie, Lydia, and The Third Man. In 1982 he wrote a memoir, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, that was almost finished when he suffered a catastrophic illness, which postponed the book’s completion until 1985. It’s a lovely book, full of colorful anecdote and serious talk about his work with Welles, Reed, and other great directors. In honor of the 111th anniversary of his birth, here are a few stories from an extraordinary career and a life well lived. 

The Philadelphia Story 500th performance party: encounter with Tallulah 

To celebrate the 500th performance of The Philadelphia Story Phil Barry gave a party at Passy, which he took over in its entirety for the occasion. Sardi’s must have been as deserted as the Vanderbilt Theatre that night. Everybody from Broadway, that is everybody who owned a white tie or a tiara, was at Phil’s party.

…I was standing facing the bar, when a soft hand grasped mine and turned me around. I looked down into the eyes of Tallulah Bankhead—the blinking eyes of Tallulah Bankhead I should say—although what I assumed to be a come-hither flutter, I was later to learn was a nervous tic. She had seen The Philadelphia Story three times. My performance, she wanted me to know, as if I didn’t, was one of the most skillful light comedy achievements of the decade. My timing was “impeccable,” my charm “overwhelming,” and my personality “hypnotic.” I listened, enraptured, and with great strength restrained my little finger from touching my raised eyebrow.

     Her flattery was intoxicating, when suddenly it stopped. Her eyes no longer blinked; they now clicked as she realized with utter disgust to what extremes her exaggeration had carried her. Her eyes now stared at me wildly, as if I had insulted her. “And now, go and fuck yourself,” she said, and walked away.

Vienna: Shooting the ending of The Third Man 

     …At that time no definite end had been decided on, and no final scene was ever written that appeared in the film.

     We were on location in the cemetery one gloomy, biting, raw day. Carol stood staring down a long alley of trees that flanked a perfectly straight, endless road whose perspective took it to a tiny point, finishing with grey sky. He simply announced: “Now we’ll shoot the ending.”

     When the camera was ready, it was pointing its eye directly at that distant apex. Then Carol shouted, as loudly as he could, “Action!” From far, far away, Valli started her walk up that lane toward the camera.

     The hero, smoking a cigarette, was standing in the foreground waiting for her. Like the audience, he was confident that she would join him, and they would stroll away happily together, arm in arm. Valli walked on and on, closer and closer, until at last she was a life-sized figure in the foreground with the hero. And then, without turning her head, or even glancing in his direction, she continued her steady pace, out of the shot, and into limbo. 

     I remained there, as directed, still smoking the cigarette. My eyes followed Valli out of the shot and, anticipating Carol’s shout of “Cut,” I almost strolled back to my chair to wait for the assistant to announce “Once more, please,” or for Carol to say “Print.”

     Nobody uttered a word. The camera kept rolling. The special effects men from their high perches continued to drop toasted autumn leaves from above. I continued to puff on my cigarette, and began to get quite panic-stricken. Was there more to the scene? Had I gone blank? What was Carol waiting for me to do? I took one more puff, then in exasperation threw the cigarette to the ground, at which point Carol shouted through his laughter the word I had been waiting desperately to hear—”Cut!“

      And that is the way the movie ends, in spite of the studio’s pleas to him to make an alternate and less stark ending, which would suggest a glimmer of hope for a happy finale. Stubborn Carol, of course, refused. 

      This scene and Orson Welles’s sudden introduction (Do you suppose that Mozart ever dreamed that another boy genius would one day darken his door?) are considered by many film buffs to be the crowning triumphs in cinema pictorial entrances and exits. King Vidor, one of our cinematic giants, always said that in the history of films, every great moment that shines in memory is a silent one. 

Reading the unfinished Kane script at the Mankiewicz’s

      “We haven’t finished the script yet,” said Orson. “Herman Mankiewicz is writing it with me, and we’re reading what we’ve got at his house tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t you join us?”

     The Mankiewiczes lived in a large, comfortable house in Beverly Hills. Around the pool were sprinkled about a dozen chairs. Blue-bound manuscripts, sharpened pencils, pitchers of iced tea were in evidence. I met a lot of people.

     “Well, shall we?” said Orson, leading the way to the garden. He then told us where to sit. Shiffra handed out scripts. 

     “We’ve never actually heard it,” said Herman.

     “I think I’ll just listen,” Orson said. “The title of this movie is Citizen Kane, and I play guess who.” He turned to me. “Why don’t you think of yourself as Jedediah Leland? His name, by the way, is a combination of Jed Harris and your agent, Leland Hayward.”

      “There all resemblance ceases,” Herman reassured me. 

      These afternoon garden readings continued, and as the Mercury actors began arriving, the story started to breathe. Many evenings we would assemble in Orson’s office and see the story tell itself through his visuals. The artist had seen most of the cast by now, and the characters began to look like Ray Collins, Everett Sloane (who played Bernstein, pronounced Bernsteen, a name that was snitched from Orson’s godfather, Dr. Maurice Bernstein), Paul Stewart, and George Coulouris. Even William Alland, over whose strong shoulders most of the scenes were shot, was heard to say, “Yep, that’s my back all right.”

…One afternoon Paul Stewart, Everett Sloane, and I were living it up in Orson’s office. Shiffra had given us some chilly glasses, and we were applauding the fine performances we were giving in the visuals on the wall. Orson came in and suggested we take a look at a movie set, and we followed him through a garden of blooming roses, down a hedge-lined street to a soundstage. He pulled a heavy door open, and we followed him inside. It was very still. The light was much dimmer than outside, the temperature much lower. We could hear a voice or two, almost whispering, somewhere far off.

     Orson put his finger to his lips to motion silence and beckoned us to follow him, which we did on tiptoe. We arrived at a lighted set. A small crew was quietly adjusting lamps and furniture. One of them was seated behind the biggest black box ever built. It was ornamented with shining wheels and handles; it rolled on a track. It was a movie camera. Paul, Everett, and I paled. This monster drew from our eyes the same look the Sabine ladies must have given the invading hordes of Romulus. 

     Orson introduced us to the crew and to the cameraman, Gregg Toland. “Shaking hands” was a literal description of our meeting. We mentioned the black cyclops. “Oh,” said Gregg, patting his camera, “you’ll come to love this little gadget.” 

Cinematographer Gregg Toland, as supportive as Welles to their actors

     Gregg was right. Like all truly talented artists, he was generous with his knowledge and assistance. He was amused by the awe of the uninitiated. He had a keen sense of others’ problems, and he accepted them as part of his own. He would destroy an entire lighting plot rather than have it impose one uncomfortable moment on an actor. In this way he was like Orson, who in his whole career as a director never led an actor or even allowed an actor to make a move alien to his own nature or utter a self-conscious line of dialogue. This is one of the reasons, I’m sure, that all actors felt safe in his hands. He was uncanny at instant personality perception. I have seen him change the whole concept of certain characters to take advantage of an inspirational, on-the-spot discovery of a natural human quirk. Harlequin always wears the same mask, the same costume; but under this conventional exterior it is the actor’s interpretation of Harlequin that stirs attention or boredom.

Losing Orson 

It has been four and a half years since I wrote that last line. “I’ll finish the book tomorrow,” I thought. Tomorrow was June 8, 1981. I have total recall of that dreadful day.

     I was having a shower. I felt something snap in my chest, then I fell to my knees on the floor. How I finally got up and dried myself I do not know. I called Patricia, and she rushed in. When she saw me she shouted for our beloved housekeeper, Shirley, who helped me put my pajamas back on and took me to our bedroom while Patricia called the paramedics. 

     I had had a heart attack, followed by a stroke that struck at my speech center. Having come through my throat operation successfully and regained my normal voice, I now couldn’t speak at all. It seemed so unfair. 

     As soon as I was well enough, I started speech therapy. Patricia would drive me to the hospital daily. After four and a half years, I still go twice a week. She still drives me there and back.

     We have moved to Palm Springs, as the doctors said the weather here would help me, and it has. We have a lovely house that my wife found, and I have flowers in my lovely garden. 

     I can now speak to them.

     I am a very lucky man.

     One day when we were returning home from buying some lamps for our new house, the telephone started ringing. It was Orson asking me to have lunch with him when we went to Los Angeles the next day. When I was first stricken, he had spoken to Patricia every day. Then later, he and I talked each week for a couple of hours. He was strong and supportive, and whenever I used the wrong word (which was frequently) he would say, “That’s a much better word, Jo, I’m going to use it.”

Cotten, Welles, and Sloane putting together their first edition of The Inquirer

     Our lunches the last few years were mostly reminiscences about our early success, but he was still determined to make one more film, one more great film. 

     I told him I had written a book. “Bring it with you when we have lunch, I’ll take it home and read it as soon as I can.” I did just that.

     He called us the same night, and said he had read it, couldn’t put it down, and would I let him find the right publisher. “Do you mind if I interfere with your writing career?” he said. Good heavens, how would I have started a movie career without him?  Patricia and I were delighted. 

     We still had workmen working on the house. One day on returning from lunch, we found them lined up outside, looking rather somber.

     “Anything wrong?” asked Patricia.

     “The telephone has been ringing constantly,” said the foreman, “Orson Welles…”

     “Is Orson Welles on the telephone?” asked Patricia excitedly as she started toward the house.

     “No, Mrs. Cotten. Uh, eh…I’m afraid he’s dead.”

     I walked up to Patricia, who stood frozen in shock.

     I still miss David Selznick very much. I had known Orson considerably longer. He had cheated death for so many years (being overweight and having a heart condition) that he had seemed somehow indestructible. I know what his feelings were regarding his death. He did not want a funeral; he wanted to be buried quietly in a little place in Spain. He wanted no memorial services, saying that a lot of hypocrites would get up and say how much they loved him.

     I respected his wishes. I refused to appear in any memorial service. The telephone kept ringing, and people said that I ought to make an appearance. I was stubborn about doing what I felt David wished as he left this world, and I was equally stubborn about not appearing at Orson’s memorial. I sent a short message, and I ended it with the last two lines of a Shakespeare poem that Orson had sent me on my most recent birthday…

              But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

              All losses are restored and sorrows end. 

     We talk about him often. Somewhere among his possessions is a manuscript of this book. He would have had it published. He would have made another great film. But it was not to be.

Vanity Will Get You Somewhere is available at Amazon. Highly recommended. I didn’t even get to the story about Cotten and Bergman pranking a big party at Selznick’s by showing up dressed as wait staff and running into party crasher Errol Flynn, disguised in a red mustache, too wasted to know where he was…