#tim holt

Tim Holt

Tim Holt, RKO Portrait '40

My apologies for not including the background context of this photo... I couldn't seem to find the film for it or any information. It's been under my collection "Tim Holt 1939", however so at least there was a date provided so I can continue my investigation.

So much has been written about the mishandling and mutilation of Orson Welles’s second feature film that it’s hard to see The Magnificent Ambersons that we have without pining for the one we lost. What we have is a fine family melodrama with a truncated and sentimental happy ending and an undeveloped and poorly integrated commentary on the effects of industrialization on turn-of-the-20th-century America. We also have some of the best examples of Welles’s genius at integrating performances, production design, and cinematography – all of which Welles supervised to the point of micromanagement. The interior of the Amberson mansion is one of the great sets in Hollywood film. Welles used the set as a grand stage, exploiting the three levels of the central staircase memorably with the help of Stanley Cortez’s deep-focus camerawork. Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich that Frank Lloyd Wright, who was Anne Baxter’s grandfather, visited the set and hated it: It was precisely the kind of domestic architecture that he had spent his career trying to eliminate, which, as Welles said, was “the whole point” of the design. As for the performances, Agnes Moorehead is superb as the spinster aunt, Fanny Minafer, especially in the “kitchen scene,” a single long take in which her nephew, George (Tim Holt), scarfs down strawberry shortcake as she worms out of him the information that Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) has renewed his courting of George’s widowed mother, Isabel (Dolores Costello). The news is especially painful for Fanny, who had hopes of attracting Eugene herself. Holt, an underrated actor, holds his own here and elsewhere – he is, after all, the central character, the spoiled child whose selfishness ruins the chances for happiness of so many of the film’s characters. We can mourn the loss of Welles’s cinematic flourishes that were apparently cut from the film, but to my mind the chief loss is the effective integration of the theme initiated when Eugene, who has made his fortune developing the automobile, admits that the industrial progress it represents “may be a step backward in civilization” and that automobiles are “going to alter war and they’re going to alter peace.” Welles was speaking from his own life, as Patrick McGilligan observes in his book Young Orson. Welles’s father, Dick Welles, had been involved in developing automobile headlights – the very thing in which Fanny invests and loses her inheritance – and was the proud driver of the first automobile on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles’s home town. The Magnificent Ambersons would have been much richer if Welles had been able to make the statement about the automobile that he later told Bogdanovich was central to his concept of the film.

It’s always shocking to realize that Humphrey Bogart failed to be nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the bitter, paranoid Fred C. Dobbs, the anti-hero of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I mean, who today remembers some of the performances that were nominated instead: Lew Ayres in Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco)? Dan Dailey in When My Baby Smiles at Me (Walter Lang)? Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty (Lang)? To the Academy’s credit, John Huston won as both director and screenwriter, and his father, Walter, won the supporting actor Oscar – the first instance of someone directing his own father to an Academy Award for acting – which his smartly delineated old coot certainly deserved. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has a generosity of characterization in both the screenplay by John Huston from B. Traven’s novel and the performances of Bogart, Walter Huston, and Tim Holt. Let’s also put in a word for Holt, who had one of the odder careers of a potential Hollywood star: He gave good performances in some of the best movies to come out of the studios in the 1940s, including The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) and My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), and was a handsome and capable presence in them. But even after working for Welles, Ford, and Huston, after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre he went back to performing in B-movie Westerns, which had been the stock in trade of his father, Jack Holt (who has a small part as a flophouse bum in this film). Tim Holt’s heart seemed not to be in the movie business, and he retired to his ranch, making only a few appearances after 1952. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was mostly filmed on location – a rarity for the time – in the state of Durango and the town of Tampico, Mexico. Some scenes had to be shot in the studio, of course, and it’s easy to spot the artificial lighting and hear the soundstage echoes in these, which don’t match up to the ones Ted McCord filmed on location.

Remembering Tim Holt (February 5, 1919 – February 15, 1973)

Tim Holt in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)