Goodbye to a Glamour Queen:
My personal encounter with Loretta Young (1913-2000)
She was the quintessential Movie Star, the essence of charm and grace, the idol of millions of women, a fantasy for millions of men. In that long-vanished world before TV and computers when people flocked to the movie houses, Loretta Young was a superstar. Some came to nurture their dreams, but most came for the thrill of vicarious romance, and a celluloid escape from the realities of depression and war. For three decades—from the FDR ’30s to the JFK ’60s, Loretta Young epitomized the glamour of Hollywood.

In the brutal arena of show business, she was a survivor, rising from bit player to starlet to movie queen to television mogul, riding the 20th Century technology train from silent movies to talkies to TV. She weathered the ups and downs of a public career, became one of the first celebrities to learn the value of reinventing yourself, and outlasted many of the moguls for whom she toiled in the days before the Screen Actors Guild, when it was expected for actors to work 18 or 20 hours a day, at least six days a week.

In an era when the studios routinely included a “morality clause” in their stars’ contracts, Loretta was no stranger to personal drama. At the age of 18 she eloped with actor Grant Withers, defying her mother, but divorced him quickly.

Two years later she had a very public affair with a very married Spencer Tracy, and two years after that a liaison with Clark Gable that most likely produced a daughter, Judy Lewis, who years later would write about the cover-up rooted in Loretta’s ultra-devout Catholicism, in her book, Uncommon Knowledge.

After 20 years of movie stardom, Loretta shocked her peers when she defected from the big screen to the relatively new medium of television. Letters to Loretta, an anthology series, debuted on NBC in September 1953 and, retitled “The Loretta Young Show,” ran until 1961. Along the way, she introduced 300 episodes, acted in 165 shows, and won three Emmys. Every week, she made a grand entrance, dressed in the latest fashion, sweeping through a door to introduce each episode. Her fans loved it, and the flamboyant entrance became her trademark.

If, in this first decade of television, Lucille Ball was the Queen of Comedy, Loretta Young was the Diva of Drama. She shared with Lucy a history of studio contract slavery, an independent spirit, and a business expertise that made it possible for both women to produce their own series, breaking ground for women in the new medium. Like her contemporaries Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur and Irene Dunne, Loretta chose to leave her fans with self-controlled memories, rather than age gracefully on camera a la Hepburn or, less gracefully, like Lucy. She retired at the age of 48, returning only for two TV movies, Christmas Eve (1986) and Lady in a Corner (1989).

Ironically, “The Loretta Young Show” eclipsed a stunning body of film work. Equally skilled at drama and comedy, she made pictures at every major studio; without formal training, she literally learned her craft on the job. She was extraordinarily prolific, appearing in a total of 91 movies—between 1928 and 1933, between the ages of 15 and 20, she made 42 pictures, 10 in ’33 alone!

Her directors include icons like Capra, Wellman, Ford, DeMille and Welles, and her co-stars are a roll call of Golden Age greats—John Barrymore, James Cagney, Ronald Colman, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, William Holden, and her favorite, David Niven.

Her early ’30s work is the most remarkable of any young actress of the time. In 1930, only 17, she played sophisticated roles opposite Barrymore In The Man From Blankley’s and Colman in The Devil To Pay, and the following year switched to the wisecracking reporter of Capra’s Platinum Blonde. She held her own in the Lower East Side melodrama Taxi (1932) with tough guy Jimmy Cagney, and starred in a string of youth market flicks like Too Young To Marry, I Like Your Nerve, and The Truth About Youth. 1933 brought three beautiful performances in the artful Zoo In Budapest, the Depression fable A Man’s Castle (co-starring Spencer Tracy), and especially the forgotten gem Midnight Mary, directed by William Wellman, in which Loretta ages from nine years to 20.

She had a special relationship with legendary “Wild Bill” Wellman, making four pictures together between 1932 and 1935, including The Call Of The Wild, the movie that brought her together with Gable; she clicked also with director Tay Garnett, who sharpened her comedy timing in Love Is News (1937) and Eternally Yours (1939). She maintained her fan base as the ’30s became the ’40s, hitting her stride with the comedy-mystery A Night To Remember (1943), Orson Welles’ Nazi-among-us-drama The Stranger (1946), the perennial Christmas fantasy The Bishop’s Wife (1947), and of course, her Oscar-winning turn as The Farmer’s Daughter (also 1947).

I met Loretta Young twice. In 1978, I was a film student aboard an American Film Institute cruise from L.A. to Mexico and back. The first time I saw her, she swept onto the deck as if responding to a cue of “Action!” She was still gorgeous at 63, dressed to kill—there was no mistake about it—she was still a star.

To my surprise and delight, she was genuinely interested in the ambitions and interests of a school kid who wanted to make movies. Cruising that week off the coast of Mexico, I had several encounters with her, pestering her with endless questions about Capra, Wellman and Ford. She seemed almost relieved—most of the folks on board wanted to talk about the TV show, while I was only interested in discussing her directors. Inevitably she responded graciously to me, with sincere encouragement and advice: “Watch the great movies,” she told me. “Keep your integrity for your career and your passion for movies alive, stay loyal to those who love and support you in your life and your art.”

They sounded like platitudes to me at the time—what did I know, I was a kid—but her words resonate as I’ve pursued a filmmaking career.

This past January, 22 years later, my fifth feature as writer-director, Blue Moon, starring Ben Gazzara and Rita Moreno, premiered at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. I knew that Loretta Young lived there in the California desert, and had been told by my friends Bill Wellman, Jr., and Tom Capra (the sons of her two most revered directors) that she was fairly visible around town. But I despaired that I would not have the opportunity to see her again, to let her know that the kid from the cruise had actually gone on to make movies.

The night before the screening of Blue Moon, I met musical genius and cineaste Michael Feinstein and invited him to the show. He told me he’d try to make it but he had a previous dinner engagement with ... Loretta Young.

Michael came to the movie, loved it, and by pure coincidence, learned that my producers Ronnie Shapiro and Sylvia Caminer had scheduled a post-screening party at the same restaurant.

There she was, Loretta Young, gray hair pulled back tightly in a bun, 10 days past 87 years of age.

A line of well-wishers formed to pay their respects to this living legend, including Rita Moreno, producers Ronnie Shapiro and Norman Chanes, and cinematographer Craig DiBona. Sylvia and I patiently waited our turn, then, introduced by Michael, we sat down and enjoyed the warmth of that distinctive smile and the depth of those beautiful blue eyes. I felt the same way I felt when I looked into the 80-year-old eyes of greats like Maureen O’Sullivan, Fay Wray, Claire Trevor and Katharine Hepburn—timeless beauty and an inner light.

Loretta instantly told us that Michael had praised Blue Moon, citing a “Capraesque quality” and the performances of Gazzara and Moreno. We promised to send her a copy, and then I told her about our meeting on the cruise and my subsequent progress. She grasped my hand, told her friends at the table that she had inspired me, and I sensed her dormant connection to the business that she loved rekindled once again. We spoke for an hour; I questioned her about Wellman, Capra and Garnett, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. She was sharp, vital, eloquent that night. She thanked us for making a movie, from what she’d been told, that was not only “safe” for all ages, but preached love and understanding. “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I’m not a prude. I loved The Piano, even though Harvey Keitel ran around in his birthday suit. It fit the story!”

We did indeed send her a copy of Blue Moon, and were rewarded with a lovely handwritten letter and a review that could have been written by my mother. Our greatest satisfaction, though, was the knowledge that we had made a picture that, in the last year of her extraordinary life, had made Loretta Young happy.
She brought joy to generations, dodging the slings and arrows of a tough business with style and smarts. “If you want a place in the sun,” she once said, “You have to expect some blisters.” As long as there are movie lovers, Loretta Young will always have her place in the sun. — John Gallagher

The Versatality of the "Plain as Porridge" Face:
Many overlooked the comic genius of Sir Alec Guinness (1914-2000)

Sir Alec Guinness

When Sir Alec Guinness died in August, the media focused, not surprisingly, on his performances as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai and as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. While these two roles are undoubtedly the most famous of his screen career, they only tell a part of the story. Sir Alec was one of the greatest dramatic actors of his time, but he was equally masterful in comedy. Beginning in the late 1940s and throughout the ’50s, Guinness gave a succession of comedic performances, mostly for Ealing Studios, that remain breathtaking in their depth and diversity. Guinness, in both looks and persona, was not a conventional leading man, and The New York Times hit the nail on the head when it said that he possessed a face that was “plain-as-porridge.” But Guinness used these potential drawbacks to his advantage, creating a chameleonlike screen personality that enabled him to dramatically change his appearance from film to film. Nowhere was this skill more relevant than in his comedies.

A sampling of his films from this period reveals his astonishing range. One of Guinness’ earliest successes was Kind Hearts and Coronets, from 1949. Directed by Robert Hamer, it is an extremely dark comedy about a rejected relative of the aristocratic D’Ascoyne family who decides to achieve what he feels is his rightful place as the Duke of Chalfont by killing all of the D’Ascoynes who stand in his way to the title. Dennis Price, then a top star in England, plays the vengeful would-be Duke, but it is Guinness who walks away with the picture by pulling off the considerable feat of playing all eight D’Ascoynes. At the time the film was made, Guinness was only in his mid-30s, but he delivers a brilliant comic performance that ranges from 24-year-old newlywed Henry D’Ascoyne to the aged banker Lord Ascoyne D’Ascoyne, and even includes the middle-aged, militant suffragist Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne. The performance easily could have descended into portraying class charicatures. But Guinness goes beyond playing stereotypes to develop distinct personalities for each D’Ascoyne, so much so that soon the novelty of seeing him under makeup wears off and the viewer accepts each character as a separate performance. Using techniques like body language and making subtle changes in his voice, Alec Guinness the actor fades from the screen and instead the eccentric (and doomed) D’Ascoyne family moves center stage.

Disappearing into his roles seems to have been his trick through much of his career. Today we are accustomed to actors who turn their character into near-reflections of their own personalities, but Guinness’ performances often took the opposite approach. With or without makeup, he would become his character and it was the character’s personality that was the prime focus. This certainly was true with 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob. In it he plays Holland, a meek and rather non-descript man, who for almost 20 years has escorted bars of gold bullion from the refinery to the bank on a daily, monotony-filled routine, earning an ironclad reputation for honesty. What his employers don’t know, however, is that he has been quietly biding his time for the opportunity to pull off the perfect heist and make his fortune. Guinness’ blend-in-with-the-wallpaper performance earned him his first Oscar nomination, but more importantly built his reputation as an actor who could take on almost any role. Through most of the film’s early scenes, as he struggles with the problem of how to smuggle the bullion out of the country, it is easy to understand why no one takes notice of this mousy little man. But when the solution finally comes to him, Guinness merely expresses it with a sudden gleam in his eyes and we know instantly that he has had the revelation of his life. From that point on Holland uses his mousiness and the trust people have in him to his advantage, knowing that no one would ever think of suspecting him of anything improper.

Guinness plays the flipside of Holland in another heist caper from Ealing, The Ladykillers from 1955. Once again playing the ringleader of a group of thieves (in this case, completely incompetent thieves), Guinness looks as if he has aged 20 years. As Professor Marcus, he is nothing short of ghoulish, and there is no doubt from the very first shot of him that this pale, decaying man with a devilish smile (the teeth have to be seen to be believed) and polite manner is not to be trusted. He and his four cohorts (one of whom is played by a very young and plump Peter Sellers) take advantage of the kindness of a naïve little old lady to involve her in a plan to rob a bank van. Ultimately the thieves are no match for this supposedly defenseless old lady; Guinness raisies comic fiendishness to new heights, and The Ladykillers remains one of the funniest movies to come out of Ealing Studios. Guinness and Sellers, both of whom seemed to relish disguises, have always struck me as being similar in both manner and style, and The Ladykillers provides a unique opportunity to witness these two great talents perform together. I can’t help but think that had not Guinness moved into more dramatic parts by the 1960s, he would have been thoroughly in his element playing Inspector Clouseau or the multiple roles in Dr. Strangelove. I wish that some director would have paired these two men up in a madcap ’60s comedy.

Towards the end of the 1950s, Guinness gave another comic performance that was probably the perfect end of his remarkable decade. The Horse’s Mouth from 1958 is a highlight of Guinness’ career not only because of his tour-de-force performance but also because he wrote the screenplay (based on Joyce Cary’s novel). It was the only film script of his career and earned him an Oscar nomination. The film should, perhaps, have been more properly titled “A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man;” Guinness’ portrayal of artist Gulley Jimson is the final screen word in aging, anti-social eccentrics. But more than just playing another hopeless, tortured artist, Guinness presents Gulley as a man so obsessed with expressing himself through painting that he has become his own worst enemy. The film was released a year after Guinness’ Oscar-winning role in The Bridge on the River Kwai, but Gulley doesn’t resemble a distant relative of Bridge’s Colonel Nicholson. Guinness undergoes an amazing physical and emotional transformation. With his pathetic shuffle and scruffy appearance, his characterization deftly blends comedy with drama without a hint of sentimentality, creating what is arguably the most underrated performance of his screen career. In one scene, while looking at one of his prized paintings for the first time in years, Gulley tries to get an unappreciative companion to understand the importance of art by telling her, “Half a minute of revelation is worth a million years of no-nothing.” Her curt response is simply, “Who lives a million years?” Gulley can only scratch his head and with the expression of a man half-beaten by his own life but still very much in love with art, responds, “A million people every 12 months.”

During this same period, Sir Alec Guinness delivered several other equally noteworthy performances, both comedic and dramatic, among them his controversial Fagin in David Lean’s Oliver Twist (1948), the title role of the obsessed scientist in The Man in the White Suit (1951), the priest-sleuth in 1954’s Father Brown (known in the U.S. as The Detective) and, of course, the tragically stubborn Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Years later, Guinness published his autobiography, as well as two collections of diary entries. Displaying a wonderfully dry sense of humor and observation, he seems not so far removed from the persona who made so many classic comedies, and the books also refreshingly reveal a man more interested in reflecting on his friends and family than on recounting his various career glories (indeed, his knighthood and many awards get barely a mention).

Beginning in the 1960s Guinness focused more on drama, always maintaining his high standards of performance, and in 1976 had the opportunity to again strut his comic stuff in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death (in a cast that included Peter Sellers). But for me and other fans of his work it was the Guinness of the late ’40s and who most stands out in the memory, a figure both hopelessly plain and wildly absurd, one who seemed perfectly suited for audiences in the post-World War II era. —Bob Mastrangelo

The Farce of Evil:
Paul Bartel (1938-2000) made murder a laughing matter

Eating Raoul (1982)

This industry is picky about who it’ll let in. Yet in its own way, it’s oddly democratic to those who do manage to get past the velvet rope. Jim Carrey butt jokes end up sharing shelf space in video stores with the masterworks of Chaplin. An overblown remake like 1998’s Godzilla mingles in the mind with the superior, dime-store charm of the original. Projectionists have no choice but to load the reels of Friday the 13th, Part VI with the same care they’d apply if they were cueing up Psycho.

Everyone knows Hollywood wants it both ways. But few had as much fun putting that knowledge to use as Paul Bartel. A writer and director probably best known for his gratuitously violent, yet delightfully grotesque comedies Eating Raoul and Death Race 2000—and for the sort of leering, prissy snob he was so good at portraying as an actor—Bartel deserves to be remembered for more than just the blood, gore and body counts of his twisted farces. That kind of thing, after all, was standard issue drive-in fare long before he picked up his first Bolex.

Bartel’s movies were unique, and so wickedly entertaining in the way they shifted the focus away from the victims and onto the victimizers. His creations trafficked in the wastelands of human endeavor—sexual perversion, cannibalism, murder—but did so with a degree of blithe indifference that, in a decidedly unsettling way, pushed wide open the envelope of farce.

Given the jaunty, fairy-tale looseness with which his characters dispatched those around them, Paul Bartel might’ve been a long-lost cousin of the Brothers Grimm. It’s hard to deny he was out to have a good time—and to give us a few queasy laughs in the process. But if you like, there are seeds of satire and social comment in his weird, homicidal tales. Death Race 2000 (1975) took a swipe at our appetite for sensation and celebrity worship by envisioning the national pastime as a road race in which contestants score points by killing pedestrians. Although he didn’t write the script, Bartel structures the movie into a lighthearted cartoon that renders us—each time we laugh at another kill—as complicit in the bloodbath as the drivers’ groupies—who throw themselves in front of cars so their idols might win. Eating Raoul, which he wrote and directed in 1982, plays like a mutant episode of I Love Lucy, only this time with our loving couple trying to get out of a money jam by embarking on a serial murder scheme and selling the bodies for dog food. The ongoing joke of the murders, and the ensuing cannibalism, was enough to make the movie a huge success. Yet simmering right at the surface is a reminder that the world might indeed be full of people who find sex shameful and repellent, but consider killing an acceptable means to an end.

The violence was purely psychological—and entirely effective—in Bartel’s first work as a writer and director, a 30-minute short called The Secret Cinema, which he made in 1966 on a borrowed camera and pilfered filmstock. Cinema is a sharp, clever piece of work in which a New Yorker named Jane suspects that her wretched life has become a movie—and that all of her friends and family are keeping tabs on her suffering for their own amusement. It’s rentable (packaged with Bartel’s second, less-interesting short, Naughty Nurses) and highly recommended as a great study of voyeurism and paranoia that leaves The Truman Show yawning in the dust.

In terms of storytelling and building tension—elements sorely lacking in his more cartoonish work—Bartel’s feature directorial debut, Private Parts (1972), is probably his best effort. The story of a young man who takes a room in a creepy apartment building,

Private Parts gurgles us down into a cesspool of sexual perversion and murder. Heads are lopped off like golfballs leaving the tee. Incinerator flames overtake the screen as they consume human flesh. Inflatable sex partners seem somehow more lifelike than the real thing. When Bartel depicts the accidental electrocution of a rat with the brio of a scene from Wagner, the message of The Secret Cinema comes clear. Someone else’s hell is one thing. But someone else’s hell for our own amusement?

Now that’s entertainment. —Carmen Ficarra

Codger King Calls it a Day:
Shambling grace and impeccable comic timing came naturally to Walter Matthau (1920-2000)

Matthau with Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple

People think I secretly want to be Woody Allen. It could be the way I talk. Or the attitude of neurotic exasperation with which I face the day. Or the fact that, even though I get off a funny line every now and then, I seem to be having trouble living up to my early promise. Whatever the case, it’s something I’ve had to live with. Until now.

Tim, Rus, David, Lisa, Mary, Mom and Dad, I’m outing myself. My personal hero, the man in whose shabby shoes I’d have been proud to walk a mile, has always been Walter Matthau.

Flying out of New York a couple of months ago, I looked up at the in-flight video screen and saw that they were showing Hanging Up, Matthau’s last feature. It brought a tear to my eye. No, I didn’t have a premonition that in a few weeks Matthau would be dead. It’s just that there he was again, playing one of those irascible, endearing, lovable, troublesome codgers—a character he perfected 30 years ago—in yet another one of those disposable, heartwarming comedies that make critics groan but keep the family-viewing dollars rolling in at Blockbuster. I know, I know. Matthau took the roles himself. They made him good money. Allowed him to keep working. And gave whole new generations of moviegoers a taste of his unbeatable timing, his shambling grace, his jazzman’s way of affectionately distorting the language so that a word as familiar as “Enough!” came out sounding like he’d coined it on the spot.

Still, it troubles me that in the final decades of his career, hardly anyone in Hollywood (short of Oliver Stone, who cast him as a drawling senator in one of JFK’s many memorable cameos) could think of doing anything with Matthau except to inject him with repeated doses of the Grumpy Old Man virus. Not that anybody could play grumpy with quite the same flair. Think of the full-body scowl of his Oscar Madison in The Odd Couple; the Nixonian slouch with which he battles the specter of honesty as the shyster lawyer in The Fortune Cookie; the impatient wisecracking with which he outwits the subway hijackers in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; the bloodless gloom with which he pontificates about the benefits of nuclear war in Fail-Safe. Tall and slender, Matthau had a way of looming over everyone else on the screen—friend and foe alike—glowering like a vulture, a sigh of infuriation building up in his cheeks. Even his clothes seemed cranky, like he did his shopping at a thrift shop with no dressing room, no mirrors, and no return policy.

Yet he carried it off beautifully, with the aplomb of a sloppy Sinatra, the cool of a disheveled James Dean. Matthau often got roles that found him playing the cat-and-mouse game—with the hijackers in Pelham; with maverick cowboy Kirk Douglas in Lonely Are the Brave; with the Russians in Fail-Safe; —and for my money, they’re his best. He fends off every wrinkle in his path, and usually gets what he’s after, and he does it with an artless indifference to style that makes another patron saint of cool, Clint Eastwood, seem fussy.

Matthau turned the concept of the leading man on its ear. Usually, Hollywood puts guys on the screen who make us fantasize about the men we’d like to be. In Matthau, they had something more unique: a leading man who aspired to be like us. —Carmen Ficarra