For Love or For Money?

An awkward plain-Jane spinster, heiress to a vast fortune, meets a handsome and debonair yet penniless younger man. Fueled by love, the formerly introverted and obedient Catherine defies her stern and taciturn father and risks disinheritance to win her beloved Morris. But matters of the heart are rarely resolved so simply, especially when money is involved.

For The Heiress (1949), based on the novel Washington Square by Henry James and adapted into a successful play by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, legendary director William Wyler assembles a stellar cast to create one of the cinema’s most unforgettable and heart-rending love stories. 

Montgomery Clift as Morris Townsend

Arrestingly handsome, with his famously chiseled features and a soulful aura that belies his character’s possibly mercenary intentions, Montgomery Clift is perfectly cast as Morris Townsend, the glamorous stranger who comes to call on the maiden heiress Catherine Sloper.  Even if Morris is in fact merely an opportunist after the Sloper fortune, he is so attractive, solicitous and romantic in his wooing of Catherine that the audience believes their marriage could indeed prove harmonious and result in a happy ending for both characters. This defining early performance sent Clift into the superstar stratosphere and made him an international heartthrob, with his potent combination of acting talent and physical beauty.

Olivia deHavilland as Catherine Sloper

Far from unlovely herself, Olivia deHavilland transforms herself skillfully into the graceless ugly duckling Catherine, courageously using the obvious age difference between herself and Clift to underline her character’s undesirability. It’s a credit to deHavilland, a great beauty and longtime screen paramour of heartthrob Errol Flynn, that she manages to convince the audience of her utter lack of attractiveness--such a handicap, in fact, that other characters in the film literally gasp when they learn that Morris is wooing Catherine. Nevertheless, deHavilland is completely sympathetic and heartbreakingly vulnerable in the role of Catherine, which makes her eventual transformation into a hard and cynical simulacrum of her father all the more startling. For this performance, Olivia deHavilland won her second Academy Award as Best Actress (she had earned the first just three years earlier, for To Each His Own).   

Olivia lets Monty be the pretty one

The supporting performances are equally striking and memorable. Scene-stealing actress Miriam Hopkins, who sparred so brilliantly with Bette Davis in The Old Maid and Old Acquaintance (as well as off the screen), is now relegated to the character role of Catherine’s vivacious aunt, which of course she plays to the hilt. Hopkins is prattling, frenetic and nearly over the top, but lends a welcome dimension of humor to this romantic melodrama.

Hopkins deftly upstages her costars

Richardson gives the lovers a frosty reception

Sir Ralph Richardson, one of the most celebrated British stage actors of the 20th century, is coldly and clinically effective as the smug and self-possessed Dr. Sloper, highly respected in New York society but prone to offering left-handed compliments and nasty but veiled remarks to his only child, who lives only to please him. Sloper’s own disillusionment is based on the long-ago loss of his beautiful and virtuous wife, the memory of whom their daughter can never measure up to.  Richardson’s distinctive speaking voice, with its peculiar inflections and trills, is somewhat stagy but absolutely appropriate in his role as the pompous and humorless society doctor who threatens to cut Catherine off without a penny if she marries Morris.

Interestingly, there are no hard-and-fast resolutions to the story or answers to its big questions: Is Dr. Sloper right? Is Morris purely mercenary? Does he love Catherine at all? Should Catherine take whatever happiness, real or imagined, that she can get? Is Catherine justified in her final decision? Each viewer is allowed to form his or her opinion, and the film does not contradict the watcher’s personal viewpoint.

Thanks to the literate script, compelling performances and brilliant direction, The Heiress is an absorbing and affecting film, worthy of its status as an enduring classic.

Did she make the right decision? 

Judging Nuremberg

Director Stanley Kramer loved movies with a message...Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind. He is equally well known for his big, splashy epics with all-star casts, like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Ship of Fools. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) combines both of Kramer’s directorial strengths in one powerhouse of a film.

Based on a Playhouse 90 television drama with a script by Abby Mann, the film version had to be bigger and more spectacular, so director Stanley Kramer pulled out all the stops by planning location filming in battle-scarred Nuremberg itself and assembling a cast that audiences would pay admission to see in the theaters.

But Judgment is far more than a collection of stars. It provides a group of fine actors the opportunity to lay their Hollywood personas aside and sink their teeth into unusual, once-in-a-lifetime roles.

Burt Lancaster as Dr. Ernst Janning

Rugged Burt Lancaster, whose career had been built as much upon his good looks and athletic physique as his acting talent, plays against type as the aging Dr. Ernst Janning, who signed into law the Nazi edicts that robbed millions of citizens of their human rights. When Janning’s resigned stoicism gives way to regret and contrition, the audience experiences a catharsis that’s a testament to the talents of a truly gifted actor.

Maximilian Schell and Richard Widmark

Handsome Richard Widmark has rarely been better than as the crusading American prosecutor hell-bent on justice for the millions of Jews slaughtered during the European genocide. Self-righteous and angry, hating every moment he must spend in the enemy’s homeland, his demonization of an entire nation of people seems nevertheless justified.

Judy Garland as Irene Hoffmann

Judy Garland, absent from films since 1954’s A Star Is Born and now approaching 40, is compelling in the non-singing character role of hausfrau Irene Hoffmann, who enjoyed a controversially intimate friendship with a Jewish neighbor when back in her teens.  In this small part, Garland is heartbreakingly vulnerable, a bird with broken wings. For this performance, Judy Garland was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress.

Montgomery Clift as Rudolph Petersen

Montgomery Clift channels his inner demons to portray the mentally disabled Rudolph Petersen, whom the Nazi Party ordered sterilized to “cleanse” the population of debility in their quest to evolve into an Aryan super-race. Clift’s startling cameo as the halting-voiced and humiliated victim of inhuman torture is unforgettable.

Marlene Dietrich as Frau Bertholt

Glamorous German ice queen Marlene Dietrich is perfectly cast as Mrs. Bertholt, widow of a convicted and executed officer of the German army, whose home Judge Haywood is given for the duration of the trial.  Her explanation and rationalization of Nazi atrocities summarizes the prevailing post-War German attitude toward the Holocaust: “We did not know.”

Maximilian Schell is passionate and fiery as the young attorney assigned to defend the indefensible. His skillful and articulate direct and cross examinations of witnesses, so beautifully laid out by writer Abby Mann, is highly compelling and almost succeeds in obscuring the architects of the 20th century’s most ignominious tragedies in reasonable doubt.  For his performance, Schell won the Best Actor Academy Award.

Spencer Tracy as Judge Dan Haywood

With his craggy face furrowed and his weary shoulders bowed with profound questions of right and wrong, good and evil, Spencer Tracy brings the full force of his considerable talents to bring the difficult role of the tribunal judge Dan Haywood  to life. Though it’s been often said that Spencer Tracy reduced his own film acting philosophy to one simple rule: “Find your marks and tell the truth,” there is a lot more going on here than mere technique. Tracy’s thoughtful and multidimensional performance is understated yet powerful, but melds beautifully with the introverted method-like work of Garland and Clift and the more representational portrayals of German actors Dietrich and Schell.

Director Kramer’s point of view, as seen through protagonist Tracy, allows every character of the story humanity and dignity, even those who condoned atrocities that robbed millions of those same qualities.

For lovers of courtroom drama and truly great acting, Judgment at Nuremberg is a must-see.

The Misfits: Misfire or Masterpiece?

Dark and downbeat, poignant and profound, The Misfits (1961) is an unflinchingly clinical examination of the inner psyches of a group of disparate unfulfilled characters played against a backdrop of the arid and cheerless Nevada desert, filmed in silvery black and white. To some film fans, it’s a masterpiece of motion picture truth. To others, it’s an unrelentingly dry and joyless two hours and four minutes, difficult to watch in one sitting.

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, All My Sons) and directed by the legendary filmmaker John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), The Misfits assembled some of the greatest talents of the mid 20th century for this original story about a group of cowboys whose lives are touched by a beautiful, lonely divorcee. The cast includes Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe (the final film for both stars), Eli Wallach, Thelma Ritter and Montgomery Clift.

The performances are faultless, the characters well-drawn, and some of the language among Arthur Miller’s best and most perceptive observations of the human experience, but this is far from the perfect movie, and the fault rests chiefly with the author himself.

Miller and Marilyn on the set

Miller’s recent years had not been productive or artistically satisfying. He had spent more time fighting House Un-American Activities inquiries into his supposed Communist leanings, and playing nursemaid to a needy and narcissistic movie star wife, than he did creating theater magic. By 1960, his four-year marriage was crumbling. As he adapted his 1957 short story, originally published in Esquire magazine, into a vehicle for Marilyn, he was obviously in a state of deep depression.

Clearly written by a man in need of a prescription for one of today’s serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Arthur Miller’s screenplay for The Misfits is a negative and gloomy tale of lost hopes, unrealized dreams and an inability to change—almost everyone we meet finds their life frozen with regret and despair. Artfully articulated, yes...but entertaining? If you are a fan of fine acting, perhaps.

Clark Gable in his final film role, as Gay Langland

Gable’s portrayal of disillusioned cattle rustler Gay Langland plumbs the depths of the actor’s capacities. He hasn’t had a juicy acting role like this since Rhett Butler, and we see moments of surprising vulnerability from one of Hollywood’s most iconic he-men. The brilliant Eli Wallach is intense and raw as Gay’s sidekick Guido. The reliable and real Thelma Ritter adds a much-needed dose of ironic humor to the often lugubrious proceedings, but she is also touching and wistful as Roslyn’s Reno landlady. Monty Clift’s physically ravaged rodeo rider Perce reminds audiences of the actor’s own horrifying car accident three years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and hooked on pain medication. His scene in a phone booth speaking haltingly with his mother is among the very best Montgomery Clift moments ever captured on film.

Montgomery Clift as Perce

Veteran character actress Thelma Ritter as Isabel

Eli Wallach as Guido

Roslyn and Gay follow the star that will take them "right home"

Monroe is a revelation as over-30 divorcee Roslyn Tabor. If you’ve never seen The Misfits, this is truly a Marilyn Monroe you’ve never encountered on the screen. Here is one of the few performances in which she was able to fully use her Actors Studio training to realize a character who is more than a cartoonlike depiction of beauty and seductiveness. Monroe’s Roslyn is disappointed with life and can find little to hold onto or believe in...yet her sheer life force has the power to bring magic to the moment.  To use Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio technical jargon, we see Marilyn “make contact” perfectly with her character, particularly in the scenes where she describes feeling abandoned by her mother and let down by her ex-husband. Though Monroe disliked her character and the story, feeling Miller stole intimate details from her own life and their marriage, her performance in this dark film strikes a poignantly incandescent note.

Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn

Much has been written about the filming of this movie, and in the ensuing years the surviving players all seemed to point to Marilyn Monroe as the reason for the film’s failure. Marilyn was difficult. Marilyn was ill—drinking—overweight. Marilyn was late. Marilyn was mean to her soon-to-be-ex. That may all have been true, but the real culprits in the film’s failure to entertain are the author and the director, who were reported to have indulged in countless gambling and drinking binges during location filming in the Nevada desert. The drama offscreen was far more exciting than the action being photographed, and Miller used Huston as a surrogate therapist and confidante as his marriage fell to pieces. 

All the major players involved in putting together this quirky film displayed behavior perfectly in keeping with the movie’s title. It's a fascinating film, but only if you're in a deep and reflective mood.

Three misfits—director Huston, star Monroe and writer Miller

Last dance for Mr. and Mrs. Miller

A Southern Gothic Summer

Ever wonder what lies behind the elaborate wrought iron gates and well-manicured lawns of New Orleans’s sedate and genteel Garden District? Ask Tennessee Williams, and he’ll show you. Suddenly Last Summer (1959) is a seamy stew of neurotic revelation bubbling forth from the psyche of a master Gothic storyteller.

In lieu of dirty rice and crawfish étouffé, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz serves up Williams’s unsavory concoction of homosexuality, cannibalism, madness and malice with unrestrained guignol, peppering it with piquant performances by a star-studded cast, including Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Mercedes McCambridge and Montgomery Clift. Gore Vidal’s skillful adaptation of the original Williams one-act play conveys the tale’s hidden meanings cleverly without completely sanitizing its taboo subject matter—quite a feat in the straightlaced ’50s. At the time of its release, the film shocked audiences and earned a condemnation from the Catholic League of Decency.

The story is simple. Wealthy Violet Venable wants to silence her niece Catherine’s “insane babblings” about the recent death of Violet’s son Sebastian, a confirmed bachelor and adventurer. (You see, Catherine was there, and she saw it all.) Mrs. Venable enlists the aid of brooding Dr. Cukrowicz to perform a lobotomy on the girl and “cut that awful story out of her brain.” 

Fans of florid Tennessee Williams monologues will devour this picture with gusto, thanks to the performances of the two powerhouse lead actresses. Highlights are Hepburn’s edgy recounting of a harrowing boat trip to the Encantadas, where her son “saw the face of God,” and Taylor’s hypnotic account of the days leading up to Sebastian’s death...building to a horrifying climax.

Troubled actor Montgomery Clift adds unwitting subtext to his own role as the doctor. You can’t miss Monty’s trembling alcoholic hands as he attempts to perform delicate brain surgery in a rickety operating theater. Clift (a closeted homosexual in real life) also serves as surrogate for the dead, unseen Sebastian, as both the Venable women vie for his trust and attention.  

Take in this richly layered movie classic on a hot, sultry summer night, and expect to be absorbed by its intricate language, dark imagery and feverish intensity.