Take Three: Gloria Grahame

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Gloria Grahame.

Take One: The Big Heat (1953)
When you think of Film Noir, you think of hard-boiled anti-heroes in fedoras, smoking, permanently with gun. But in some noirs it’s ladies first. Fritz Lang’s dirty, masterful noir par excellence The Big Heat has a first-rate femme fatale in Grahame’s Debby Marsh. Thank 20th Century Fox for replacement pleasures then: Grahame stepped in when original pick Marilyn Monroe’s fee became too high, giving the the film an extra sprinkling of salty sass. She excelled in each moment, whether heartfelt or hardened; I can only hazard a guess that Monroe might have made Debby’s eventual desperation too pleading. Under Grahame’s control Debby’s desperate dilemma was frenetic and wrenching. Never has the rapid flush of devastation been so well conveyed on screen as when she runs to Glenn Ford’s apartment to beg for cover.

Grahame’s transformation, from carefree nonchalance to scornful grittiness is more readily noticeable after a second viewing of the film. Indeed, The Big Heat deserves two watches for Grahame’s performance alone. She flips drastically in a scene wherein Lee Marvin (as Vince, her criminal beau) throws hot coffee in her face. It occurs off screen and we are withheld the image of her scarred visage until... well, let’s say she gets her revenge in an apt way. But her face, now fuelled with anger and half covered with bandages, tells us everything we need to know about what she’s thinking. It’s a beautifully judged and performance. No wonder Stephen Frears insisted on her influence for his Grifters ladies. Grahame had the film’s best line too. “Hey, that's nice perfume.” Vince says. “Something new,” Debby replies, “it attracts mosquitoes and repels men.”

Take Two: In a Lonely Place (1950)

As with The Big Heat, Grahame wasn’t the first choice for Nicholas Ray’s 1950 masterpiece In a Lonely Place. She was third in line to play Laurel Gray. This being a Humphrey Bogart film, the obvious choice at the time would have been Bogart’s wife, Lauren Bacall. But, under contract, Warner Bros. refused to loan Bacall out; Ray, who was married to Grahame (though they subsequently separated during filming) managed to get her cast over Ginger Rogers, too.

Laurel Gray is a struggling actress, living across the courtyard in an adjacent apartment to Dixon Steele (Bogart). In fact, this is how she comes to be embroiled in his affairs and ends up falling in love with him. We see her go from cool, aloof social gal to a woman in dire need of a supportive shoulder to spill her woes to; "is-he-isn’t-he a killer?" conundrums are tough to sort out. Grahame takes obvious pleasure in the spiky moments of dialogue between herself and Bogart, leaving the air in recently-vacated spaces pungent with tease. Referring to Bogart’s face she says

I said I liked it. I didn’t say I wanted to kiss it.

Off she walks, daring us to scuttle after her.

Her performance gives way to darker edges as the plot sinks further into muddy emotional territory, but throughout the entire film Grahame is on full actressing alert. Her last lines find their way out of her conscience at the close. “I lived a few weeks while you loved me...” She adds a sad “Goodbye Dix” at the end. In a lonely place, indeed.

Take Three: Crossfire (1947)

Grahame’s is the first name after the title in Crossfire, but she shares the screen caption with four others, a trio of Roberts: Mitchum, Young and Ryan, aptly sounding like a private detective firm. The Roberts³ head this 1947 noir from Edward Dmytryk. Grahame only really has two scenes in the film. But what a pair of scenes. Each is nearly ten minutes long and crucial to the plot. She dominates both with a characteristically captivating allure, leaving us wanting at least another half dozen more. We first see her emerge from a blurred dissolve: she enters the film as she enters the recollection of Ryan’s soldier. She’s in the Red Dragon, the “stinking gin mill” out of which she procures her men folk. She’s Ginny “because [she’s] from Virginia”, lit by cinematographer J. Roy Hunt as a seductive blonde vapour, only her showy attributes are spotlit: the hard glint in her eyes matches the gleam from her bling.

It’s her second scene, much later in the film, where she gives good talk to match the face. It’s surely the scene that earned her the Supporting Actress Oscar nomination (she would win the award in The Bad and the Beautiful five years later). The shimmy has dimmed - she’s dowdy in a housedress - but she's no less captivating. Here we see another side to Grahame, a defiant irritation, as Ginny is questioned on Ryan’s whereabouts the night of the anti-Semitic murder that propels the narrative. Dmytryk’s camera searches her for the answers the plot demands. Grahame’s greatness in the role becomes all the more evident because of this scrutiny.

Three more key films for the taking: The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Oklahoma! (1955), Human Desire (1954)

Overheard: 'Princess Anne'

Two middle aged white ladies on the subway.

Lady #1: She's so pretty. Did you know she could sing, too?
Lady #2: I know. I totally didn't but there she was singing. She's so talented.
Lady #1: I watched Princess Diaries last night.
Lady #2: [Excited] Ohhhh, I want to see that!

I know this isn't truly much of an overheard but given the thrill of discovery in Lady #2's voice I couldn't help but chuckle. The last line was uttered like The Princess Diaries was a new box office champ, unseating Rango from its perch. What is this Princess Diaries everyone is talking about? Better get on that before it leaves theaters and there's that interminable wait before VHS!

I kid. I kid. I love all peoples who talk about movies on the subway. They delight me.  If I were a cartoon my eyes would pop open and my ears would fan out comically to absorb every word. I wish subways weren't so goddamn noisy! Maybe I missed some deep analysis of Rachel Getting Married shout outs to Ella Enchanted ?

Day of Rest

Shhhhhhhhhhhh....

I'm in an emotionally abusive relationship with my blog (it's Rourke / I'm Basinger) and we're both exhausted. Be back in Nine ½ Hours... or, okay, more like 15 hours. Need lots of beauty sleep.

Mix Tape: "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" in It Happened One Night

Andreas from Pussy Goes Grrr here, to talk about an impromptu musical number that doubles as a historical document. Frank Capra’s Oscar-sweeping screwball comedy It Happened One Night is naturally best remembered for the cute love story that unfolds (over the course of several nights) between stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert.

However, it’s also something of a postapocalyptic travelogue, since the odd couple’s odyssey by bus up the East Coast gives them a panoramic view of a nation debilitated by the Depression. They run into purse snatchers, con men, starving children, and crowds of poor families forced together by poverty. For Colbert’s spoiled heiress, it’s a shocking glimpse of how the other half lives. But the world she discovers is not all negative: the bus’s passengers comprise a makeshift community, and it’s one that loves to sing.

So while the bus chugs along, a band suddenly forms in the back—complete with fiddle, guitar, and vocalist—and, apropos nothing, starts playing the decades-old standard “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Soon the whole bus joins in on the chorus, and individual passengers stand up to sing the verses alone. Out of nowhere, a form of communal vaudeville springs up, a show-within-a-show that Gable and Colbert watch with delight.

Everyone gets a chance to shine, including a mincing sailor who gives a lurid emphasis to the line “His eyes would undress every girl in the house!” (It’s a surprisingly bawdy song for such a public performance, but no one seems to notice or care.) The film’s main plot continues during the song courtesy of clever editing, as close-ups on the sleazy Shapely and the distracted bus driver appear alongside wide shots of all the other passengers with the band as their focal point. But this is decidedly a detour, albeit a spectacular one, from the fugitive couple’s episodic progress; it’s a sequence more about setting and the nature of Depression-era bus travel than about plot.

This spell of utter mirth ends, of course, with a minor tragedy, as the bus careens into a muddy ditch. Soon thereafter, Gable and Colbert lose the rest of their money and have to leave the bus for good due to Shapely’s half-baked scheming. But that spur-of-the-moment musical number is still a chance for bonding, as the sheer cuteness of the passengers’ singing cuts through the main characters’ lingering cynicism and world-weariness. (Gable even gets in on the act, passing a flask around to some dancing fellow travelers.)

Maybe it’s an American instinct to respond to times of crisis by putting on a show. Or maybe this is just a manifestation of the cliché that poor people are happier and have an easier time cutting loose—the same one witnessed in Titanic when Rose goes below decks to dance a polka away from her stultifying society friends. (Or in My Man Godfrey, or Holiday, or any number of other Depression-era comedies.) Cliché or not, though, the scene in It Happened One Night feels so alive and strangely naturalistic despite its improbability, because the sailor and all the other participants bring such enthusiasm to their performances. For these few minutes, money and class are meaningless: all that matters is the music.

(Trivia time: the guitarist in this scene is Ken Carson, who would later join the band Sons of the Pioneers. With them, he helped record the theme song for The Searchers and the song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” later used in the opening of The Big Lebowski.)

Tennessee 100

Starting Monday... it's Tennessee Williams Week! The great American playwright's centennial is on March 26th and since his stage work has had such crucial impact on the big screen especially for actors, since Nicole Kidman and James Franco will soon attempt to revive Sweet Bird of Youth on Broadway, and since his writing has influenced other legendary writers or filmmakers like John Waters, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner and Pedro Almodóvar, why not a whole week?

For those of you who haven't seen any of the movies based on his work, why not rent a couple? On Wednesday night we'll celebrate A Streetcar Named Desire with "hit me with your best shot" but other films we hope to touch on include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Fugitive Kind, The Rose Tattoo, Baby Doll, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth and Night of the Iguana. If you have a blog, tumblr or whatnot and you do anything to honor him this week... make sure to let us know and we'll check it out.

Netflix has Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke and The Glass Menagerie (TV version) available on Instant Watch. TCM is showing A Streetcar Named Desire (Tues at 3:45) though strangely they have no centennial programming this month for one of the artistic giants of the 20th century.