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MOVIES

by Wilfrid Sheed

Moralizing about actors and actresses is as American as Cotton Mather. Every child knows which one took the pills and which one cracked up the car, and how it was success that did it, or premature rape, or a pushy mother. Writings about the stars thus tend to be thinly disguised moral tracts — hagiography or demonology, take your pick.

Before we get on with the clucking and preening, I suppose we’d better say something about these books — which are really not so much books as glorified bubblegum cards: something to hoard and trade, lots of still photos of your favorites, and a text you can read without taking your eyes off the Late Show. They belong on your shelf next to the bound copies of Screen Gems.

The Dietrich book is written in terms of mandatory gush. That is the way you write about Miss Dietrich. Her career comes through as a heart-warming saga of German grit. Of the kinky compulsion that keeps “the Kraut” (as her friend Ernest Hemingway called her) on stage in the half-light under a ton of makeup you will learn little here. This intriguing, self-satirizing lady has been flattened out as if she were the mother founder of a religious order.

The Crawford book faces the question, “What am I doing here?” squarely, by inflating the subject’s importance outrageously. Miss Crawford’s career is typically American. The book tells us that “she is American in that she projects enterprise, resiliency, and drive in her performances. She is also American in that she hangs on to her gains,” unlike, say, the French or the Chinese. What we don’t learn here is that Joan Crawford movies are now a symbol of High Camp; or that Scott Fitzgerald once wrote of her: “Writing for her is difficult. She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face, so that when one wants to indicate that she is going from joy to sorrow, one must cut away and then cut back. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as telling a lie, because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the British.”

Viewed in this light, she assumes a certain interest. All the same, there seems little point in solemnly laying out the plots of all her movies, many of which were dogs and turkeys which she just happened to be assigned to. There is little artistic pattern to this, not even a tale of waste, as with Miss Dietrich; just a humdrum catalogue of what her agent was able to drum up.

The Monroe volume is mainly instructive for its samples of what passed for movie reviewing in the daily press of the period. Tags from Kate Cameron and Alton Cook (and if the names mean nothing to you, let’s let it go at that) are appended to the synopses of the Monroe movies: trivia piled upon trivia. The gentlemen trip all over themselves in oafish appreciation of Marilyn’s “natural assets,” “curved surfaces, “shapely gams,” and such. Her resemblance to a force of nature is noted. Her unexpected gifts as a comedienne are constantly being rediscovered, sometimes by the same reviewer. But what will certainly stick in your mind, and throat, is the lush billboard prose that the critics seemed to pass among them, interchangeably.

The Marx Brothers at the Movies is so much better than the other books that it really belongs in another review. There is some point in having a résumé of the Marx movies, partly just to hear those lines again, but partly because the brothers were artists: they stood for something (in fact, they stood for just about anything, and don’t you forget it, Gottlieb). The authors emphasize that the brothers were set in their ways by the time they got to Hollywood. They were already vaudeville veterans crowding their forties, and although they learned to make concessions to the camera, there wasn’t much they could do about their personas. No doubt the vulgarization of Hollywood in the late thirties hastened their extinction.

Now for the moralizing, starting, of course, with Marilyn Monroe, the preacher’s delight. Her book kicks off with a standard bittersweet introduction by Mark Harris, all about the little waif who was kicked around by America and hounded to death by the press and the public. It is a reasonably moving presentation of the case, but we fans already know it by heart. What would be more to the point would be a discussion of the contrary case put by Ezra Goodman in The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood: that Miss Monroe grossly libeled her foster parents, that she lied repeatedly about her miserable past, and that she methodically stepped on everybody who ever tried to help her. Mr. Goodman may, in his turn, have been romancing (the ruthlessness cliché vs. the victim cliché), but his piece was carefully documented and needs to be dealt with. He originally prepared it for Time magazine, which dropped it in favor of the sentimental version. Curiously enough, the intellectual community, pop-culture branch, has done the same thing.

It seems possible that both versions had some truth in them. Marilyn seems to have been the kind of person who is reluctant to tell about her past but who still manages to get it told, her way, in time for the early editions. If faces mean anything, Miss Monroe was quite the little go-getter, protected even in death by fatherly intellectuals, who have been conned by that spiritual look, or that lost look, or whatever a girl needs to get ahead. But then having gone and got, having thrust herself forward, like a neurotic stage mother, she found herself well and truly helpless. Because she had absolutely no talent. It was nice of the critics to keep digging up that comic gift and burying it again, but if it was there at all, it was an accident: the result of morbid fear and embarrassment in front of the camera. I can’t say I ever found her wide-eyed dither or dumb-genteel voice particularly amusing; on the contrary, it seemed cruel to laugh at them, and strange of her to ask us to. It seemed like a grim exercise in self-abasement and self-pity, a predatory attempt to capitalize on a defect, to make herself even more pathetic than she was. Such comic gifts I would rather not watch.

The Films of Joan Crawford

by Lawrence J. Quirk (Citadel, $7.95)

The Marx Brothers at the Movies

by Burt Goldblatt and Paul D. Zimmerman (Putnam’s, $5.95)

The Films of Marilyn Monroe

edited by Michael Conway and Mark Ricci (Citadel, $2.45)

The Films of Marlene Dietrich

by Homer Dickens (Citadel, $7.95)

Returning to Marlene Dietrich, one finds a career bracing in its toughness and self-reliance. To judge from the early snaps in the book, she seems to have been a plain girl: so she had the blessings of a slow incubation. It’s a dull thought but true that the slower you build your success the longer it seems to last. One thinks of Bing Crosby shooping along with the Dixie Rhythm Boys, Bob Hope hoofing in Red, Hot and Blue, Archie Leach (Cary Grant) catching Mae West’s eye as an acrobat. Unlike the Marilyn Monroes, who rush on the stage without having prepared anything, these performers have a jauntiness and stoicism, a sense that they can always hold the audience with something, a handstand or a soft-shoe.

The Marx Brothers may have taken almost too much time emerging. It is a sobering thought (and about time you tried one, Gottlieb, your beard is beginning to run) that had the talkies taken another five years in coming, the Marxes might not have adjusted to them at all. Their styles had already hardened by 1930. Older friends advise me that they were funnier on stage than ever they were in movies — a staggering thought. I wish that Messrs. Zimmerman and Goldblatt had given us a more personal view of the Hollywood years. Did the family élan weaken after they got out there? did Chico keep pace with his more sophisticated brothers? and so on. One career is hard enough to manage. Three, these three at least, must have been impossible. Thus one wonders whether the feebleness of their later movies had some extrastudio explanation.

The only moral of the Joan Crawford book is that in those days of more movies and more moviegoers, there was room for more stars, and survival was easier. This could open a tin mine for publishers: The Films of Spring Byington, The Enigma of John Payne, Through the Years With Bugs Bunny. B-books about B-movies.