Astor, I Hardly Know Her

Wise: I'm really sorry, Werth.  

Werth: Sorry? Why? Did you not send your condolences to the family of Deanna Durbin? 

Wise: While it's sad when anyone with a connection to old Hollywood passes on, I never really understood Durbin's appeal.  She was all eyebrow and tremolo to me.  But I'm apologizing because I forgot to bake a cake to celebrate Mary Astor's birthday.  

Werth: Astor is one of my favorite actresses from the Golden Era. Not as well remembered today as some of her contemporaries, Astor was a cinematic workhorse starring in films from the silent era until her final role in 1964 in Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte.

Wise: Obviously collateral damage from the Davis/DeHavilland brawl. 

Werth: Astor turned in one of her most memorable performances in the 1941 hard-boiled classic, The Maltese Falcon. Based on Dashiell Hammett's popular detective novel, Falcon stars Humphrey Bogart as iconic gumshoe Sam Spade. Spade receives a visit from the lovely Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Astor) who hires him and his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowen), to tail a man who's done her wrong. When Archer turns up with lead in his guts, Spade becomes embroiled in a crime ring in search of a valuable statue.

Wise: If only he had checked Amazon first. 

Werth: The film is full of a who's-who of Forties character actors. Sydney Greenstreet is a delight as The Fat Man, a chortling, criminal Buddha, earning himself a Best Supporting Actor nom in his first film. Elisha Cook, Jr. is appropriately twitchy as a young gunsel who is just itching to plug Spade.  

Peter Lorre is creepily sinister as Joel Cairo, a lilting-voiced two-timer whose card smells of gardenias, and who practically fellates a cane in Spade's office. Warner Bros. only hinted at this gay character, Hammett's book outright calls him a "queer."

Wise: I wonder if there's an "It Gets Better" video for people who want to marry their walking stick. 

Werth: Bogart had finally gotten a star turn the same year in High Sierra after 27 years of making films, and with the popularity of Falcon, he reached superstar status. Of course, one year later he would become a Hollywood legend in a little film called Casablanca. Bogart's detached and world-weary, good guy persona was a winning combination for the actor, and his gruff and tart delivery of the rat-a-tat dialogue shows the intelligence and charm behind his baggy-eyed exterior. 

Astor plays with and against her good-girl screen image as a patrician, elegant woman whose every line is a lie, her delivery correctly sounding like a performance. But rather than just playing the duplicity of the role, Astor's eyes capture a genuine desperation that make this role one of her best.  

Falcon was John Huston's directorial debut and he made the most of it, earning Academy noms for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, and helping craft the cinematic look that would come to be called film noir. 

Wise: Astor plays a smaller, though no less vital role in A Kiss Before Dying (1956) as the mother who inspires Robert Wagner's murderous desires.  Wagner plays Bud Corliss, an Army vet and college student who discovers that his rich girlfriend Dorie (Joanne Woodward) is pregnant, but instead of eloping and risking her father's wrath (and disinheritance), he plots to murder her, disguise it as a suicide, and marry her sister Ellen (Virginia Leith) instead.  He nearly succeeds, but Ellen, following a few clues and with the help of the hunky nephew (Jeffrey Hunter) of the chief of police, discovers the shocking truth. 

Werth: I've got a few shocking truths to show Jeffrey Hunter.  

Wise: In just a few short scenes, Astor creates a portrait of a woman whose own frustrated marriage forced her to focus her attentions on nurturing her son, only to realize that her efforts have bred a killer.  Astor, who spent much of the 1940s playing wholesome maternal figures, most notably in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Little Women (1949), dials up her performance just enough to make her virtuous screen persona turn slightly off-key.  It's all very Freudian, and A Kiss Before Dying fits neatly into a continuum of murderous mamma's boys from the post-war period of Hollywood that culminated with Norman Bates in Psycho (1960).  

Werth: Did they smell of gardenias?

Wise: Director Gerd Oswald employs an effective strategy in the making of the film: his characters barely speak above a whisper, creating tension by forcing the audience to the edge of their seats.  He also stages long takes with little action, but framed at off-kilter angles, telegraphing both his killer's skewed outlook on life as well as the precarious position of his innocents.  (It's hard to believe this is the same guy who put Bunny O'Hare on the screen.)   

But Robert Wagner is the real revelation here.  To those of us who know him from the latter half of his career playing dashing buffoons in TV series like Hart to Hart or the Austin Powers films, it's a shock to see him slender and beautiful and full of malice.  

Werth: Some would say enough malice to shove his wife off a boat.


Wise: Let's leave the Hollywood conspiracy theories for next week's Film Gab.

 

Happy Birthday Bette Joan Perske!

Wise: Howdy, Werth!

Werth: Greetings, Wise!

Wise: What's with the flamethrower?

Werth: I made a cake for Lauren Bacall's birthday and I figured it would be the easiest way to light 87 candles.

Wise: Wow. At her age, she'll need a wind machine to blow them out.

Werth: She'll just pucker up her lips and blow. Bacall is one of the great figures of classic film, and I think we should give her a Film Gab birthday present, and dedicate this week's entry to her.

Wise: Sounds good to me. Beats having to buy her something.

Werth: Bacall first came on the scene with a bang in 1944  in Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not. She was paired with her future husband Humphrey Bogart and the cinematic sparks flew. The legendary duo made four movies together and their last one is a perfect Sunday afternoon, curl up on your couch classic.

Wise: As opposed to the typical hangover-induced, Domino's binge Sunday couch surfing? 

Werth: Key Largo (1948) is a veritable time capsule of some of the greats of the Hollywood studio system. Bogart is Frank McCloud, a war hero who comes to the Florida Keys to visit the young wife and father of one of his men who was killed in action. Nora (Bacall) and James Temple (the wheeled Lionel Barrymore) are happy to meet the man they've heard so much about and ask him to stay on in their hotel. 

But this bittersweet meeting is made even more bitter when a gang of mobsters led by Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) decides to take up residence in the hotel. All hell breaks loose when a hurricane hits and traps them all for the duration, pitting Bogart against Robinson in a silver screen titan throwdown.

Wise: I wish Bogart and Robinson had stopped by my place during Hurricane Irene.

Werth: Directed by Bogart friend and collaborator John Huston, Key Largo lacks some of the film noir edge of Huston's Maltese Falcon (1941) and Asphalt Jungle (1950). But in several scenes Huston uses bright light to give the film a grainy, almost verite feel, and some of his closeups eschew Hollywood's typical beauty shots and instead go for craggy realism. But oh what faces! Bacall is beautiful and dumps her typical sly vamp routine for one of a fresh-faced, tender woman whose looks at Bogey are more schoolgirl crush than 40's seductress. Bogey gives the reluctant man of action performance that audiences had come to expect of him, but never tired of. 

Edward G. Robinson is dapper and indomitable playing exiled mobster Johnny Rocco as if he was Napoleon, slapping women, taunting old men and chomping lustily on a cigar. Lionel Barrymore is the most boisterous invalid to ever roll across the screen and he lets loose at Rocco with both barrels, making you wonder if he could get out of that wheelchair what he would do. 

Wise: If he were alive today, probably a second career at Dancing with the Stars.  

Werth: But the real stunner in this already crowded talent pool is Claire Trevor. As the washed-up, drunken gun moll Gaye Dawn, Trevor is a heart-wrenching sensation. Desperately clinging to the bar, Trevor gives a full-bodied, Oscar-winning performance that culminates in a humiliating singing routine for a drink. She leaves us wanting to either throw her a gimlet or rush her to a twelve step program.  

Key Largo is a fun assemblage of performers at the top of their games portraying people who "ain't what they used to be"—as worn-out as the threadbare lobby of the Largo Hotel.

Wise: Or, as worn-out as the 1981 Bertie Higgins song.  At the other end of the spectrum is Bacall's late career supporting role in My Fellow Americans (1996).  A comedy about former rivals and current ex-Presidents Russell P. Kramer (Jack Lemmon) and Matt Douglas (James Garner) as they thwart assassination attempts, unravel Washington skullduggery, and meet the most cheerful, oddball Americans this side of a sit-com's backyard fence.  

Bacall, as former first lady Margaret Kramer, has little to do but gaze adoringly at Lemmon and occasionally crack wise, but she uses all her star power to communicate the brittle dignity forced upon Presidents' wives.  

Werth: Speaking of brittle dignity, I wonder if Nancy Reagan reads Film Gab...

Wise: Also along for the ride are Dan Aykroyd, Wilford Brimley, Sela Ward, Bradley Whitford, and Ester Rolle.  

Werth: It sounds like the cast for a very special episode of Murder, She Wrote.  

Wise: The credits are definitely chock-full of the usual Hollywood suspects, and the script provides each of them with a spicy morsel of scenery to chew.  And while it's not exactly Chekhov—  

Werth: Is Chekov from Star Trek in it too? 

Wise:  —the film is one of the few attempts at imagining life after the White House and the kinds of humiliations ex-Presidents face as they attempt to both keep their dignity and find purpose in the dénouement of their careers.  Of course, those small tragedies are each played for laughs—and often, the broadest, most inane yuks possible—but the film does question the afterlife of public service and the possibility of redemption after a lifetime of political compromises.  

Werth: Speaking of lifetimes—thank you, Lauren Bacall, for a lifetime of movie memories!

Wise: - and bring Nancy Reagan next week for leftover cake and more Film Gab.