Hollywood Madonna (24 page)

If Hollywood was able to grind out so many war-related films in the 1940s, it was partially because screenwriters had concocted a workable formula: Take an event, a battle, or a branch of the armed services and weave a plot around it. In
Ladies Courageous
, based on a novel by Virginia Spencer Cowles, the same principle was applied to the WAFS. The movie did not downplay the tension between the male and female pilots (the latter originally intended merely to ferry planes to military bases, freeing the men for combat). Although the men are clearly sexist and sneer at the “lady pilots,” the WAFS are not exactly a community of saints. Among them is a wife (Lois Collier), who commits suicide by crashing her plane because her philandering husband has taken up with another WAF (Diana Barrymore), and a reckless celebrity (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who only enlists for publicity and is so irresponsible that she almost costs another WAF her life. Loretta is the exception: a faithful wife with an MIA husband. Will he return for the fade out? He does, the movie ends, and
Ladies Courageous
goes into a tailspin, landing in the sea of forgotten films.

In case feminists wondered whether Wanger could have used the same plot points for a movie about male pilots, for the most part, he—or anyone—could have. Only suicide posed a problem, although at the end of
Bombardier
(1943), Randolph Scott sacrifices himself so that Colonel Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo would succeed. Generally, the suicides in World War II films were women. Veronica Lake, as a Red Cross nurse in
So Proudly We Hail
, conceals a grenade in her shirt, raises her hands as a sign of surrender, and blows herself up—along with the Japanese soldiers encircling her, thus enabling the other nurses to escape the proverbial fate worse than death. Rosalind Russell, as an Amelia Earhart type pilot, runs out of fuel in
Flight for Freedom
(1942) and chooses to remain airborne, knowing that her plane will eventually plunge into the Pacific—but
better a watery grave than landing on a Japanese-held island where an unknown fate awaits her.

A male version of
Ladies Courageous
would have been atypical and unpopular. Men in the 1940s combat film could be competitive, particularly in the “two men-in-love-with-the-same-woman” movie (
Thunder Birds
[1942],
Bombardier
[1943],
They Were Expendable
[1945]), but the loser never resorted to suicide. Men have their fears (
Thunder Birds
) and could be prickly, pugnacious, and smart-alecky (
Action in the North Atlantic
,
Air Force
[both 1943]), but not reckless to the point of endangering another GI’s life. According to Hollywood, men apparently bond better than women (
Wake Island
[1942],
Corregidor
[1943]); divergent opinions (
Bombardier
) and generational conflicts (
Destroyer
[1943]) exist but are eventually resolved. Hollywood’s GIs were uncommonly religious (
Destination Tokyo
and
Guadalcanal Diary
[both 1943]). This is the image of the fighting man that the films of the war years have bequeathed to subsequent generations. World War II veterans would know better, but Hollywood’s version was meant for mass consumption.

The
Ladies Courageous
plot points,
sans
suicide, could have been recycled for a similar screenplay about men, except that no studio would have produced it. Any studio would have realized that such a film could never be shown on army bases, and that women would have wondered how America could ever win the war if such men were representative of our armed forces.
Ladies Courageous
at least acknowledged that there were women’s divisions other than the well-known WACS and the WAVES, and moviegoers, who knew nothing about the WAFS, at least learned the acronym. But Loretta’s fans just wanted a movie with enough suspense to justify the price of admission. That they received, but no upgrades.

CHAPTER 15
       “Age cannot wither”
(but Hollywood Can)

At thirty-one Loretta looked as porcelain-skinned as ever. When she endorsed a beauty soap, like Lux, it was as if she had bestowed beauty upon the product, not vice versa. But to remain a star, rather than a working actress who once knew stardom and was now reduced to playing leads in minor films (Virginia Bruce, Kay Francis), or who was relegated to supporting cast status (Fay Wray, Anna Lee, Mae Clark), a dewy complexion was not enough. Loretta had not yet been nominated for an Oscar, although she should have been for
Man’s Castle
and
Midnight Mary
. The situation would change in 1947, six years before she left Hollywood, where an Oscar nomination, or even an Oscar, is just an annual honorific that is often forgotten the next year. “You’re only as good as your last picture” was the mantra. Loretta was always good, even though some of her pictures were only adequate.

Billing varied with her costars. In
China
, Loretta was billed first, Alan Ladd, second. In her next and last film with Ladd, the billing was reversed; now it was Alan Ladd and Loretta—Paramount’s pride and a freelancer in the second of her four-film contract with Paramount—starring in
And Now Tomorrow
(1944). With a script by Frank Partos and Raymond Chandler adapted from Rachel Field’s novel,
And Now Tomorrow
should have been an outstanding film. Partos was a respected screenwriter (
Jennie Gerhardt
,
Thirty Day Princess
,
Cradle Song
), although his script for
A Night to Remember
might have fared better with actors who could don a bit of the motley (Jean Arthur and Fred MacMurray, or Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea, instead of Loretta and Brian Aherne). Chandler’s reputation rested on novels that are paradigms of detective fiction:
The Big Sleep
,
Farewell, My Lovely
, and
The Lady in the Lake.
But he was a novice screenwriter, whose other 1944 script was
Double Indemnity
, coauthored
with writer-director Billy Wilder, who admired Chandler’s fiction, but deplored his inability to grasp the differences between writing a novel and writing a film script. Chandler, who found working with Wilder an “
agonizing experience
,” at least acknowledged Wilder’s “genius” as a director. Chandler’s voice is heard intermittently in
And Now Tomorrow
, a “woman’s film” about a deaf heroine (Loretta) cured by a street-smart surgeon (Alan Ladd).

Loretta played Emily Blair of Blairstown, where the railroad tracks were the line of demarcation between the haves and the have-nots. The surgeon, Merek Vance (Ladd), revels in coming from the “wrong side of the tracks,” known as “Shantytown,” and delights in baiting Emily. The two no sooner meet than they start sparring, each trying to outdo the other in put-downs and behaving like people who do not know they are in love, until they realize they have armed themselves with verbal ammunition to keep from declaring it. Ladd and Loretta play these scenes as if they were veterans of the mating game—Ladd talking tough and Loretta unflappably genteel. It is in these scenes that Chandler’s voice comes through, as it did in
Double Indemnity
, when Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray meet for the first time and launch into sexually encoded dialogue.

In
And Now Tomorrow
, Chandler’s voice is discernible in Merek’s opening line. Emily is returning to Blairstown from Boston, where she has learned that her deafness, brought on by meningitis, is incurable. While waiting for the train, she stops at a coffee shop. Vance enters, sitting near, but not alongside her at the counter. His order comes straight from the pulps—hardboiled, terse, clipped: “Coffee. Hot, strong, and made this year.” Chandler was probably the one who punched up Vance’s dialogue, which Ladd delivered with the self-assurance of a man who worked his way to the top without ever having to say “thank you.” Vance may be a noted otologist, but he is still blue collar to the core.

Alan Ladd was the main draw; it was he who contributed to the film’s financial success, despite hostile reviews. Loretta gave the more demanding performance, always remaining in character. Edith Head’s wardrobe was a different matter. It looked as if it came out of Emily’s 1944 closet, not from 1937, the year in which the film is set. The cast does not even remotely look 1930s. Such mismatches, however, did occur. MGM’s
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946), based on James Cain’s 1934 novel, seems to be set in the 1930s, but one would never know it from Lana Turner’s costumes. Another Turner vehicle,
Johnny Eager
(1942), also evokes the 1930s, although Turner does not. In
And Now Tomorrow
, it
was not the costumes but Loretta’s performance that was memorable—beautifully nuanced, faithful to the script and the character. Before Emily learns sign language, she fixes her gaze on her fiancé (Barry Sullivan); frustrated that she cannot understand what he is saying, she hovers over him as he writes out his answers to her questions. Even after Emily learned to read lips, she always focuses on the speaker, as if she were trying to see if there was a discrepancy between the words and the facial expression.

More demanding was Emily’s transformation from a creature of privilege to the wife of a doctor, who has not forgotten his commitment to the class from which he came. When Emily accompanies Vance to “Shantytown,” one could easily imagine her devoting one day a week to serving its residents. In its own way,
And Now Tomorrow
succeeds as an amalgamation of melodrama (Emily’s sister, a wickedly cunning Susan Hayward, has designs on the fiancé) and social consciousness (Vance saves the life of a Shantytown child). Audiences had no problem with Ladd’s cockiness and Loretta’s initial coolness—particularly after Loretta sheds the mantle of privilege when she finds herself dependent on Vance. Ladd’s tough guy persona had been forged in
This Gun for Hire
(1941); from then on, he used the same mask in different settings: Asia (
China
,
Calcutta
[1947],
Saigon
[1948]); Los Angeles (
The Blue Dahlia
[1946], Raymond Chandler’s only original screenplay); the Old West (
Whispering Smith
[1948],
Streets of Laredo
[1949]), and even as Jay Gatsby of West Egg in the much maligned movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
(1949), in which Ladd played the perfect nouveau riche with a past and an attitude. In
And Now Tomorrow
, Ladd may not have played the kind of specialist moviegoers ordinarily consult—except those who don’t mind a surgeon whose rough edges will never be planed down.

There are two exquisite touches by director Irving Pichel that merit attention. The first is a flashback in which Emily, returning to Blairstown, looks out of the train window as the rain beats against it. A slow dissolve begins, as the present yields to the past, and the train window fades out as the window of Emily’s bedroom fades in, revealing the day she awakened and discovered that she was hearing-impaired. She could see the rain-streaked window but hear no sound. The second occurs after Emily has completed the treatment prescribed by Vance. This time she awakens to the sound of sleet and a crackling fire. Knowing that she can hear, Emily claps with childlike glee. It was a poignant moment in a film that was by no means the disaster that some critics claimed.

Loretta would return to Paramount, but not immediately.
Ladies Courageous
fulfilled her two-picture commitment to Universal. She was now at liberty, and so was William Goetz, Louis Mayer’s son-in-law by his marriage to Mayer’s daughter, Edith. Goetz was eager to start his own studio. Although he could never compete with Mayer’s other son-in-law, David Selznick, who married Mayer’s daughter Irene (later a major stage producer), Goetz had the same goal: independent production. Realizing he needed a distributor,
Goetz turned to Leo Spitz
, RKO’s corporate president from 1935 to 1938; together they formed International Pictures in 1944, with RKO as distributor.

Goetz was eager to recruit name talent, not necessarily luminaries, but actors of sufficient luminescence to attract audiences. International’s first release,
Casanova Brown
(1944), with Oscar winners Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright, opened at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. But the others bearing the RKO trademark—
The Woman in the Window
(1944),
Belle of the Yukon
(1944),
It’s a Pleasure
(1945),
Along Came Jones
(1945),
Tomorrow Is Forever
, and
The Stranger
(both 1946)—did not live up to Goetz and Spitz’s expectations. Ironically, Fritz Lang’s
The Woman in the Window
is now enshrined in the film noir canon; Orson Welles’s
The Stranger
is not
Citizen Kane
, but still brilliant moviemaking, if for no other reason than the mounting suspense that culminates in the clock tower scene.

When RKO no longer wanted to distribute International’s product, British movie magnate J. Arthur Rank, Universal’s biggest shareholder,
brokered a merger
with Universal, resulting in the formation of Universal-International in 1946, which released International’s last film,
Temptation
(1946). What made International especially attractive to Rank was its talent, in particular Gary Cooper, Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, and Loretta, who costarred in two International films,
Along Came Jones
(1945) and
The Stranger
(1946), opposite Gary Cooper and Orson Welles, respectively.

Along Came Jones
is a western satire, produced by Gary Cooper himself, who wanted to spoof the misleading image the public had of him as an innocent making his way through the world of experience. Anyone who saw his extraordinary performances in
The Plainsman
(1936),
Sergeant York
(1941), and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1943), knew that he was a multidimensional actor. But comics and commentators stamped him with a signature phrase, “Yup,” as they did Cary Grant (“Judy”), Greta Garbo (“I want to be alone”) and Bette Davis (“Peter”), to such an extent that Grant and Davis impressionists felt obliged to reproduce
the stars’ eccentric pronunciation (“Jeudy,”“Petah”). As Melody Jones, Cooper succeeds in mocking the public’s misconception of him as a hayseed by laughing both at himself and, in a sense, at the audience for its naïveté. Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay revolves around a case of mistaken identity, in which Melody is mistaken for Monte Jarrad (Dan Duryea), an outlaw with the same initials. When Melody spots Cherry (Loretta), Cooper reacts with his eyes, as if wondering how the West could ever have produced a woman of such otherworldly beauty. But Loretta is very much at home on the range: She can drive a carriage, ride horseback, and at the climax, handles a rifle better than Melody or the other men. She and Melody share a sexuality that simmers, never boiling over into passion. In a wonderfully erotic moment, Cherry rolls a cigarette for Melody. Loretta handles the paper and tobacco as if she were preparing an aphrodisiac, doing it properly but also provocatively. The ending might have inspired the climactic moment of another—and more famous—Cooper film,
High Noon
(1952), for which he won his second Oscar. In
Along Came Jones
, just when it seems that Jarrad will kill Melody, he is struck by a bullet from a rifle—Cherry’s. In
High Noon
there is a similar scene, in which Cooper’s wife (Grace Kelly) does the same to save her husband, even though she is a Quaker. In each case, it is a woman who saves a man’s life. Coincidence or influence?