Calling all Classic Film Lovers!

The thing is it's kind of shocking that Reagan didn't appear in many good movies. This is the Golden Age of Hollywood with the biggest talent in one place at one point. No shortage of good roles, and good film-makers.

You have Dana Andrews who was a solid character actor who was reliable and professional and had directors chasing him. You had Rock Hudson (who Reagan's wife left to die of AIDS) not a good actor but did amazing work with Sirk. You had Tom Neal in Detour and many other minor actors and stars of limited range in this period who appeared in notable films.

Alrighty then, let me ask: was Marilyn Monroe a good actress?

Marilyn was a very good actress indeed. See Fritz Lang's Clash by Night where she plays a supporting role as a working-class newly married woman whose husband is, IIRC, a returning war veteran having issues with his wife working. That was pre-Leading lady Marilyn. She's also great in River of No Return (even if she and Preminger hated each other).

Marilyn was a movie natural...she was always herself before the camera and had no sense of having to put on a bag of tricks to get into character, and that personal warmth which she had (she was in real-life a really nice person) comes across well on camera. She was also a brilliant comedy actress as is clear in many films: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes/ Some like it Hot / Let's Make Love. In that respect she is like Marion Davies in her films with King Vidor, also a brilliant comedy actress who was totally underrated. She was a huge pain to deal with if you are a film-maker, and it got worse when she got into Method Acting and had that acting trainer with her all the time. She didn't need Method Acting at all, and certainly not the hooch offered by that quack Strasberg.The sleeping pills addiction came from this and eventually she died because of her dependance on that, coupled with her new regiment. In a way I think Lee Strasberg got her killed.

I'd heard insults levied about her that said she was talentless or something, which I felt to be very untrue.

Then again, the person levying those insults was a nutcase...

Everyone assumes that because she was blonde, hot and slept around that she cannot be a good actress. It's that old canard about middle class virtues being rewarded somehow. If a man did the things she did in her personal life, it would not be commented on, but because it's her, everyone still brings it up.

She appeared in some great movies: Some Like It Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, River of No Return, The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, and Clash by Night and The Misfits (okay a little flawed but she's one of the best parts about it). Now her best roles are supporting characters and I think she was a better supporting actress than lead but she's still pretty good.

I agree. I think she was a really good character actor, but I don't think she could carry a movie all by herself.

On another note, found a cool article about women and female sexuality in pre-code and 30s comedies. Pretty good. Talks over what we've been talking about: censorship, women, and "freedom" in modern films.[1].

I've always felt that Marilyn Monroe was a fine actress, but I do confess to rolling my eyes a bit at the way she get's mythologized. I feel the same way about James Dean, the other icon of the age.

"It's true that we have a gentleman's agreement, but, unfortunately, I am no gentleman."

I know where Long Tall Shorty's quote comes from.

It comes from this movie: Design for Living

I can't get on board the "Marilyn Monroe was a great actress" train. Just about every movie she was in, she played the same part: the sexy, ditzy blonde. She tries to go all Serious Actress in The Misfits and she isn't very good at it. And as has already been noted, for all her incandescent hotness, she couldn't carry a movie. Marion Davies could, and did with films like Show People.

I'm always baffled by people who idolized stars like that, especially the died-very-young variety. Weirdly enough, Audrey Hepburn also gets that treatment, but she lived a fairly full life. It's also kind of grating in a sense, because you seem them everywhere: on random posters, pictures with quotes, decorative house paintings, and it renders these once living, breathing people into some weird commodity. I think that's messed up.

Oh, no. You've figured it out. Now you're gonna tell me my avatar is not a picture of me, but Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels.

Seriously, I love that scene in Design for Living where Miriam Hopkins purrs that line, pats the couch, and gives Coop a come hither look.

edited 29th Apr '16 6:01:23 PM by LongTallShorty64

I like the part of Design for Living in which it becomes clear that Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper, and Fredric March are going to be living together in sexy, sexy polyamory. People talk about the pre-Code era, but Christ, you couldn't get away with that in a movie in 2016.

It's rather strange that that's the case.

My guess about Audrey Hepburn is that she had both the glamorous (yet amazingly cute) look while also showing a perky personality, I think.

And, naturally, the way she rocked some of those dresses and other clothing.

edited 29th Apr '16 7:01:48 PM by Quag15

Yeah, she did wear some legendary clothing and maybe was a bit of a clotheshorse. Very stylish lady.

I think the mythology of the stars is one of the reasons why they are stars. These actors have these baggage and associations which viewers have projected on them and which film-makers invoke and appeal to in their portrayal of the characters.

Like take Humphrey Bogart, an actor of fairly limited range and who you can count to play the same character once he found a successful type and handle, which High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon gave him. His best performance, In a Lonely Place is brilliant because the movie is a deconstruction of that familiar archetype, this tough no-nonsense soured idealist showing how unpleasant that individual would be in real-life. Someone like John Wayne actually has more range than Bogart. For one thing he has a vulnerability and sweetness with women, like Howard Hawks brought that out in Rio Bravo. In fact Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell pointed out that 60s college kids worshipped Bogart and slammed Wayne because the former was liberal and the latter was not, but in actual fact these (mostly male) kids liked Bogart because he was a bigger macho pig than Wayne. Wayne was really underrated too, and people still dislike him because of his politics.

I think the greatest actor of that time was Jimmy Stewart in terms of range. Especially his post-war films. John Ford himself said that of all the actors he had seen, Wayne/Cooper and others, Stewart was the only real actor he knew. As for James Dean well I love East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause so I don't care for debunkers because he's awesome in those movies. Eternally young. Rebel Without A Cause came out after he had died of that car accident (which contrary to popular belief, he was driving responsibly within speed limits and it was the other guy's fault) and it must have been incredibly poignant to see that.

As for Audrey Hepburn, I must say I am not a fan. I like her and off-screen she was a nice lady but generally I didn't always find her gamine personality convincing.

But that said I really like Two-for-the-Road. I also like Roman Holiday even if she was dated. Speaking of stars I don't get, Gregory Peck. I for one think that dude was really overrated but hey he's awesome in Duel in the Sun where he plays a nasty rapist sadist.

Among actresses who are underrated is Jennifer Jones. Really bold and new kind of assertive female archetype.

Steve Mc Queen. Way underrated imho.

Gregory Peck was stiffer than a two-by-four. No idea where the love for him comes from. Actually, from what I've heard, he was a decent guy. Family man and overall good guy, but his acting... No range. No range at all.

I've only seen Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, but I liked what I saw in terms of acting.

EDIT: Oh, wait, and in Bullitt, and The Thomas Crown Affair.

edited 30th Apr '16 4:11:15 AM by LongTallShorty64

If I were being unkind I would say Gregory Peck made a career getting roles Jimmy Stewart was either too busy or too expensive for. I am kidding of course, but you know compare Stewart's lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder to Peck's Atticus Finch. I like Peck best in Duel Of The Sun but then that is plainly Jennifer Jones' movie and has amazing supporting turns by Lillian Gish and Joseph Cotten.

Gregory Peck might have been the male Marilyn Monroe, I think, in that he got work in Hollywood because he was very good-looking.

I don't think there is such a thing as a male Marilyn Monroe, nor can there really be. Marilyn's particular star persona of being this sex object for mass consumption is not something a male Hollywood actor of that generation could really experience.

As Gore Vidal noted what made Marlon Brando and James Dean exception was that it was the first time audiences realized men could be sexy and that was acceptable to the wide consensus. In the case of Dean, Even The Guys Wanted Him. Dude was handsome. Gregory Peck in any case was never sexy (except for Duel in the Sun). Tyrone Power was sexy (and again a guy who appeared in what, 2 or 3 decent films) as was Errol Flynn the OG statutory rapist. Cary Grant was the suave elegant kind of sexy. But there weren't many others in that time until the Method Revolution.

Interestingly, Harper Lee said she broke into tears the first time she saw Peck as Atticus Finch, because he reminded her so much of her father, on whom the character is based. I'll agree that Peck was frequently stiff, but I think his performance as Atticus is exceptional. And by all accounts, Peck was a lovely human being; he stayed in contact with Lee and with the little girl who played Scout for the rest of his life.

I love Jimmy Stewart, but as for range...hmm. I'll have to think on that one. He could be likeable and earnest, and yet in some other parts he was able to come off as downright reptillian. That is pretty good range. I'd also cite James Cagney and Edward G.Robinson as actors with good range.

I read an article once by Mark Evanier about how, when he was in college he got a chance to meet a big star from the Golden Age of Hollywood (he was friends with the head of the gent's fan club at his college, and she took Mark along when she got a chance to meet said star). Evanier never names the guy in the article, but he makes it clear that while he felt the star was charming and friendly and sociable, he became increasingly aware during the interview that his friend was massively disappointed. He had a chance to speak to the star privately a little later, and the star opined that you can't be a Hollywood star and a human being at the same time. Current celebrities have so much of their lives reported in the press that their fans feel they know them, and part of being a "Star" of the old sort is that there's a bit of mystery.Find out that they breathe and go to the bathroom occasionally and it's over.

Going back to the silent era, there was Rudolf Valentino. I think the trick with Brando and Dean, though, was that women found them sexy, and men (hetero men, anyhow) found them cool. The old "women want him, men want to be him" sort of thing. I think Clark Gable managed it, too. Beforehand, when an actor was popular among women, he was generally not at all popular with men. It can be rather a difficult thing to pull off, being considered extremely sexy by the opposite sex while not alienating one's own sex.

edited 30th Apr '16 10:07:31 AM by Robbery

The thing is so much of Old Hollywood was outright invented. like Archibald Leech was a working-class cockney who became suave, sophisticate trans-atlantic Cary Grant (as he once said, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant, even I wanted to be Cary Grant"). One of the only movies of Grant where you can hear his real accent is George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett made in 1935, with Katharine Hepburn (and probably her best performance).

Norma Jeane was a working-class brunette who had bad relationships and worked in a factory during World War II and yet she became Marilyn Monroe, glamour gal supreme. Humphrey DeForrest Bogart, a preppy WASP rich kid becomes a thug in 30s gangster films and later plays non-intellectual types in movies. About the only times you see Bogart close to who he was is The Barefoot Contessa and In a Lonely Place. Rita Cansino, a Latina girl became Rita Hayworth. Marion Morrison became John Wayne, a persona which Ford invented for him after bullying, Gaslighting and grooming him for more than a decade before Stagecoach. Part of the reason so many of these guys were good actors in their movies was that they never really stopped acting. They continued to act after the film was wrapped. Like Archie Leech had to be Cary Grant for the rest of his life.

You can see such transformations all over the place in that time. Today you don't really get that with many actors since so much of their lives are known and transparent. And most actors today come from middle-class upbringing and backgrounds. I don't know if a working-class girl can become Marilyn Monroe today. And of course there's also the race issue, since African-Americans and Latin-Americans never really had a shot to be movie stars in the same sense that white actors did. Most of them found stardom in blues/jazz/rock and hip-hop.

It seemed latinos had a bit of a larger presence in Hollywood in the 30's and the 40's (Rita Cansino/Hayworth was latino, after all), at least if they looked white, There was even a bit of a craze for latin performers in the late 20's/ early 30's, which inspired studio heads to rename Austian-born Jewish actor Jacob Krantz Ricardo Cortez (he was Sam Spade in the original, pre-code Maltese Falcon).

Oh and I'll say this for Bogart: the man worked at it. I saw a list of his credits once, on the stage in his pre-film days, and in all the b-films and character parts (he played a vampire in The Return of Doctor X, for instance, and was apparently so convincing that he felt in danger of being typecast as one), and it's huge. Usually only actors who are character actors their whole lives get credit lists like that.

edited 30th Apr '16 10:23:50 AM by Robbery