Chapter 2 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:

THE LAND OF MORAL AMBIGUITY: HOLLYWOOD & THE HAYS CODE

"Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex Relationships are the accepted or common thing…"

Prior to the Production Code, LGBT characters were somewhat prevalent, if heavily stereotyped and exploited, in a number of major films. The 1920s especially were a time of shifting societal norms and expanding artistic experimentation. As women rode the first wave of feminism and prohibition was increasingly challenged, filmmakers began to expand their boundaries and feature more controversial plotlines. – Sophie Cleghorn

Pre-Code was a brief period in the American film industry between the dawn of talking pictures in 1929 and the formal enforcement in 1934 of the Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC) familiarly known as the Hays Code. Pre-Code was a glorious time in the history of cinema. It was during the Depression Era before the cultural politics of Clergy and reformer organizations came in and initiated the need for moral governance over the film industry. Their interference evolved into the Hays Code created to oversee silent and talking pictures.

In the late 1920s before the Hays Code, films began to speak becoming audible and more realistic as Hollywood recognized that many Americans knew all about sex. In the early era of talkies during the gutsy cinema of the Depression era, there was nothing stopping the studios from producing daring films. Hollywood movies weren’t afraid to show gay characters or reference their experiences. Ironically, queers were pretty visible onscreen at this time in American cinema. These characters left an impression on trade papers like Variety which called this phenomenon – “queer flashes.”

Also in the early twenties, there were notorious scandals on and off-screen. Hollywood’s moral ambiguity was literally in the clutches of the Hays Code which the MPPDA used to wage a moral battle against Hollywood that they perceived would eventually lead to cultural ruination. The priggish William Hays was a deacon in the Presbyterian church, a former chair of the Republican party, and postmaster general before he was picked to lead the war on decadence in the movie industry. William Hays was appointed chairman of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) from the year it was established in 1922 to 1945, but the Hays Code was not overturned until 1968. Hays and his code regulated film content for nearly forty years. The little worm.

W.C.Fields and Franklin Pangborn- Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)

The Hays Code became a series of self-imposed, perceived-to-be-moral guidelines that told filmmakers and the major studios what was permissible to do in their movies. The Code was established in 1930, and the MPPC set forth censorship guidelines that weren’t yet strictly enforced. And states had their own censorship boards and so their individual standards varied. Hays tried to contain his guidelines without the intrusion of government censorship, so he created his own Production Code that was for all intents and purposes optional for studios.

They felt that the liberal themes of films in the 1920s were contributing to the supposed debauchery infiltrating society. They championed government censorship as the solution to return society to its traditional moral standards (Mondello).

In June 1927, Hays publicized a list of cautionary rules. A construct of ‘Don'ts and Be Carefuls'. The document and empowering legislation spelled out guidelines for propriety on screen in classic Hollywood that became known as the Production Code. It was co-authored in 1929 by Martin J. Quigley, a prominent Catholic layman, editor of the journal Motion Picture Herald, and Reverend Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit Priest. Their collaboration reflected a ‘Victorianism’ that would tint the freedom of Hollywood’s creative license. “The Production Code was a template for a theological takeover of American cinema.” “No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.”

“Just Ten of the Thous Shalt Nots”

Homosexuality

While the Code did not explicitly state that depictions of homosexuality were against the Code, the Code barred the depiction of any kind of sexual perversion or deviance, which homosexuality fell under at the time. -Wikipedia

The convict

"The courts of the land should not be presented as unjust"¦"

Prostitution and fallen women

"Brothels and houses of ill-fame are not proper locations for drama. They suggest to the average person at once sex sin, or they excite an unwholesome and morbid curiosity in the minds of youth"¦"

Bad girls

"Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing"¦"

Musicals

"Dancing costumes cut to permit indecent actions or movements are wrong"¦ Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passion are forbidden"¦"

Adultery and the sanctity of marriage

"Adultery as a subject should be avoided"¦ It is never a fit subject for comedy. Thru comedy of this sort, ridicule is thrown on the essential relationships of home and family and marriage, and illicit relationships are made to seem permissible, and either delightful or daring."

NOT TO MENTION: GOD COMPLEXES-

Boris Karloff is Dr. Henry Frankenstein’s creation. Make-up by Jack Pierce.

By the time the sequel Bride of Frankenstein was released in 1935, enforcement of the code was in full effect and Dr. Henry Frankenstein’s overt God complex was forbidden. In the first picture, however, when the creature was born, his mad scientist creator was free to proclaim “Now I know what it feels like to be a God.”

‘Don’ts’ included “profanity,” “sex hygiene,” “miscegenation,” and "ridicule of the clergy." There was a much longer list of "˜Be carefuls' which indicated it was offensive to “show sympathy for criminals,” “arson,” “surgical operations,” "excessive or lustful kissing” and of course “HOMOSEXUALITY.”

Hays appointed Colonel Jason S. Joy to be in charge of the supervisory agency, the Studio Relations Committee. Once the first talky The Jazz Singer (1927) starring Al Jolson was released a newly fired-up rebel cry was heard from the hoity-toity do-gooders who raised objections against Hollywood’s immorality. What was once suggestive in silent pictures was now committed to sound, with all its risque humor and wicked context.

In 1934 censorship was tightening its stranglehold. Under pressure from the Catholic Church and other religious groups, the Motion Picture Production Code made it so that any marginal gay characters became masked in innuendo, relying on queer symbolism instead. Several grassroots organizations were founded in order to pressure the film industry, the most influential of all was the Catholic Legion of Decency.

So, between the Code and state censorship boards, one might expect that films produced after 1930 would be exemplars of wholesomeness and purity. In practice, the men who enforced the Code on behalf of the MPPDA (Jason Joy and James Wingate) were wholly ineffectual, primarily due to the very small staffs they were allotted to keep up with the work of reviewing scripts, treatments and finished films while battling studios that weren't especially thrilled by the bottleneck caused by the whole operation. The combination of bureaucratic sclerosis and the economic, political and cultural crisis brought about by the Great Depression ushered in a vibrant era of filmmaking and the introduction of many stars whose personas would forever be rooted in their pre-Code films.- Mike Mashon

The Code set in place in 1930 was a turning point in the history of self-regulation. With the strict enforcement of the Production Code, they attempted to influence the discourse in American film without coming out and definitively stating which contexts were strictly forbidden. Instead, they issued phrases like "should be avoided" and "should not suggest." Though a variety of controversial topics weren’t vigorously banned by the Production Code, gay characters WERE strictly prohibited. 

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) directed by Alfred Hitchcock- Peter Lorre

When the Hays Code was adopted in 1930, they articulated that, “though regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purpose of teaching or propaganda, they know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking.”

When the MPPDA formally ratified The Code, they demanded that it be followed to the letter but it “lacked an effective enforcement mechanism” – and the studio heads openly defied its frame of mind and its puritanical spirit.

The movie studios had other pressing issues of concern. It was the Great Depression, and studios were barely making it, on the brink of ruin due to low ticket sales. They were quite ready to fight with states over censorship because sex and violence sell. They wanted to draw in audiences that would be titillated by gangsters, vamps, and racy subject matter. Popular musicals could entertain with disparaging racial clichés and glamorous, intoxicating imagery, with hints of queerness. You could also watch languid prostitutes on screen — everyone seems to long for Shanghai Lil, in the film that has it all, Footlight Parade (1933)

Filmmakers tried to switch around controversial subject matter that would not only push the boundaries but would promote ticket sales, with films that would attract a more sophisticated audience. Breen perceived these films to be less ‘dangerous’ a word he often used. They focused on the ‘gangster’ film with its violent content, and when they put their foot on that genre’s neck, Hollywood rolled out the ‘fallen woman‘ films. They tried very hard to get around the scrutiny and so they delved into making horror pictures, and racy comedies. These fare better as they fell under the heading of being ‘unrealistic’ which rendered them as innocuous material to the censors.

During the Great Depression, movies were an escape for audiences in dire need of distraction. The morally-charged stranglehold that was beginning to challenge filmmakers forced them to experiment with movies that were audacious and candid in different ways. Pre-Code actually challenged audiences to watch real-life issues on screen. Pre-Code cinema offered some titillating truths coming out of the dream factory. Depression-era cinema exhibited gay characters, but generally in small parts and often used for comic purposes that managed to cue audiences in, with roles that were codified and readable as queer. ‘Queerness’ was railed against because it subverted traditional masculinity which was under attack by the new socioeconomic crisis in the country. Yet somehow, Hollywood found it to be a viable trigger for ideological gossip.

These films illustrated narratives that were thought-provoking, worldly, and subversive. Movies dealt frankly or were suggestive of sexual innuendo, sexual relationships between races, mild profanity, drug use, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and of course, homosexuality.

William Wellman’s Safe in Hell (1931) stars Dorothy Mackaill as a call girl in hiding. Prostitution is a no no!

Filmmakers took risks delivering a portrait of America with a punishing realism, and creative freedom to portray taboo themes like crime (gangs and guns, violence), and social dilemmas (drug abuse, poverty, and political unrest). And sexual relationships (adultery, promiscuity, deviance = homosexuality). In the 1930s filmmakers also sought to stir up controversy by screening queer characters, in order to shock audiences and drive up their ticket sales. As a result, movies became more lewd, ruthless, and vicious between 1930 and 1934. And Hollywood was its MOST queer from 1932-1934.

Yet during the silent era to the mid-thirties, gay characters were illustrated as stereotypes showcasing the popular tropes established by conventional hetero-normative gender bias. These archetypes were styled to be gender non-conformists. Queer men were fussy, effeminate, and flamboyant. With high-pitched voices, the air under their feet, and waving hands. Essentially, ‘fairies’ were deployed as comic relief on the periphery of the drama. Real-life queers of the Depression era and later periods were exposed to cinematic images, the vast majority being caricatured in which gays and lesbians were often presented as targets of ridicule and contempt for their divine decadence. ‘Entertainers play with gender ambiguity in Broadway thru a Keyhole (1933).‘ (Lugowski)

Lesbians were at the other end of the spectrum. They were ‘masculine,’ demonstrating deep voices, cross-dressing in male attire, and were installed in male-dominated professions. They were often invalidated by the straight male characters and were either played for the uncomfortable humor or shown as baffling to men. The PCA in its Hollywood’s Movie Commandments specified that there could be no comic characters “introduced into a screenplay pantomiming a pervert.” (Lugowski)

Gender Reversals, Queerness, and a Nation in Crisis.–

In Michael Curtiz’s The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932) Suddenly, queer imagery in film, typically in the form of comical representations of gay men, lesbians, and ambiguous sexuality, did not seem so funny any-more, least of all to those charged with applying Hollywood’s Production Code to film content. By “queer” imagery, I am focusing particularly on situations, lines of dialogue, and characters that represent behavior coded, according to widely accepted stereotypes, as cross-gendered in nature. As played by such prominent and well-established supporting comedy character actors as Franklin Pangborn, Edward Everett Horton, Grady Sutton, Erik Rhodes, Eric Blore, and Ernest Truex, queer men tended to appear as one of two types.

The queer in his more subdued form appears as the dithering, asexual “sissy,” sometimes befuddled, incompetent,and, if married, very henpecked (Horton), and sometimes fussy and officious (Pangborn). Pangborn, however, was one of the actors who (along with the unsung likes of Tyrell Davis and Tyler Brooke) also played or suggested the other type, the more outrageous “pansy,” an extremely effeminate boulevardier-type sporting lip-stick, rouge, a trim mustache and hairstyle, and an equally trim suit, incomplete without a boutonniere. Although a number of actors played or were even typecast in such roles, one generally doesn’t find a circle of prominent supporting actresses whose personas seemed designed to connote lesbianism (the closest, perhaps, is Cecil Cunningham) lesbian representation occurs frequently as well, and in perhaps a greater range of gradations. At her most overt, the lesbian was clad in a mannishly tailored suit (often a tuxedo), her hair slicked back or cut in a short bob. She sometimes sported a monocle and cigarette holder (or cigar!) and invariably possessed a deep alto voice and a haughty, aggressive attitude toward men, work, or any business at hand. Objections arose because she seemed to usurp male privilege; perhaps the pansy seemed to give it up. -David M.Lugowski: Queering the (New) Deal-Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood’s Production Code

Filmmakers were encouraged not to promote lifestyles of a ‘morally questionable’ nature, so queers remained as humorous detours away from the central story. It was a subtle defiance that filmmakers were determined to feature queer characters in their films in spite of the ban. Because of the threat of boycotts, this created some maneuvering around the scrutiny. Queer identities were not portrayed with depth or realism, this marginalized group was relegated to one-dimensional stereotypes. They were never shown to be in romantic relationships and filmmakers relied on visual cues to signal the character’s identity.

Censors at the PCA, for example, were very worried about the three female characters in William Dieterle’s Dr. Monica (1934) starring Kay Francis. The film is the story of three women, an alcoholic, a nymphomaniac, and a lesbian. In October 1935, Joseph Breen wrote a letter to RKO’s head B.B. Kahane concerned about Follow the Fleet (1936) starring Fred Astaire who gives a dance lesson to all male sailors. “We are assuming of course that you will exercise your usual good taste in this scene of the sailors learning to dance. There will be no attempt to inject any ‘pansy’ humor into the scene.”

Due to a new, stricter Motion Picture Production Code, gays were being swept under the rug in movies. In the late 1930s and 1940s the only way to circumvent the Code was by painting homosexuals as cold-hearted villains (The Celluloid Closet). Now it appeared that gays were committing terrible crimes because of their sexual orientation, implying that homosexuality leads to insanity. In a society where being homosexual was synonymous with being sinful, it is no surprise that Hollywood made the leap to correlating a homosexual orientation with malicious crimes and wicked urges (Weir).

Alfred Hitchcock is a visual magician who rolls out the answers gradually while deconstructing what is explicit in the narrative. He is one of the most measured auteurs, whose eye for detail links each scene together like a skillful puzzle. He has been studied, tributed, and –in my opinion–unsuccessfully imitated. Rigid to conform, he danced around the Hays Code like a cunning acrobat indulging his vision while deflecting the lax regulations. There are arguments that Hitchcock insinuated homophobic messages in some of his films. The queer characters were all deviants and psychopathic predators, who were the ones responsible for some of the most heinous murders on screen. For example, in his film Rope (1948) the two Nietzschian murderers are intellectual companions who get off on trying to perpetrate the perfect murder. They exhibit a romantic friendship with no sexual contact on the screen. Yet there are cues that they are sexually aroused by each other’s mutual pleasure at killing a young boy. The Hays Code inhibited the depiction of a queer couple so Hitchcock had to subtly suggest their sexual relationship by dropping metaphors and visual clues. Though, it might be interpreted through a homophobic lens, and their homosexuality might be at the core of their cruel and immoral nature.

According to David Greven, Hitchcock’s homophelia ‘was through a larger conflict that Hitchcock’s cinema that filmmakers conducted their investigation of American masculinity, one that focused on fissures and failures. Homosexuality emerged as representative of these and also as potential new direction for American masculinity to take, not without serious risk but also treated with surprising, fascinated interest… Hitchcock’s radical de-centering of heterosexual male dominance, devising contemporary narratives of heterosexual male ambivalence that allowed for, at times depended on, an investment in same-sex desire as well as an awareness of its dangerous, pernicious seductions. Homophobia in both Hitchcock and the New Hollywood’s informed by an attendant fascination with the homoerotic that emerges from scenes of gender crisis and disorganization that are rife in both the Cold War and New Hollywood eras. 

Any illicit sexual behavior on screen considered perverse would be demonized and exploited as immoral. Queers were shown as villainous, dangerous deviants who were fated for ruination and/or death.

There were several broad categories the Code was not vague about. Any movies depicting criminality had to essentially illustrate that there would be consequences. The message was clear, any flagrant criminal behavior is abhorrent and audiences should NOT feel sympathy, primarily through the implicit edict of “compensating moral values.”

Authority figures had to be treated with respect, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers, and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear that those individuals portrayed as villains were the exceptions to the rule.

Clearly, there were some productive strategies for circumventing the Motion Picture Production Code. They enabled characters that performed behind the veil, under the radar of social acceptability, while dancing a step closer to the fringe. It allowed for ‘queering the screen’. I find it feasible to consider how Alexander Doty points out that ‘queering’ something implies that you are taking a thing that is straight and doing something to it. Rather it should be considered that it’s less about co-opting or subverting films – making things queer, and more about how something might be understood as queer.

It might be easy to read Zasu Pitt’s and Thelma Todd’s relationship, the brilliantly paired comedy twosome, as lovers. While they perform humorous heterosexual man-hunting, they sure seem to be most interested in each other and sure look adorable in their pajamas! I wonder, as Big Daddy says if there’s ‘something missing here’. Below, they are in the film short directed by Hal Roach – On The Loose 1931, with bobbed hair, leaning into each other in bed together, looking awfully intimate.

To be ‘queer’ is also to deconstruct existing norms and ‘destabilize’ them, making it harder to define, so that it is a clear picture of non-normative straight masculinity/femininity.

What was perceptible to those ‘in the life’ were expressions, and gestures, of the term often used by the Hays Code, ‘deviancy.’ One of the things that the Code banned in Clause 6 Section 2 on "Sex" was that "sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden."

Not that films during the reign of the Code were ripe with queer love stories, of course. There were none to be found beyond the foreign offerings of Oswald’s Different From the Others and Mädchen in Uniform. The most prevalent allusion to being gay was the flamboyant man who was the ambiguous bachelor or fussy asexual husband. If there was anything close to a butch woman, she could be an earthy farmer’s wife, a Marjorie Main or Patsy Kelly type (Both lesbians in real life). A tough-as-nails prison matron, a tyrannical madame, or a risque nightclub owner. Perhaps she’s an embittered heavy drinker or just one of the guys who is a faithful friend to the female lead. Maybe she never gets the guy or hasn’t met the right man. Perhaps she was married to a no-good bum and is off men for good!.. And just sometimes, sometimes it’s because… well some of us would know why!

Thelma Todd joined up with Patsy Kelly in comedy series. Here’s a lobby card for their Babes in the Goods. The two became very good friends during their collaboration.

Patsy Kelly had started in Vaudeville and appeared in Wonder Bar 1931 centered around a Parisian club. Kelly played Elektra Pivonaka and sang two lively songs.

She is known for her ballsy, straight-forward, no-nonsense persona, be it her tough-as-nails nurse Mac in Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964) or as Laura-Louise, attending to Rosemary (Mia Farrow) in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Kelly played very non-feminine roles, injecting a bit of her ‘in the life’ energy into the characters in every one of her roles. More often than not she had an unglamorous reputation as a funny spunky, brassy, wise-cracking gal who played a lot of maids. She was outspoken about being an uncloseted lesbian, which hurt her movie career in the 1940s. But she had been a very successful actress on Broadway, returning to the stage in 1971 winning a Tony Award for No, No Nanette and Irene.

In director/screenwriter Sam Fuller’s sensationalist The Naked Kiss (1964), Patsy Kelly plays Mac the nurse, a hard-edged pussy cat. A no-nonsense nurse who lives for helping children with disabilities, but there is no visible sign that she has the slightest interest in men, aside from a smart-alecky comment about Grant bringing her back a man from Europe. Kelly might have wanted her role as an independent woman with a more offbeat way of stating that she is a tough dyke and expected Fuller to write her into the script that way. Knowing Kelly that’s a good assumption. The film is audacious in its scope for dealing with more than one theme, as taboo as prostitution, abortion, and pedophilia.

The Catholic Legion of Decency used their influence to label gays as ‘sexual deviants’, not be depicted on screen. ‘Deviancy’ was used to refer to any behavior deviating from what was perceived to be normal in terms of romance, sex, and gender. Hays even ordered all ‘Nance’ characters to be removed from screenplays.

The Federation of Women’s Clubs and the Hays Code tried to make symbolic gestures to maintain decency in films. The Legion of Decency was getting pressure from the Catholic Church. So in 1934 came up with A-acceptable B-Morally Objectionable and C-Condemned. Hollywood promised to observe the rules. The various subject matter was restricted to screen-open mouth kissing, lustful embraces, sex perversion, seduction, rape, abortion, prostitution, white slavery, nudity, obscenity, and profanity.

But all this unsolicited attention caused the studios to be watchful of their off-screen personnel, and they also had to be certain that the Los Angeles Police Department received payoffs to keep their mouths shut. Though the lurid and shocking subject matter was no longer tolerated on screen, the studios tried to continue to release their films without the intrusion of the Hays Office, even though from a commercial standpoint, sex sells.

Warner Bros.’ lack of cooperation with the Code until the bitter end and how Paramount, which was cooperative under B. P. Schulberg, decided to be “as daring as possible” under Emmanuel Cohen in 1932 and 1933. At MGM, Irving Thalberg’s resistance only really ended with his heart attack and journey abroad to recover in 1933. As James Wingate, Breen’s SRC predecessor, put things that same year: (Lugowski)

In 1934 Jack Warner ignored Breen’s letter and phone calls about a scene in Wonder Bar (1934) that explicitly demonstrates homoerotic desire. In it, one man cuts in to dance with another man, interrupting a woman who is dancing with her male partner. “May I cut in?”  she responds, “Why certainly,” as the man’s suitor grabs her chaperone to dance instead. The film stars Al Jolson who exclaims, “Boys will be boys!” Breen would later write, “It is quite evident that the gentleman [Warner] is giving me the runaround. He evidently thinks that this is the smart thing to do.” Wonder Bar may have added a flash of queer diversion as part of the entertainment, but it is an incredibly offensive and racist film using a cast who are in Black face.

During the ongoing Depression era, sissy and lesbian characters of the period continued to be screened as effeminate and mannish with one change. They became progressively sexualized between 1933-34. As the Depression moved forward, the Code needed to establish a “suitable” masculinity in film that would satisfy the morality police. They wanted this accepted masculinity to mirror the public art imagery that was now being federally funded by the New Deal in the mid-and late 1930s.

Before 1934 the studios were able to ignore the Code’s denouncement and endeavor to censor the movie industry but Hollywood filmmakers could no longer disregard the regulations issued by the Hays Code. The Legion of Decency forced the MPPDA to assert itself with the Production Code and formed a new agency, the Production Code Administration (PCA). The Hays Code was formed in 1930 but it only began to have a profound impact on Hollywood when the Production Code Administration (PCA) began strictly enforcing it in 1934. The crusade to save America’s purity and squash the filth mongers began a cultural war.

It was a system of moral oversight, conservatives lobbied to enforce, using the PCA to compel the industry to drastically adhere to it. PCA is strongest in explaining how the Code tried to at once repress and enable discourse to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of viewers and to offend the fewest. (Lugowski)

And in 1937, the Production Code Administration (PCA), handed down Hollywood’s Movie Commandments that decried “No hint of sex perversion may be introduced into a screen story. The characterization of a man as effeminate, or a woman as grossly masculine would be absolutely forbidden for screen portrayal.”

The Code was detailed in two parts that reflected the foundation of Catholic principles. The moral vision and "particular applications a precise listing of forbidden material.”

The code was divided into two parts. The first was a set of “general principles” which prohibited a picture from “lowering the moral standards of those who see it”, so as not to wrongly influence a specific audience of views including, women, children, lower-class, and those of "susceptible" minds, called for depictions of the “correct standards of life”, and lastly forbade a picture to show any sort of ridicule towards a law or “creating sympathy for its violation.

The second part of the Code was a set of “particular applications”, which was an exacting list of items that could not be depicted. Some restrictions, such as the ban on homosexuality or on the use of specific curse words, were never directly mentioned, but were assumed to be understood without clear demarcation. Homosexuals were de facto included under the proscription of sex perversion.” — Wikipedia

The second part of the Code was a ban on homosexuality. Though it was not specifically spelled out, queers were the subject under review of ‘sex perversion.’ Though the Hays office would not stand for "more than a dash of lavender" as long as the representation (especially a non-desirable depiction of homosexuality) was fleeting and incidental. Thus, “Pansy comedy" was tolerable in Pre-Code Hollywood. "Despite the watchful eyes of the Hays Office, the trade paper Variety remarked that Hollywood continued what was called "queer flashes" and “mauve characters" who sashayed through Cavalcade 1933, Our Betters 1932, and Sailor's Luck 1932.

The industry moguls and business offices finally had to follow the rules, clean up the ‘sinful’ screen and adopt a symbol of moral righteousness, that came along with a seal. The Code would be certified by a Code Seal printed on the lobby cards of each Hollywood film. And the seal would be an emblem that would appear on the motion pictures themselves. Any film without a Code Seal would be fined $25,000.

After some revisions, they agreed to the stipulations of the Code. … negotiated cuts from films and there were definite"”albeit loose"”constraints, a significant … against homosexuals, all in clear violation of the Hollywood Production Code.

Any sexual act considered perverted, including any suggestion of same sex relationships, sex, or romance, was ruled out.

Thus, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the PCA scrutinized and censored, everything coming out of Hollywood and put its seal on each movie released. The Hollywood executives preferred to call it “self-regulation” and feared that censorship by the PCA would be even worse if they tampered with the creative ‘source’ of their product. Because of the studios’ defiance, Roman Catholics formed the National Legion of Decency, which became an influential group that would put Hollywood’s transgressions through the ordeal, of boycotts, picketing theaters, urging Catholics not to patronize these immoral movies or fall “under the pain of sin”, being met by hoards of angry protestors at the gates of the studio. Now religious groups and other moral traditionalists began a warlike campaign for the government to regulate what was shown on the screen.

Mae West: She Done Him Wrong 1933

Also, government officials were bent on making gay people invisible from cinematic narratives and the United States Supreme Court handed down the ruling that filmmakers were not protected by the First Amendment in the matter of free speech. They considered Hollywood to be a powerful mechanism that to exploit ‘sinful’ behavior on the screen and influence American audiences. This laid the groundwork for local governments that could weigh in and ban films from their theaters if they considered them immoral. Hollywood could not afford to lose money at the box office from governmental authorities, by negative publicity, or from the threatening boycotts by rabid church groups.

Motion pictures could be regulated and run out of town by cities, states, and by ominous extension, the federal government.

“After all, censorship had been a fact of creative and commercial life for motion picture producers from the very birth of the medium, when even the modest osculations of the middle-aged lovebirds in Thomas Edison's The Kiss (1896) scandalized cadres of (literally) Victorian ministers, matrons, and other variants of a sour-faced species known as the “bluenose.” By common consent, the artistically vital and culturally disruptive spectacle of the motion picture – an entertainment accessible to all levels of society and degrees of moral temperament, including unassimilated immigrants,impressionable juveniles, and other menacing types – required editorial supervision from more mature, pious, and usually Protestant sensibilities” -from Archives Unbound

Hollywood was in the grip of the Code that saw the ‘dream factory’ movie machine as a Hollywood Babylon. While the powers that be were busy policing the murmuration of taboos, Pre-Code was a brief moment in history, a fruitful period between 1929 to 1934. Hays then appointed someone who could intercede between studio moguls and anti-Hollywood groups, Joseph I. Breen. “The vulgar, the cheap, and the tawdry is out!”

The PCA had been known as the Hays Office but to those in Hollywood, once the oversight became an operation with teeth, it became known as the Breen Office. Breen came in to take over the weak Studio Relations Committee (SRC). The Code consisted of thirty-six rules that informed Hollywood filmmakers to limit the representation of or normalization of subject matter considered by religious groups to be “unsavory or morally corrupt.” The SRC and the PCA were the inner mechanisms within the film industry, shaping the content of the film and heading off any ethical problems the film might encounter before it reached the local censors.

Dorothy Mackaill’s Safe in Hell (1931)

Many scenarios disappeared from the movies by mid-1934: for example, audiences would no longer see women’s navels, couples laying in bed together, murderers going unpunished, an illustration of a bedroom that isn’t merely recognized as a bed chamber. The normalization of drug use, the glamourization of criminal behavior, or not following the law, and of course any overtly revealed gay or lesbian character. After 1934, women would not be sporting short haircuts and tailored suits, confidently smoking cigars. Men toned down the gushy gestures that would be interpreted as flamboyant. Gay men and women were transformed into dowdy spinsters and high-strung bachelors.

What we started to see was an ambiguity, a narrative uncertainty that took the burden of responsibility off of the filmmakers and dropped the perception of the content into the laps of the audience. Since the Code asserted that no picture should lower the moral standards of those who saw it, it was a law that bound Hollywood’s accountability for their plots. Ruth Vasey calls the antithesis of this “the principle of deniability” which refers to the ambiguity of the textual vaguery that shifted the message to the individual spectator. Lugowski cites Lea Jacobs, “Under the Code ‘offensive ideas could survive at the price of an instability of meaning… There was constant negotiation about how explicit films could be and by what means (through the image, sound, language) offensive ideas could find representation.” The studios would have to come up with a structure of ‘representational conventions’, that could be understood by a more sophisticated audience yet would fly over the heads of more inexperienced spectatorship. Though producers felt the sharp sting of the Code as a mechanism of restraint, in terms of ‘queerness’ on screen, film studios could use the leverage of deniability to argue about the interpretation of certain scenes.

Once the limits of explicit “sophistication” had been established, the production industry had to find ways of appealing to both “innocent” and “sophisticated” sensibilities in the same object without transgressing the boundaries of public acceptability. This involved devising systems and codes of representation in which “innocence” was inscribed into the text while “sophisticated” viewers were able to “read into” movies whatever meanings they were pleased to find, so long as producers could use the Production Code to deny that they had put them there. Much of the work of self-regulation lay in the maintenance of this system of conventions, and as such, it operated, however perversely, as an enabling mechanism at the same time that it was a repressive one.-(Documents from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc., 1922 – 1939)

… by assuming that the social crisis over cinematic representation in the early 1930s was caused by the content of motion pictures. The institution of censorship in Hollywood was not primarily about controlling the content of movies at the level of forbidden words or actions or inhibiting the freedom of expression of individual producers. Rather, it was about the cultural function of entertainment and the possession of cultural power. (Tino Balio: Grand Design Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939)

Geoff Shurlock was appointed as acting director of the Production Code in the 1940s and as permanent director in 1954. Over the years, Shurlock would straddle the conflict, appeasing both movie producers, and morality mongers trying to persuade the Association Board that introducing more liberal thinking could protect the PCA from fading away. There were attempts to ease up on the Code, in 1954 he introduced an amendment that would eliminate various taboos, for instance, miscegenation, liquor, and some profane words, but producers felt that there weren’t enough considerations to the amendment and the Catholic Legion of Decency felt that even that much went too far. Shurlock had a tough time making everyone happy.

The 1950s witnessed a weakening of the Production Code to restrict specific representations such as adultery, prostitution, and miscegenation. By the beginning of the 1960s, the only specific restriction left was homosexuality = “sex perversion.”

In the 1960s, filmmakers pressured the Production Code Administration. In the fall of 1961, two films went into production that would deal with homosexual subject matter. William Wyler, who had initially directed Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon in These Three (1936), revealed that he was working on a more faithful treatment of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour; that dealt overtly with the love that dare not speak it’s named. Around the same time director Otto Preminger began to adapt Allen Drury’s political novel Advise and Consent 1962, which delves into the lives of Senatorial candidates that uncovers controversial secrets, including Don Murray’s homosexual encounter.

Throughout Preminger’s career, he challenged the restrictions of the Code and eventually influenced their decision to allow homosexuality to be shown on screen. Also fighting to change the stifling rules was Arthur Krim, president of United Artists, who threatened to ignore the Code and release the film without the mandatory “seal of approval” forcing them to amend it’s ideological strangle hold.

On October 3, 1961, the Production Code Administration backed off: “In keeping with the culture, the mores and values of our time, homosexuality and other sexual aberrations may now be treated with care, discretion, and restraint.”

In order to maintain control of the Administration’s power at least in terms of how homosexuals were portrayed on film, they insisted that the subject be infused with medical overtones, to show it as an ‘illness’. Sympathy or illness in psychological terms, were two key factors. The Code’s changed the use of the word “sex perversion” and replaced it with “homosexuality.”

Don Murray –gay bar scene in Advise and Consent 1962

Another interesting shift was that they owned up to the fact that “mores and values of our time” were changing whether they liked it or not, people were becoming more in touch with the freedom to express their sexuality, society was becoming more permissive, the love generation was upon them and sexual representation was a fearless exploration reflected by a new generation of filmgoers.

Otto Preminger was the only major producer able to successfully release films without the Production Code’s Seal of Approval. He defied the Code (Hadleigh) with movies like Advise and Consent (1961) The Man with Golden Arm (1955) Anatomy of a Murder (1959) Wendell Mayes said “Look at the record–you’ll discover that many of the changes in the Code were a result of Otto Preminger breaking the rules”

Though the Code had been revised in 1961 to open up the door for portrayals of gays on screen, the sissy effete and predatory dyke took on a more sinister role. Because they had been hidden in plain sight using symbology that hinted at either failed masculinity or women performing masculinity. When the MPPA rating system was established in 1968 gays on screen were starting to kick the doors open but what was awaiting them was an even crueler denouement than during the reign of the Code. Queers were now portrayed as suicidal, predatory, or homicidal maniacs. And much like the coded gay characters under the Production Code, things moved very slowly in terms of progress for positive representations of being ‘queer.’

Dirk Bogarde and Dennis Price in Basil Dearden’s brave film Victim (1961)

Between January and June 1962, five films were released that dealt with homosexuality, almost as many as in the previous three decades. One did not receive a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration but was released nonetheless. Even without the seal of approval, British director, Basil Dearden’s Victim (1961) was reviewed in all the publications being considered. The liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal even disagreed with the Production Code Administration’s claim that the film made pleas ‘for social acceptance of the homosexual.’ “63 Still, the consensus among reviewers was that of the Production Code Administration and society at large: films should not and, for the most part, did not condone homosexuality. (Noriega)

This ban applied to all characters attracted to the same gender or characters who differed in their gender presentation or identity. While nudity and violence were quickly reintegrated into film canon following the abandonment of the Production Code, LGBT characters remained taboo. For decades after LGBT characters were allowed to appear in films, their sexuality and gender was shrouded in thinly-veiled innuendos and visual cues. If a character was to be openly same-gender attracted or transgender, they would be gruesomely killed or presented as morally corrupted. (Cleghorn)

Like the Code’s authors, film critics tend to examine the film itself, and not the discursive acts that surround a film and play a sometimes central role shaping its meaning(s). Contemporary gay and lesbian film criticism of Production Code era films operates on the same principle, with the added limitations that historical evidence and homosexual “images” censored. Thus, in order to ensure “the survival of subcultural identity within an oppressive society,” gay and lesbian film critics have employed a wide range of interpretive strategies to recuperate a history of homosexual images from the censored screen. The emphasis, therefore, has been on “subtexting” censored films from a singular presentist perspective. (Sophie Cleghorn)

Sources:

*Mike Mashon & James Bell for Pre-Code Hollywood Before the Censors-BFI  Sight & Sound Magazine (April 2019)

*Archives Unbound (1http://gdc.gale.com/archivesunbound/)

*Sophie Cleghorn: The Hollywood Production Code of 1930 and LGBT Characters.

*Wikipedia-Pre-Code

*David Lugowski-Queering the (New) Deal)

*Chon Noriega

During the period of Pre-Code, queer humor appeared in films such as Just Imagine (1930) and The Warrior’s Husband (1933). The male characters were feminized because of their affinity for writing poetry. This asserted that they must be queer.

The Warrior’s Husband directed by Walter Lang, is a film primarily cast with women. Yet the air of queerness permeates throughout because the women, featuring a butch Queen, are Amazons. Gender is inverted and several other female rulers cross-dress and exude a lesbian vibe. It is inhabited by independent women and swishy men who camped it up as ‘queens’ amusing themselves by flirting with all the good-looking men.

The Warrior’s Husband image courtesy Peplums Blogspot.com

Like so much self deemed culturally aberrant, the homosexual appears with greater frequency and readier acceptance in Pre-Code Hollywood cinema "The thirties was surprisingly full of fruity character comedians and gravel-voice bulldyke character comediennes" film critic Andrew Sarris observed in his touchstone study The American Cinema "but it was always played so straight that when ((character actors) Franklin Pangborn or Cecil Cunningham went into their routines, it was possible to laugh without being too sophisticated." Maybe in the later thirties the homosexual was played straight but in the Pre-Code era, he and she was playing queer. No sophistication was needed to read the same sex orientations as gender disorientations.- Pre-Code Hollywood; Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 by Thomas Doherty.

Miriam Hopkins got the part of free-spirited Gilda in Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living 1933. This original Noël Coward play actually featured a Ménage à Trois between the three Bohemian lovebirds in Paris in the decadent thirties. The film also starred Gary Cooper as artist George Cooper and Fredric March as playwright Tom Chambers. The liberated Gilda becomes the girl both men fall in love with. The three make a pact to keep their mutual attractions platonic, but that doesn’t last too long, and they each begin a sexual relationship. When George comes back from a trip to Nice, he finds that Tom has taken up with Gilda. “I can’t believe I loved you both.”

Ben Hecht's screenplay didn’t have a trace of any of Coward’s romantic relationship between George and Tom. Ernst Lubitsch, known for his sophisticated style, directed memorable witty interactions between all four players. Edward Everett Horton as Max Plunkett plays Miriam's bland suitor. Horton is, as usual, a whimsical idiosyncratic delight to watch. And Franklin Pangborn Mr. Douglas, Theatrical Producer is a perfect theatrical queen who is thoroughly annoyed when Gilda approaches him in the restaurant about Tom’s (Fredric March) play “Good Night Bassington”, as she leaves him with this thought, “There, read it, I’m sure you’ll adore it, it’s a woman’s play…”

Al Jolson “Boys will be boys” Wonder Bar (1934)

Any portrayal of on-screen “sex perversion” or homosexuality, even those connected with various tropes of ‘deviant’ sexual behavior were restricted after the enforcement of the Production Code in 1934.

Lending the Code moral authority even within the limits of pure love, asserted the Code delicately certain facts have been universally regarded by lawmakers as outside the limits of safe presentation Father Lord and Mr. Quigley saw no need to defile the document by typesetting long lists of "pointed profanity" or "vulgar expressions" Likewise, the prohibition against homosexuality dared not speak the name, but it didn't need to spell it out. "Impure Love" the love which society has always regarded as wrong and which has been named by divine law"¦ must not be presented as attractive or beautiful."-Pre-Code Hollywood; Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 by Thomas Doherty.

Different From the Others (1919) Conrad Veidt and Fritz Schulz two musicians in love — during the period of Pre-Code.

But, outside of the United States, films were a little more adventurous. Austrian director Richard Oswald’s film bravely shows two men in love. The “third sex” was eventually mocked. One of the earliest films to feature two men in love was the 1919 silent film from Germany,  Different From the Others. Director Richard Oswald's story of two male musicians in love had a typical unhappy ending, but it depicted gay people in a positive light. The film condemned the German law known as Paragraph 175, which outlawed gay behavior. Different Than the Others was censored soon after it was released. Starring Conrad Veidt it is considered the first pro-gay film.

Joseph Breen viewed any meaningful treatment of queer cinema as perverted. Conrad Veidt also gave an emotionally evocative role in The Man Who Laughs 1928, playing a violinist who falls for his student and is then blackmailed for it. The rising Nazi party in Germany attempted to erase these films from the screen, and this made Oswald flee to America.

But, the Hays Code made certain that no films of this type would be seen in the United States. Even books and plays with gay, lesbian, or bisexual narratives were reworked and any content related to the subject was erased in order to meet the social code of the time.

Other non-American films included Dreyer’s Michael (1924) and Mädchen in Uniform (1931) directed by Leontine Sagan and again in (1958) with Lilli Palmer as Fräulein Elisabeth von Bernburg and Romy Schneider as Manuela von Meinhardis. And Viktor Und Viktoria (1933) directed by Reinhold Schünzel.

Mädchen in Uniform (1931) was directed by Leotine Sagan, and starred Dorothea Wieck and Hertha Thiele.

William Dieterle’s Pre-Code German film Sex in Chains (1928) stars the director as Franz Sommer a man sent to prison for manslaughter who, though longing for his wife, develops a close relationship with his cellmate. A fellow inmate informs Franz that he’s “lived to see someone unman himself, just so he could finally sleep.”

In 1927, during the Pre-Code period, director William Wellman’s Wings won an Academy Award for Best Picture, and it also depicted the first gay kiss between two men in American cinema.

Wings follows two Air Force pilots in World War I, Jack (Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers and Dave (Richard Arlen) who at first rivals for the affections of the beautiful Mary (Clara Bow) before they discover the underlying love they begin to feel for each other. During a boxing match at training camp gets too rough and Jack knocks Dave bloody and silly. Dave gazes up at Jack with an epiphany and the two walk off arm and arm as close ‘buddies’. The relationship is referred to as friendship, but the film paints a picture of two men falling in love.

Dave is mortally wounded in combat at the end of the picture, Jack embraces his dying ‘friend’ with a tender yet impassioned kiss while Mary looks on, framed with her on the outside looking in. Wellman humanizes the men's close relationship in this scene when Jack leans into Dave to embrace him as he dies. He lets him know that nothing has meant more to him than their relationship. The moment feels sympathetic instead of exploitative, yet he mourns Dave’s death. And though it is tinged with homoerotic elements, the case can always be made that it is a story about war, which brought two men closer together.

The Knocking Knees dance. Horton’s homosexuality – comedic, subtle, and acceptable in The Gay Divorcee (1934)

In The Gay Divorcee (1934) crossing the threshold is the archetypal ‘Sissy’, Edward Everett Horton. Marginalized audiences were looking to the movies for any indication of the familiar, any little crumbs left as a trail to be picked up. For instance, there is a moment in Johnny Guitar, the fiercely burning with sensual brawn, Joan Crawford. Bigger than life up on that screen, androgynous in her black cowboy shirt, strides down the stairs, gun in her holster waiting to confront coded dyke, Mercedes McCambridge. Many women’s chests, mine included, heaved a little with delight. That flutter of excitement hit us again when Doris Day sings the sentimental “Secret Love” in Calamity Jane (1953).

In Myrt and Marge (1934) Ray Hedges plays the flaming stagehand Clarence Tiffingtuffer he’s told “Here put this in the trunk and don’t wear it” speaking about one of the show girls costumes. In his boldly effete manner “If we got the runs on the show, the way the girls got in their stockings, I could put the 2nd down payment on my Kimono.”

Clara Bow, Willard Robertson, and Estelle Taylor in Call Her Savage (1932)

From Call Her Savage 1932 purportedly the first on-screen gay bar.

In director William Wyler’s These Three (1936) the relationship between Miriam Hopkin’s Martha and Merle Oberon’s Karen was delicately subtle and though to mainstream audiences might be seemingly obvious to interpret as two women attracted to the male lead, Joel McCrea. It revised Hellman’s play that centered around Martha’s love that dare not speak its name, for Karen. Sam Goldwyn bought the rights to Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, a story depicting the supposed ‘carryings-on’ of two female teachers at a private school for girls. Though, These Three on its face is the story of a love triangle between two women and a man, it could read as Martha being more uncomfortable with the presence of Dr. Cardin (McCrea) because he is intruding on her closed relationship with Karen. The later screenplay adapted into the film, The Children’s Hour (1961) directed by William Wyler, was boldly more explicit and revealed the true nature of Martha’s predicament and her struggle with her love for Karen.

These Three (1936) Merle Oberon and Miriam Hopkins.

The Children’s Hour (1961) Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn.

Coded characters in the film were on the screen relaying messages and signaling to those of us who understand and who are “in the life: that movies can reflect the existence of a queer reality. These representations were not necessarily positive, but films showed evidence that we exist. You would see it in a revealing gesture, or an air of difference about them, though it would be inconspicuous to audiences that were unaware of the cues.

Continue reading “Chapter 2 – Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:”

Chapter 1: Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:

"I wish to join the Legion of Decency, which condemns vile and unwholesome moving pictures. I unite with all who protest against them as a grave menace to youth, to home life, to country and to religion. I condemn absolutely those salacious motion pictures which, with other degrading agencies, are corrupting public morals and promoting a sex mania in our land… Considering these evils, I hereby promise to remain away from all motion pictures except those which do not offend decency and Christian morality."

"”Catholic Legion of Decency pledge

And now here at The Last Drive In, the subject of “The Third Sex in the Shadows of Cinema.”

Clifton Webb as Hardy Cathcart in The Dark Corner 1946 directed by Henry Hathaway. Waldo Lydecker: “I’m not kind, I’m vicious. It’s the secret of my charm.”

“Oh, it’s sad, believe me, Missy, when you’re born to be a sissy without the vim and voive…” -Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Growing up as a gay woman, though gender and sexuality are fluid, there was not a well spring of characters in film or television that I could grab onto as a buoy for my burgeoning self-awareness – I was ‘different than the others.’ Though there are the obvious icons who became heroes and heroines to many of us because of their peerless image. And while films could not overtly represent ‘queerness’ directly, they could posit mixed messages and a whole generation of us could understand the subtext, unsheltered from an array of homophobic language.

We still had Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo, who gave us immortal androgyny– there was no one who could shatter the silence, and ceremoniously ring the bells out in the open. There were no ‘obvious’ gay role models. We had to create that worship ourselves through iconography and a variety of sublime, convention-smashing signals. For those of us who knew how to look in the dark corners, right under your nose, corners, or should I say coded corners.

There’s one thing I want to be very clear about. I am not asserting that the actors themselves were gay in their personal lives, but that what was coded was merely the particular characters they played in the film. Or that the narrative might seemingly be ‘queer’. Which I will go on to explain. Particular actors or directors’ private lives are not up for conversation unless they were clearly open about themselves and their influences on their artistic work.

For instance, I am not saying that I suspect Doris Day is a lesbian, just that the character of Calamity Jane is throwing out messages for those of us ‘in the life,’ to feel a special affinity. Using comforting symbology gives us a place in the universe, especially when the story is presented by the stars we most admire. Not all coded gay characters are portrayed by gay actors, and not all coded comedy, jokes, or situations denotes that the character themselves are gay, just that the humor is cannily made to be queer at the moment. It can be an off-the-center remark that speeds by almost unnoticed except for the sake of the hurried laugh or two. Sometimes it’s all subjective and at times it’s pretty obvious which way the deliberate wind blows.

(Stacey) categorizes her range of material into several kinds of identification broadly dividing them into two categories. "Cinematic identifcatory fantasies" "”devotion, worship transcendence, inspiration are proper to the act of spectatorship and appear to be based primarily on difference from the star ideal and "extra-cinematic identifactory practices" "”imitation and consumption "”attempt to close the gap between subject and star even as they take place outside cinema.

The worship of Doris Day is not surprising, she was one of the top box office draws of the 1950s. Day performs a cross-dressing role in the biopic of a legendary lesbian. Indeed, Day and Calamity Jane in particular in which the star sings both "Secret Love" and a duet with another, feminine character called " a woman's touch" are regularly cited by lesbians as crucial cinematic texts. (Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing)

There was a period when Peter Lorre, George Sanders (and his equally effete brother Tom Conway), Anne Revere, Judith Anderson, and Agnes Moorehead played movie villains, fanatics, or oddballs. Each of these actors suggested queerness in their androgynous personas. Each became an iconic character actor of classic cinema.

Characters like Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius, Clifton Webb’s Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), Judith Anderson in Rebecca (1940), or Gloria Holden as Countess Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter (1936), stood out to us, though they were despicable and unwelcoming characters. Although I see Gloria Holden’s character as strangely sympathetic. Usually, queerness that was veiled behind a coded role, exhibited a disturbed or desperate personality. They might be a person who is ambiguous in their maleness or femininity. And at times, they were full-on, deadly.

However, there was so little for those of us who are part of the ‘hidden audience’, we needed to catch sight of something familiar. That meant grabbing onto whatever little crumbs were thrown to us. So whether those characters were inherently insensate evil had nothing to do with our empathy or revulsion. The real power lay in the ability to identify with the essence of ‘otherness’ and more to do with familiarity and belonging. I longed to find that ‘something‘ that signified a relative identification of their sexuality. To see that subtle finger motioning, come closer, you’re in the right place kiddo, you’re one of us. Andrea Weiss writes: “[In the 1930s] for a people who were striving toward self-knowledge, Hollywood stars became important models in the foundation of gay identity.”

The films I have uncovered throughout my endeavor to write this immense blog post, either commonly fall within the queer canon or can be liberally dissected and/or challenged. We can read into any film if we so choose. I am merely putting it out to you that these films do seem to meet the criteria for coded queer paradigms. I also began this piece thinking that in order to understand the evolution of coded characters, you first have to look at the origin of the queer presence in silent and Pre-Code films, and how the Code influenced and constructed the way being queer had to be hidden in plain sight.

I echo Susie Bright, in her feelings that we (the queer community) would hang on to anything close to a hint of gayness, and it would change the whole world of the motion picture, just to see that famously analyzed moment when Marlene Dietrich plants that sensuous kiss on a woman’s lips in Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco 1930. Or the first cinematic lesbian romance when vamp Louise Brooks slinks on the dance floor with her androgynous female admirer Alice Roberts as Countess Anna Geschwitz in director GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929).

The boldly androgynous Marlene showcased another masculine appearance when she ascends the throne at the end of The Scarlet Empress (1934).

Greta Garbo portrays the Swedish monarch who declares herself not an “old maid” but “a bachelor” in Queen Christina (1933)

Because of the social relationship between non-normative gender and sexuality and the symbology of fashion and the role of work, women only had to dress like their male counterparts and be employed in a man’s job to seem queer. In the movie directed by George Cukor, What Price Hollywood? (1932), the very drunk filmmaker notices a woman having lunch at a fashionable Hollywood restaurant. The drunks inquiry goes like this, “I beg your pardon, old man… who’s your tailor?

In Victor Fleming’s Red Dust (1932), Jean Harlow is adorable as Vantine as she handles the heat and hands out the jibes.

Other members of the lesbian parade inhabit spaces that, as with the men, connote queerness. Consider the lesbian couples in the Greenwich Village dive in Call Her Savage (1932), seated alongside male same-sex couples while pansy entertainers, dressed as maids, perform for their amusement. Mannishly garbed women barflies, sometimes wielding cigars, often pal around with men, or sometimes confuse and emasculate them, in Lawyer Man (1932), Grand Slam (1933), and Blood Money (1933). (Lugowski)

Blood Money (1933) Rowland Brown’s atmospheric jaunt that embraces the gritty underworld, includes racy subjects like sadomasochism, empowered women, and fluid sexuality. Kathlyn Williams credited as the “Nightclub Woman Wearing Monocle”, is a beautiful androgynous off-cut in the film. In one notable scene George Bancroft as Bill Bailey enters Ruby Darling’s (Judith Anderson) nightclub and comes across a young woman at the bar, dressed in a man's tuxedo and sporting a monocle. Baily offers her a cigar. She smells it and nonchalantly mocks the husky guy, “Why, you big sissy!” and hands it back to him. The nature of this adventurous passage into a subversive world generated a lot of sexual tension. With Blood Money, the subject of homosexuality is a non-issue, belonging to a subculture that invites those who are outsiders.

In Blood Money and Call Her Savage, "¨homosexuality is just another pocket of an underworld that exists outside the law. When George Bancroft warns a timid taxi driver not to betray his destination to the police, he threatens, “Lissen fag” -and is rebuked by Judith Anderson for “scaring the little fellow half to death.”

Keeping along the lines of the connection between women working at men’s jobs, within a wide range of social status, you can see this example in Heat Lightning (1934) starring interestingly handsome actress Aline MacMahon when she, covered in grease, working on cars in her desert garage/gas station wearing a filthy jumpsuit and hair wrapped in a bandana. She sheds her desire to be desired by men, and exudes a solitary quality, as if she has given up on, performing femininity for men. She seems independent and strong and in her ‘male’ attire, you can see her projecting a queer attitude, though the film deposits a past love interest with bad boy Preston Foster as a distraction. The attraction is doomed from the start.

Olga (MacMahon) balances the duality of loving Preston Foster, donning her "˜womanly' dress when she decides to submit to a heterosexual liaison which goes wrong. Then she shuns the idea of her femininity, re-asserting her hyper-masculine posture in greasy mechanics overalls and once again hiding her ravenous hair under her bandana, to protect herself from performing as a straight woman again.

To be clear it is not my belief that she’s not “all woman,” even using these props to represent masculinity. She is not truly changing her gender but for the purposes of the narrative, in the movie’s time period, it suggests a superficial interpretation of gender for our spectatorship.

In Jame’s Whales’ The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933) there is a sophisticated female lawyer Hilda Frey (Jean Dixon) who is stern and stiff-backed, and is dressed in severe clothing, a “new kind of woman” which allows for an undercurrent of lesbianism.

In The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933), Nancy Carroll as Maria Held is a career-oriented lawyer, who wears men’s suits and considers herself a “new woman.” There are tinges of heterosexuality, which serve to shield her character from scrutiny. But, she does appraise heterosexuality in vaguely cynical terms. She talks to another woman about a case where the husband has murdered his wife, “At least no one will ever murder me.” She also responds to, “What are you? A lawyer, or a new kind of woman?” by saying, “By day, I’m a lawyer. At night, well, you might be surprised.” Either it went undetected by the SRC (Studio Relations Committee) or they felt that the connotations of her lesbianism were ambiguous enough to slip by an unsophisticated audience.

We learn to watch out for signs that there are ‘others’ out there on the screen – those we can relate to. A young person exposed to old films, as I grew older and dove head first into classic film with a critical eye, I could read those sign posts and cues that led me to become consciously aware of the invisible affinity laid out in plain site for me, and those of us who knew the secret whispers behind the storyline.

Women wearing men’s apparel, like Dietrich’s wonderful drag performance, kissing a woman in Morocco in 1930. Or Clifton Webb’s often effete superiority as with his character, Waldo Lydecker in Otto Preminger’s Laura 1944, or his role as Hardy Cathcart’s with a pathological objectification of his wife Mari’s aesthetic beauty in Henry Hathaway’s The Dark Corner. Greta Garbo in Queen Christina 1933 “I shall die a bachelor!” Gloria Holden’s vampiric desire to embrace the necks of beautiful young female models in Dracula’s Daughter 1936.

Nan Gray and Gloria Holden in Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

The Production Code Administration (PCA) saw the obvious connection between vampirism and lesbian sexual desire in Dracula’s Daughter (1936) They only gave two warnings concerning the ‘queerness’ of Countess Zaleska and her thirst for young female victims. Universal, even hyped the idea that women were not safe from unnatural desire using this publicity catchphrase, “Save the women of London from Dracula’s Daughter!”

Throughout these films coded lesbian characters, scattered their rose petals of longing for their dead lost loves or the nymphs just out of their reach. There was tragedy within the tragedy of the horror story! As long as these queer women monsters also became victims, the PCA could negotiate its release, being comfortable with the narrative in that form.

The most overt representation of lesbians was her stylized look, a severely tailored suit, monocle, slicked back or bobbed short hair, or staunch, with a strait backed, severely repressive temperament. The coded dyke is typically less seen on screen than the pansy who enjoyed more of a character actor’s trademark in popular films. However, it could be said that covert lesbians are more subtle in their presence than their queer male counterparts – the sissy.

Major female stars could be seen as having indirect lesbian undertones, though their ambiguous sexuality might be camouflaged by their independent streak, their strong spirit or shaded by their exotic, mysterious nature. Thus we find some of our lesbian icons like Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Clara Bow, Greta Garbo, and Barbara Stanwyck. Lesbian vibes can often be signaled by a playful tomboyishness. And what we have is a diametrically opposed result, the pansy is perceived as failed manhood, but conversely the lesbian performing manhood is perceived as a threat.

And if they weren’t tomboys they could be man-less shrews, castrating viragos, or in need of a man, who can make her come to her senses, and give up her career and her disruptive way of life. The threat of strong women is still equal to the threat. The gay man elicits a laugh.

Thus, discourses about queer sexuality in this period are never purely homophobic against men. To a sizable extent, they have their basis in sexism against women, for it is the power of femininity, the “feminization” of 1930s culture mentioned, and the threat of working women “wearing the pants” that are being policed.

The metaphorical nature of the pants-wearing, money-earning woman attaining independence from men connoted lesbianism as a complete break from the interwoven financial and sexual economies of patriarchy. Thus, if “clothes make the man,” the wearing of pants in and of itself suggested a link to lesbianism that films of the time simultaneously offered as spectacle and punishment. (Lugowski)

In particular classical horror and science fiction films spoke to the sense of "otherness" installed in my psyche. That does not mean that I viewed things through a dark lens, but classical horror and science fiction are effusive metaphors and inherently philosophical. When some of us, like Frankenstein’s monster were figuratively chased with flaming torches, horror, and sci-fi movies afforded us shelter from the angry mob. Their use of mythic undertones and symbolic context provided for so many of us, psychic release and catharsis.

It’s also why I love and identify with the monster in classical horror films. The iconic or tragically fated monster has always been portrayed as the ‘other’. Gay people understand what it means to be an outsider. And filmmakers encoded that sui generis into our beloved classical horror genre. It worked like waving that meaningful finger at the audience, saying, you found us, we’re here.

WHAT IS A CODED GAY CHARACTER?

CODED–verb [with object] 1 convert (the words of a message) into a particular code in order to convey a secret meaning: express the meaning of (a statement or communication) in an indirect or euphemistic way: (as adjective coded)

films allude to homosexual meanings in more of less coded ways. From today’s perspective, one can view these films as excellent examples of the very discourse of the closet-they employ connotative and symbolic meanings to signify homosexuality for those ‘in the know’ while ostensibly being about something else. Such connotative meanings were the way homosexuality could be signified under the dictates of the Hollywood Production Code.

Although it was continually challenged throughout the 1950s (by films such as The Moon is Blue 1953 and Baby Doll 1956) The Production Code still exerted a profound effect on the content on Hollywood film, especially in relations to homosexual themes. The Production Code Administration (PCA) edited queer backstories and subtexts of the film adaptations of Tennessee William’s plays A Street Car Named Desire (1951) , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Vincente Minnelli’s film of the Broadway hit Tea and Sympathy… (Jeffrey Sconce)

 

Continue reading “Chapter 1: Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic, Noir & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters:”

THE BIG VIOLENCE OF FRITZ LANG'S THE BIG HEAT (1953)

"Lang's almost musical control of violence deferred both apprehension and catharsis" –Carlos Clarens

"The "heat" in this instance is the appalling cruelty; but the "big heat" is criminal slang for a large-scale investigation and an allusion to the hellish state of the city." "”David Thomson

The Big Heat (1953) is perhaps one of Fritz Lang's most violent noirs. It is an explosive noir masterpiece filled with striking images of the urban milieu that is often the site of Lang's allegorical urban war. But here there are also themes of revenge, obsession, sexual hostility, and corruption. The nightmare exposed as realism in the everyday spaces of the city.

"Violence is the most consistent motif in the film noir; virtually no noir is without it. Its importance is complicated and often explained in sociological terms to justify its aesthetic power. As a statement in itself, violence in noir cinema a distinctive use. Whereas its purpose in the pure gangster film has often been to explain the sociopathic breeding and greed of thuggish personalities who reach power and control, violence in the noir is less explicable and more arbitrary less a matter of historical cause and effect than an unexpected and intense exercise of rage. ["¦] The Big Heat"”each has moments of violence that jar us by their cold-bloodedness, occasionally terrify us in their perverseness. suggest a darker cruel impulse."
"”From Violence In The Noir Street With No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir by Andrew Dickos

The film's cold dimensions come from Sidney Boehm's script (based on the novel by William P. McGivern) which conveys perhaps the most ferocious rage in the noir canon. It opens with a gunshot. A corrupt police records sergeant, Tom Duncan, blows his brains out, leaving a suicide note which reveals how gangster Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) "”a first-generation immigrant"” has risen to power, holding the city in the clutches of highly organized criminals. Just as Homicide Detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) who is a working class family man, Lagana is an upper-class family man, worshiping the memory of his mother and doting on his daughter. In contrast, Lagana made his money through shady dealings. Duncan's suicide sets forth a chain of events in where the narrative of the film pivots on it's violence.

JEANETTE NOLAN & GLENN FORD Film ‘THE BIG HEAT'(1953)Directed By FRITZ LANG 1Oct. 1953 CTJ27877Allstar/Cinetex COLUMBIA

Duncan's widow Bertha (Jeanette Nolan) shows no emotion over her dead husband's lifeless body and stashes the letter. She telephones Lagana, cleverly signaling the implications of her husband's suicide. Now that she possesses evidence that can expose the syndicate boss who runs the city from his palatial mansion, Bertha proceeds to blackmail Lagana. She is thinking of providing for herself a better lifestyle than a cop's salary.

When Bannion comes to the door she must pretend to be the grieving widow. Bertha gazes at herself in the mirror, the camera holding mirrors in the background as symbols of deceit. And it's a premonition of Bannion's fractured morality as he is about to go on a mission of retaliation. The noir iconography of mirrors depicts duplicity and fragmentation. Charles Lang's cinematography transforms the ordinary environment, texturing it with anxiety.

Lagana lives against skyscrapers and a starry city night scene, but in his home, there are antiques and expensive artwork, a hive of servants, and classical music: this riles Bannion. "Cops have homes, too. Only sometimes there isn't enough money to pay the rent, because an honest cop gets hounded off the force by your thievin' cockroaches for tryin' to do an honest job."

Bannion refuses to drop the investigation into Duncan's suicide. His domestic bliss is shattered when his wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando) first gets an obscene call. This leads him right to the door of Lagana's opulent home to threaten him. When Bannion insults Lagana's pride, he plants a bomb in Bannion's car that accidentally kills his wife. The violent act itself happens offscreen, but the brutal aftermath of such evil becomes the center of the film, a cautionary tale of human behavior and corruption.

The film juxtaposes scenes of the domestic innocence of Bannion's family yet with the explosive violence he is capable of when he is driven to bring people down. He's transformed into an avenging angel. He goes on a personal crusade against Lagana, resigning from the force after he's warned by corrupt Commissioner Higgins (Howard Wendell) to lay off. He tosses his badge, but not his .38, simmering "That (gun) doesn't belong to the department, I bought it."

Bannion's life is now bleak with his private war to expose Lagana's grip on the city and the corruption within the police. He leaves the wholesome suburban home he shared with his wife, now empty except for his daughter's baby carriage in a barren room. With no future before him, he leaves his former home without a trace of his once blissful life.

It is this desolation that springs the violence to come. Bannion rampages through the screen, threatening and intimidating poker-playing bullies as he invades with vigilante fantasy Lagana's corrupt landscape. Bannion, once an average man, turned into the bitter vision of a noir hero who is being pushed to his capacity for violence. Bannion becomes obsessed with vengeance against the Syndicate boss and his chief thug, the sadistic Vince Stone (Lee Marvin). He roughs up hired gunman (Adam Williams), just short of killing him.

Bannion hunts down Duncan's mistress, a B-girl Lucy Chapman (Dorothy Green) who knows where the bodies are buried and she tries to salvage Duncan's reputation. But Bannion accuses her of "a shakedown," walking out of the bar feeling morally superior to Lucy.

She is found the next day outside of town, tortured and murdered by sadistic criminals. The brutal murder takes place off-camera but we still hear the horrifying account in the coroner's report. The morgue attendant asks "You saw those cigarette burns on her body?", "Yeah, I saw them. Every single one of them." As he crushes his cigarette into the ashtray, a nod to his culpability in her death.

Hirsch claims that few film noirs can or even try to sustain the pitch of these intensely violent moments. "These privileged moments are isolated from the rest of the films in which they occur by their special intensity but not by their content: the best film noir thrillers "˜earn' and can absorb these moments of visual and theatrical virtuosity; the violence and mania that are highlighted in these passages of kinky vaudevillian cinema flow directly from the noir milieu." – From Film Noir The Dark Side of the Screen by Foster Hirsch

Vicious Vince Stone, a vicious deranged hoodlum who gets off on torturing women, using one of them as an ashtray, burning a cigarette into a barfly Doris' (Carolyn Jones) hand "” a disquieting show of cruelty. Gloria Grahame is sexy, incendiary, and delightful as Stone's girl, Debbie Marsh. Debbie is a smart-mouthed girl drifting amid the macho posturing of the gang. She becomes an ally of Bannion's after she realizes her life palling around with criminals is aimless and dangerous. Bannion gives her a gun for protection, "the big heat falls for Lagana, for Stone, and all the rest of the lice." The big heat purifies Debbie and Bannion in the climax.

As Debbie, Gloria Grahame possesses a sharp wit, moral ambiguity (half of her face is covered with bandages, two distinct profiles she presents), and enigmatic sensuality. "I'll have to go through life sideways"¦" "I've been rich and I've been poor. Believe me, rich is better." Looking around Ford's hotel room, "I like this. Early nothing." Debbie's a positive counterpoint to the materialistic middle-class Mrs. Duncan, who pushed for her husband to lie down with Lagana, and eventually, kill himself.

Debbie becomes Bannion's agent of death, blasting open the whole corrupt system. She shoots Bertha Duncan at the same desk her husband committed suicide. In this pivotal moment, she exposes the depth of evil in the narrative by handing over the suicide letter.

Just before Debbie shoots Bertha, "You know Bertha, we're sisters under the mink." Hailing from the gutter, Debbie's only complicity with Bertha and her corruption is that they share the same symbol of greed and luxury. And they are both marked for a fall and a noir fate.

The Big Heat has some of the most virulently aggressive attitudes and scenes, not least of which is the iconic moment when Lee Marvin splashes a scalding hot pot of coffee in Gloria Grahame's face, scarring her for what's left of her life on screen. After she is savagely injured when in a jealous rage, Debbie retaliates at her ex-boyfriend by scalding his face the same way. In the escalating crescendo of Debbie's dramatic demise, Vince shoots her in the stomach. Debby dies looking for love and approval from Bannion, her gruesome scars are obscured by her beloved mink coat. As she dies, she is redeemed and her morality is restored.

Toward the end, Bannion can't look at Debbie's face until their one intimate moment before she dies. He confesses wanting to kill Bertha Duncan, acknowledging his rage and finally seeing her in himself. The shadow patterns projected onto them by the window suggest a symmetry in their relationship. Bannion maintains his moral superiority and doesn't submit to his murderous temptations.

All of the women in Bannion's life meet with a tragic end. Bannion is unselfconscious of the victims he leaves in the wake of his mission. Most are women, with four dying violent deaths during the film, suggestive of Lang's streak of misogyny.

"Lang's almost musical control of violence deferred both apprehension and catharsis. Quiet, intimate moments were invested with characteristic threat through the intrusion in the frame of a lampshade or even a potted plant, empty rooms seemed to lie in wait for people. The tension was so expertly set up that when the picture finally let go with the violence, the viewer was ready"”indeed rooting"”for it." "” From Crime Movies by Carlos Clarens

This is you EverLovin’ Joey sayin’ stay out of trouble, will ya!

Coming very soon to The Last Drive In 🏳️"ðŸŒˆ

In celebration of Pride, I intended to publish my special feature “Queers and Dykes in the Dark: Classic Noir  & Horror Cinema’s Coded Gay Characters” for Sunday June 28th’s Pride… but it’s a very weighty proposition and taking me more time than expected. I promise to release it within the next few weeks, so bare with me. I’ll be publishing the feature in chapters… See ya soon… and Happy Pride!

— Your EverLovin’ Joey, who got out of that closet a long long time ago. Now I just go in there to sort my shoes and let the cats play for a while!

The Intriguing Everyman: Cult Star Stuart Whitman

There is a rugged sensuality about Stuart Whitman with his thick black hair and that sexy cleft in his strong chin. I’ve been totally gone gaga over the man for as long as I can remember. Although he doesn’t possess the typical pretty leading man who looks like Paul Newman or Marlon Brando, Whitman has an offbeat sex appeal that I’m drawn to more than the obviously handsome guy. Maybe it’s his commanding brows framing his deep, drawn blue eyes. Or perhaps it’s his raspy suede voice one octave down from middle C and that outre cool swagger that gets me. I love the self-assured manner that he exudes in every one of his roles. There are over 180 films and television roles to his credit. It seems like he lived a very full life on his terms, and had a great appreciation for the ladies– lucky them! He was also a long-time friend with many of his working colleagues, and that says a lot to me.

Stuart Whitman was born on Feb. 1, 1928, in San Francisco. He appeared in summer stock plays in New York until the age of 12. After living in New York, his family moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. He graduated from Hollywood High School in 1945, then enlisted in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for three years. While in the service, he was secretly trained in boxing by his uncle and won boxing matches as a light-heavyweight. After an honorable discharge, he attended acting classes at night with the Michael Chekhov Stage Society and studied for four years.

He joined the Ben Bard Drama School in Hollywood, debuting in the school’s production of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which ran for six months. 20th Century Fox scooped Stuart Whitman up while amassing new talent during the late 1950s.

In 1952, Stuart Whitman continued to appear in small roles in George Archainbard’s Barbed Wire and Tay Garnett’s One Minute to Zero. Universal signed him in December 1952, which got him a tiny part in Douglas Sirk’s All I Desire with Barbara Stanwyck and The All-American.

His most memorable and brave portrayal is of Kim Fuller in The Mark.

In The Mark, Stuart Whitman takes on the compelling, challenging role of Jim Fuller, who, after serving three years in prison for the abduction and attempted molestation of a nine-year-old girl, is let out. Jim Fuller, coming to terms with his past, has gone through extensive therapy with psychiatrist McNally (Rod Steiger) and is released as a reformed man, given a good job, and tries to acclimate himself back into normal society. He starts up a relationship with the company secretary Ruth (Maria Schell), who has a 10-year-old daughter. The ugly monster that is his past creeps up behind him and challenges his chance at a new life. While the film’s subject is still one of revulsion, the character of James Fuller is framed sympathetically, partly because he never went through with committing the crime. The film gives a well-explained symptomology through Dr. McNally’s compassionate, trained eye for uncovering the truth, and flashbacks aid us in seeing Fuller’s utter agony with what he contemplated doing. He stops himself from going through with the assault and vomits at the thought of it. He drives the little girl back to town, where he is met with an angry mob. He asks to be locked up because he is sick.

The Mark explores without reservation the conflicted Jim Fuller, who, in the cinema at that time, breaks ground. He finds solace in his relationship with a sympathetic psychiatrist, Rod Steiger. The Mark costars Maria Schell.

While the film is quite black & white with its Freudian brush strokes, the story is still compelling, and Guy Green’s direction works well to light the flame under the kettle slowly. The Mark was released at a time in film when sexual ‘deviation’ was being experimented with at the cinema. Director Basil Dearden’s taut drama Victim (1961), starring Dirk Bogarde about homosexuality and blackmail, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) deals with mental illness, homosexuality, and cannibalism, and Lillian Hellman’s story directed by William Wyler The Children’s Hour (1961) that deals with the stigma of lesbianism.

Originally, Richard Burton was cast in the part of Jim Fuller, and the part of Ruth was to be Jean Simmons. And while Burton is of course one of those incredible actors who is laudable at dancing the waltz with complex and damage, Whitman is profoundly adept at pouring out multitudinous levels of torturous self-loathing and social anxiety in a plot full of minefields the protagonist can step on. The film earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, not only for his incredibly nuanced performance but also for his brave and challenging accomplishment. The Mark features Whitman’s complex portrayal of a sexual deviant and a self-reflexive man struggling to come to terms with his predilections while finding his way back into society again. There’s a good reason he was nominated for Best Actor… he deserved the award.

Excerpts from an Interview From Shock Cinema Magazine by Anthony Petkovich

SC: What was the challenge for you in making THE MARK?

STUART WHITMAN: “I was doing a screen test at 20th with Lee Remick for a movie called The Candy Man which Tony Richardson was going to direct. And I got a telephone call from Kurt Frings my agent at the time. And Kurt tells me, “Don’t go back” “˜but I’m shooting right now I said. “Don’t go to the set.” He said “What do you mean?” “˜Don’t go back Just go home, pack a bag and catch the four o’clock to London this afternoon. You’re gonna shoot a movie in Ireland.” I asked “Well, what’s the name of the picture?” “Not to worry. Don’t ask any questions. Just get on the plane and go.” And I remember racing to the airport to catch the plane and running into the actor Dane Clark, “Where you going Stuart?” He asked me ” I’m off to do a thing called THE MARK” I told him, “but I don’t know anything about it.” THE MARK? He said “My God, I really wanted to play that role, Jesus Christ.” So that was the only indication I received that it was something special”¦ Well Richard Burton was originally supposed to do my role in THE MARK but he was starring in Camelot and couldn’t get out of his commitment to do the play. So Kurt–who handled Burton and Maria School, the female lead in THE MARK and wonderful to work with-he squared me into the thing.”

“So they put me up in a hotel in London, and I had three days there before going on location to Ireland. Now when I arrived at the London hotel, all of these British reporters were asking me “What do you think about doing this movie?” “˜I haven’t read it” I told them ” I don’t know. Let me read it , then I will tell ya” So I got rid of all of the reporters because I really didn’t know what the fuck the movie was all about. And in my hotel room, when I finally read the script, I kind of freaked out. So much so that I was thinking to myself “Well, I could get sick and tell them that I can’t do the movie””I had all kinds of excuses that I was going to lay on “˜em so that I didn’t have to tackle this project. Then I thought, “Well, fuck it. If I”m in the right business or the wrong business I”ll know if I can pull this one off. And if I can I”ll be alright, But yeah it was difficult to do. And that’s when I first met Rod Steiger. Since Rod and I had a lot of scenes together, he said “you want to come over to my house and we’ll just run over the lines and get familiar with it?” “Absolutely” I said to him.”

After the dreaded Night of the Lepus, Whitman survived the blip in his momentum and proclaimed his comeback with multiple entertaining films and television roles, many of which helped him attain cult status. Including Lawrence Harvey’s excursion into cannibalism, Welcome to Arrow Beach, and master of horror Tobe Hooper’s sub-genre of horror films, the hillbilly slasher Eaten Alive starring Neville Brand and Carolyn Jones. My favorite is his performance as the love-sick paramour of Piper Laurie in Curtis Harrington’s Ruby (1977). An underrated nightmarish ghost story and a great vehicle for Piper Laurie. Whitman brings that wonderful 70s sensibility to the film as he aches for his lover to return his affections.

Meg Foster and Stuart Whitman in Lawrence Harvey’s Welcome to Arrow Beach.

Stuart Whitman and Rory Calhoun in Night of the Lepus.

Stuart Whitman also stepped into the role of cult leader of People’s Temple, Jim Jones, with a hyperbolic performance in GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED.

Aside from some of his more obvious diversions into the cult market, Stuart Whitman delivered memorable roles in films like director Monte Hellman’s Shatter 1974 where he plays a cool character, an international hitman who is now himself a target. Whitman can slip into a diverse range of characters from sympathetic child molesters, to homicidal cult leaders/mass murderers, cutthroats and heroes, urbane hitmen, or a variety of sheriffs. From the 60s decade through the 70s, Stuart Whitman’s roles ran the gamut.

Making his film debut in 1951, in the science fiction films uncredited in director Rudolph Maté’s and George Pal’s When Worlds Collide, credited as Kip Whitman, and in director Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Whitman gained popularity as a cult actor, appearing in a variety of films, including The Girl in the Black Stockings (1957), co-starring Mamie Van Doren and Anne Bancroft.

The 1960s were a golden time for Whitman,  when he found himself to be one of the leading stars in Hollywood. Another outstanding example of his versatile acting ability is showcased in the intense crime drama based on New York gangsters — Murder, Inc. 1960 and 1964, psychologically disturbing, psychotronic Shock Treatment 1965. Whitman plays an actor, Dale Nelson, who is hired to locate $1 million in stolen money, so he gets himself committed to the institution run by Lauren Bacall. But finds himself immersed in the depths of insanity inside the asylum. Then there was the internationally assembled cast for the aviation extravaganza comedy Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines and the fantastic adventure film The Sands of the Kalahari.

Stuart Whitman in The Sands of the Kalahari (1965).

Murder, Inc. Year: 1960 USA Stuart Whitman Director: Burt Balaban.

Stuart Rosenberg’s directorial debut Murder, Inc (1960) co-starred Peter Falk in his explosive role as Abe Reles.

SC: Hey, I don’t want to forget about MURDER, INC.

STUART WHITMAN: “I did that while I was still under contract to 20th They said “you’re going off to New York to do this thing called Murder, Inc. So on the plane I’m reading the script, and I’m thinking “wow! What a role here”¦ Abe Reles”¦ And when I got to New York and they picked me up in a limo at the airport, they asked me “how did you like the script? “Oh God, I just loved it” And they said “we got an interesting young guy, a character actor named Peter Falk who’s gonna plays Abe Reles” “Wait” I said, “I thought that was my role” “No, no You’re going to play the kid in it.. with May Britt.. the love affair part of the story.” And I said “Oh shit, I don’t want to do it. SO I called up (Spyros) Skouras (president of 20th Century Fox from 42 to 62) and said “Now Mrs Skouras that’s not the role I wanted to do” No do it” he said.

Anyhow, Peter Falk and I were getting along, getting some good stuff into the picture but when they fired the director Stuart Rosenberg, we had a sit down strike between us actors. But then a full out strike was coming along, and 20th said “The strike is coming up, so we have to finish this picture right away””before it hits.” Well, the very day we finished the picture, the strike hit. But that’s why there are two directors credited on Murder Inc. Burt Balaban was the producer so when Rosenberg got fired he stepped in.”

Stuart Whitman was very physically fit and started doing a lot of macho-type movies around this time, like Westerns Rio Conchos 1964 and The Comancheros 1961. Whitman has top billing in the well-cast western, The Comancheros, and maintains a glorious chemistry with Wayne. He plays a womanizing gambler who kills a nobleman’s son in a duel. He escapes the noose but is hunted down by the honest Captain of the Texas Rangers, Jake Cutter (John Wayne). It’s directed by Michael Curtiz, and both men exchange quick-witted dialogue. Inevitably, the two become friends. Cimarron Strip 1967-68 was Whitman’s short-lived, highly charged 90-minute TV western, which was his show starring the serious Marshal Jim Crown. The episodes featured other great actors like Richard Boone, Warren Oates, and Robert Duvall. I read that Cimarron Strip was one of Whitman’s favorite projects.

Stuart Whitman as Marshal Jim Crown in the television western series Cimarron Strip, 1967-68.

Stuart Whitman in Rio Conchos (1964).

Stuart Whitman and co-star John Wayne in Michael Curtiz’s The Comancheros (1961).

Stuart Whitman was so versatile that he was able to stand astride both television and feature films, from dramatic hits to film noir, horror, and cult exploitation. Some of his most notable films are Ten North Frederick (1958) and director William Wellman’s Darby’s Rangers (1958) co-starring James Garner. Whitman does a superb job as a ballsy American soldier who joins an elite group and is trained in special forces during WWII. Andrew L. Stone’s The Decks Ran Red (1958) co-stars James Mason and Dorothy Dandridge. 
The Longest Day (1962), The Comancheros (1961) co-starring John Wayne, The Sound and The Fury (1959) co-starring Joanne Woodward, the grand British comedy adventure spectacle Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Shock Treatment (1964) co-starring Carol Lynley and Roddy McDowall as a very disturbed gardener, René Clément’s The Day and the Hour (1963) co-starring Simone Signoret. Stuart Whitman plays an American soldier who is shot down behind enemy lines and is aided by the French resistance. Whitman directed one specific scene that Clément agreed to let him shoot. There is an impassioned chemistry between the sublime Signoret (a favorite actress of mine) and Whitman, as the two journey to escape the Nazis in occupied France. Clément is at his finest profiling war-torn Europe, his focus on the stirring content and eloquent faces that populate his films.
 Stuart Whitman in Darby’s Rangers (1958) – directed by William Wellman.
Joanne Woodward and Stuart Whitman in The Sound and the Fury (1959).
Stuart Whitman holding Simone Signoret in a scene from the film ‘The Day And The Hour’, 1963. (Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images)
Le jour et l’heure (The Day and the Hour) Year: 1963 Director: René Clément -Simone Signoret, Stuart Whitman, Billy Kearns.
Le jour et l’heure Year: 1963 Director: René Clément Simone Signoret, Stuart Whitman.
Le jour et l’heure Year: 1963 Director: René Clément  Simone Signoret , Stuart Whitman
Whitman plays the compassionate prison guard who believes in rehabilitation, not the death penalty, in Convicts 4 (1962). His performance adds a real and humanist impact to the tense and confining spaces of the prison. There are also fine appearances by Rod Steiger, Sammy Davis Jr., and Vincent Price. Whitman felt at home in the West; he starred in Rio Conchos (1964), and then the turbulent psycho-drama An American Dream (1966) co-starring Janet Leigh and Eleanor Parker.
 Night of the Lepus (1972) co-starring Janet Leigh and Rory Calhoun. Apparently, Whitman felt that this low-budget horror film marked the decline of his career. Stuart Whitman was forced into taking the role in William F. Claxton’s ridiculous horror flick. In it, Whitman and Janet Leigh play zoologists who accidentally unleash giant bunny rabbits. The film is laughable and was partly responsible for the blemish on his career, though the film has attained cult status. He managed to work with some of the most prominent directors, William Wellman, Frank Borzage, Don Siegel, Richard Fleischer, Michael Curtiz, Douglas Sirk, Jacques Tourneur, and René Clément. After guest starring in dramatic television programs, Lux Video Theatre, Four Star Playhouse, Zane Grey Theater, and Dr. Christian. He gained recognition in the lead role as Marshal Jim Crown in the successful Western television series Cimarron Strip, which ran from 1967-68 on CBS. Other television appearances include Death Valley Days, Highway Patrol 1956-57, Have Gun-Will Travel (1958), Bracken’s World (1970), Rod Serling’s Night Gallery episode Lindemann’s Catch, and Fright Night.
 He was in Circle of Fear (1972) The Streets of San Fransisco (1973), Quincy M.E., Knight Rider, A-Team, S.W.A.T., and Murder, She Wrote. He had a re-occurring role in Knots Landing. In 1988, he was featured in Superboy which lasted until 1992. Whitman played Jonathan Kent Superboy’s adoptive father.
 Stuart Whitman and Chloris Leachman in Jonathan Demme’s Crazy Mama (1975).
Stuart Whitman and Eleanor Parker in An American Dream (1966).
Fred Williamson, Jenny Sherman, and Stuart Whitman in Mean Johnny Barrows (1976).
1971: (L-R) Bradford Dillman, Carol Eve Rossen, Shelley Winters, Stuart Whitman appearing in the ABC tv movie ‘Revenge!’. (Photo by Walt Disney Television via Getty Images)
Stuart Whitman appeared in various TV movies, including City Beneath the Sea (1971) and Revenge! (1971) co-starring Shelley Winters, The Woman Hunter (1972), co-starring Barbara Eden.
Donald Randolph, Tony Curtis, Richard Long, Stuart Whitman, and Palmer Lee in “The All American” 1953 Universal ** B.D.M.

Under contract to Universal, Stuart Whitman was still cast in minimal parts in 1953. The first is with director Budd Boetticher’s The Man from the Alamo. Then he worked with Jacques Tourneur on his crime thriller Appointment in Honduras. Then followed The Veils of Bagdad and Walking My Baby Back Home.

In 1954, he was still getting cast in small roles in Charles Vidor’s Rhapsody, loaned out to MGM. Stuart Whitman appeared in Brigadoon. He performed on stage at the Coast Theater in Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed.

In 1955, Whitman maintained his brief images, like the man on the beach in Curtis Bernhardt’s Interrupted Melody. Also that year, Whitman had a minor role in the serial King of the Carnival. In that same vein, he appeared in Allan Dwan’s war drama Hold Back the Night. Then came Budd Boetticher’s western Seven Men from Now in 1956, co-starring Lee Marvin and Randolph Scott.

Finally, in 1957, Stuart Whitman’s film presence gained visibility in Gerd Oswald’s noir thriller Crime of Passion and Reginald Le Borg’s War Drums. He got his first leading role in John H. Auer’s Johnny Trouble. Where Whitman plays Johnny Chandler, a belligerent young man whom Ethel Barrymore believes is her grandson, films that followed were Hell Bound, co-starring Broderick Crawford and James Mason, and Howard W. Koch’s psycho-sexual shocker The Girl in Black Stockings (1957).

Stuart Whitman as Prentiss in The Girl in the Black Stockings (1957).

Carolyn Jones and Stuart Whitman in Johnny Trouble (1957)

Also in 1957, Whitman had a notable role in the military series, Harbor Command, based on the United States Coast Guard.

He had a recurring role as police officer Sgt. Walters was on the television series Highway Patrol. Whitman and his co-star Broderick Crawford hit it off and became friends.

He was cast in bit parts in film and stage productions. Then he finally had his breakthrough with the drama Johnny Trouble in 1957, co-starring Ethel Barrymore in her last role. Then he co-starred with Gary Cooper in Ten North Frederick (1958). Stuart Whitman co-starred with Dorothy Dandridge in the crime drama The Decks Ran Red in 1958, where the two kissed, showcasing one of the first interracial kisses in Hollywood at the time.

STUART WHITMAN & DOROTHY DANDRIDGE Film ‘THE DECKS RAN RED’ (1958) Directed By ANDREW L. STONE 10 October 1958 CT2447 Allstar/Cinetext/MGM

Dorothy Dandridge and Stuart Whitman in The Decks Ran Red (1958)

excerpts from an Interview From Shock Cinema Magazine by Anthony Petkovich

SC:You also starred with Broderick Crawford (they worked together in Highway Patrol) in The Decks Ran Red 1958.”

STUART WHITMAN: “Dorothy Dandridge, poor baby”¦ She was previously married to one of the two Nicholas brothers {Harold} and their daughter, who was (brain-damaged), eventually had to be placed in a mental institution. And poor Dorothy was going through all of that turmoil while she was making the movie. A goddess, that’s what she was. “You know how Brod got that picture? Listen to this”¦ Andrew and Virginia Stone both produced it with Andrew directing. And I said to them “who are you going to get to play this role (of Henry Scott)?” And they said, “Oh God, we’d love to have Broderick Crawford but he’s a drunk” And I said “Wait a second, if he tells you he’s not going to drink, then he won’t drink” No, they said. And I said “look. Call him up and talk to him. Tell him that I’m in the picture.” So they called Brod up and hired him. And just as I told them Brod didn’t touch a drop until the last day of shooting-then he let go But that’ show he got that job It was actually a good little movie. James Mason was an interesting guy, and we became fast friends. Oh God, he was a sweetheart. But Brod and he just didn’t get along.”

In 1958, Charlton Heston left William Wellman’s film Darby’s Rangers. Its star, James Garner, took over the role, and Stuart Whitman took Garner’s original character. Starting in production that year was Richard Fleischer’s western, These Thousand Hills, and beginning its theatrical run was Ten North Frederick. Whitman remarked, “Many good things came from that”.

In 1958, Hedda Hopper wrote a piece on Whitman which said he could be the “new Clark Gable” :

This is a fresh personality with tremendous impact. He’s tall and lean with shock of unruly black hair and dark hazel eyes which harden to slate grey when he plays a bad man or turns on the heat in a love scene. When he comes into camera range, the audience sits up and says: “Who dat?”

The Decks Ran Red, directed by Andrew L. Stone, followed, and according to Whitman, he got MGM to hire his friend Broderick Crawford with the condition that he remain sober during the shooting.

In 1959, Stuart Whitman replaced Robert Wagner in The Sound and the Fury, co-starring Joanne Woodward and Yul Brynner. Woodward and Whitman would find themselves acting together once again in the taut thriller Signpost to Murder 1964. Also, that year, he appeared in an episode of the popular television show, written/produced by Gene Roddenberry, Have Gun-Will Travel.

Whitman finally started getting leading man roles in director Don Siegel’s Hound Dog Man. Whitman played a rogue his “fourth heel in a row… I had a ball because the character was a real louse, with everything hanging off him, and no inhibitions. I like those kinds of guys, I suppose because I can’t be that way myself.”

In 1960, he starred in the Biblical drama The Story of Ruth, replacing Stephen Boyd as Boaz.

Stuart Whitman in “The Story of Ruth” 1960 (Photo by RDB/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

That year, he co-starred in the darkly violent crime biopic Murder, Inc. Whitman had originally thought that he was to be cast in the Peter Falk role, but wound up playing the romantic lead instead. The film’s production was problematic from the beginning. Director Stuart Rosenberg was fired for taking too long to set up shots. After the actors’ strike, the studio was pressured to finish the film, so they hired Burt Balaban to finish production.

Then came 1961 and the role that earned him the Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Stuart Whitman was frustrated with the kinds of roles he was getting. “I had been knocking around and not getting anything to test my ability” When Richard Burton dropped out of the production of Guy Green’s The Mark, to take the part in the stage production of Camelot, Whitman was contacted by his agent, the actor not knowing the controversial content of the film, he flew to Ireland to read the script. Though it was a challenge, he felt that he could tackle the role of a child molester, and he was right as he garnered an Oscar nomination for his performance. Whitman acknowledged that it “doubled my rating as an actor,” yet “I had a tough time breaking my image in that movie… it blocked my image as a gutsy outdoorsman.”

Whitman then starred in The Fiercest Heart filmed in South Africa. Then he appeared in Michael Curtiz’s religious biopic Francis of Assisi. Curtiz wanted Whitman to appear in his next film, The Comancheros. John Wayne had to negotiate with the studio to get Whitman released from a prior commitment with the studio. Stuart Whitman plays Paul Regret, who escapes from the law but is eventually captured by Texas Ranger Jake Cutter (John Wayne).

1962, Whitman starred in Millard Kaufman’s crime drama Convicts 4 and was cast in the all-star feature The Longest Day (1962). The events of D-Day were told on a grand scale from both the Allied and German points of view. 

Publicity Still from The Longest Day (1962).

Le jour et l’heure Year: 1963 Director: René Clément Stuart Whitman, Marcel Bozzuffi.
Le jour et l’heure Year: 1963 Director: René ClémentStuart Whitman, Reggie Nalder

From Wiki: In 1963, instead of choosing any of these roles, Whitman played an American pilot in the French film René Clément’s The Day and the Hour, shot in Paris and set during World War II. As described by Whitman, he got the part through Alain Delon, who he bumped into in an elevator at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Delon invited him to meet the director, and eventually worked out a way to loan him out from his studio contract. During the production of the film, Whitman disagreed with René Clémenton the direction of a torture scene. Whitman swore to René Clément that he could handle it. After coincidentally sitting in a plane next to Sidney Buchman who co-wrote The Mark, they re-wrote the scene. Whitman directed the torture scene and hasn’t directed since. Whitman described René Clément, as one of the finest French directors. He enjoyed the experience, saying, “I busted through at last and can now get an honest emotion, project it and make it real. You become egocentric when you involve yourself to such an extent in your role; your next problem is in learning how to turn it off and come home and live with society. It took a lot of time and energy to break through, so I could honestly feel and I’m reluctant to turn it off. Now I know why so many actors go to psychiatrists.”

In 1963, Stuart Whitman appeared in an episode called “Killing at Sundial” of the first season of Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre. Whitman plays a Native American seeking to avenge his father, who was hanged years ago.

1964, Whitman was cast in the expository psychological shiver as the unfortunate Dale Nelson who gets cast into the snake pit of Shock Treatment (1964). Then came the western directed by Gordon Douglas- Rio Conchos, co-starring two other leading men, Richard Boone and Tony Franciosa. Whitman said that he didn’t like the script, but producer Darryl F. Zanuck dangled the carrot of the lead role in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines in 1965. After Stuart Whitman met with Richard Boone and director Douglas, he agreed to take the part. Director Annakin had wanted Dick Van Dyke for the lead role in this aviation extravaganza. Still, he had to accept the studio’s choice and wound up being pleased with Whitman’s wonderful performance.

In 1965, he appeared in the director George Englund’s film noir Signpost to Murder, co-starring Joanne Woodward. Signpost to Murder is perhaps one of Stuart Whitman’s most compelling performances. He plays Alex Forrester, an escaped patient from an asylum, who takes refuge in Molly Thomas’ (Woodward) house and has secrets of her own. This contemplative thriller with twists is an incredibly underrated psychological thriller and deserves more attention paid to it for its narrative precision. There is an evocative score by master composer Lyn Murray that underlines the moody discord of the plot. Whitman is superb as the desperate man trying to free himself from being labeled insane, culminating in the emotional eruption of violence. “What a terrible way to live out the one life I have. Shut up. Shut off. Forever lost.”

He got the lead in Cy Endfield’s Sands of the Kalahari. Other actors considered for the role were Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, and Marlon Brando. Whitman had a horrendous time during the shoot, due to the extreme heat on location in Africa, and the baboons whom he had to fight with weren’t trained. And finally, the release of director Ken Annakin’s comedy centered around the aviation craze circa 1910 with an ensemble cast. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, with Whitman featured as the American participating in the race from London to Paris.

In 1966, Whitman starred opposite Eleanor Parker in Robert Gist’s An American Dream, aka See You in Hell, Darling, based on the novel by Norman Mailer. The film is a self-indulgent, cynical journey as Whitman is suspected of killing his wife (Parker), who plays a miserable alcoholic. Whitman then appeared once again on the dramatic television series Bob Hope Presents in the episode The Highest Fall of All. He played a suicidal stuntman with a death wish who was willing to do a dangerous fall.

In 1967, Whitman came into American living rooms for the first time as U.S. Marshal Jim Crown, the lead character in the television western Cimarron Strip.

Stuart Whitman and Margit Saad in The Last Escape (1970)

In 1970, Whitman appeared in the episode “Murder off-camera” of Bracken’s World. Also that year, Stuart Whitman starred in The Last Escape and The Invincible Six. He was also in an episode of The FBI. In 1971, Whitman acted in director Alexander Singer’s Captain Apache, co-starring Carroll Baker and Lee Van Cleef.

Whitman plays a psychic who is hired by Carol Rossen to find her missing husband in the Grand Guignol made-for-television thriller Revenge! starring Shelley Winters as a twisted, vengeful mother who is holding Bradford Dillman captive in her cellar. He appeared in another made-for-television sci-fi adventure, The City Beneath the Sea. In 1972, he played a hardened, solitary sea captain who catches a mermaid in “Lindemann’s Catch”, an episode of Rod Serling’s horror/fantasy series Night Gallery. Serling wrote the episode, and Jeff Corey directed it.

City Beneath the Sea (1971) is a made-for-TV movie.

Also in 1972, he appeared in Disney’s Run, Cougar, Run, and an episode of Fantasy Island called “Carnival/The Vaudevillians“. He did another episode of Night Gallery called “Fright Night,” where he must take care of a mysterious trunk in an old family estate. Having a proclivity toward starring in horror he appeared in a television episode of Circle of Fear/Ghost Story called “The Concrete Captain co-starring Gena Rowlands. That same year he appeared in another television movie, The Woman Hunter starring Barbara Eden. Came 1972 Whitman appears as a hitman in “The Set Up” episode of The Streets of San Francisco, and the made for the television film The Man Who Died Twice. He also appeared in Love, American Style, and an episode of Hec Ramsey called “A Hard Road to Vengeance.” Curtis Harrington’s Made for Television horror film The Cat Creature (1973) co-starring Gale Sondergaard.

In 1974, he took to the horror stage again, appearing in the outre, creepy, and violent Welcome to Arrow Beach, co-starring Lawrence Harvey and Joanna Pettet, about a veteran who craves human flesh. Harvey, who directed, had asked Whitman to play the lead role, but he told him he didn’t want to play a cannibal, but he’d play the deputy because he wanted to work with Lawrence Harvey.

In 1975, he had the lead role in Call Him Mr. Shatter and an episode of Cannon called “Man in the Middle”. He co-starred with Fred Williamson in Mean Johnny Barrows. That same year, he starred in Jonathan Demme’s exploitation film Crazy Mama, co-starring Cloris Leachman. Several generations of women go on to be outlaws robbing banks so they can reclaim the farm in Arkansas that was taken away from them by the bank. Whitman plays Jim Bob, who is along for the ride with Melba (Cloris Leachman). In Mean Johnny Barrows (1975), Whitman co-stars as a crime boss with Fred Williamson.

In 1976, he starred in the television series S.W.A.T. episode “The Running Man,” and then he took to the Italian action genre, working with director Alberto De Martino in his Giallo feature, where Whitman plays Capt. Tony Saitta co-stars with John Saxon and Martin Landau in the very slick mystery Strange Shadows in an Empty Room. He appeared alongside Rod Taylor and Elke Sommer in Treasure Seeker. He acted in the television series Harry O with friend David Janssen and appeared in the series Ellery Queen. He played the sheriff in Tobe Hooper’s nasty horror gorge- Eaten Alive.

In 1977, television called Stuart Whitman once again to appear in Quincy, M.E. in the highly charged episode “Hot Ice Cold Hearts.” He appeared in one of my favorite horror films starring the great Piper Laurie. He starred in J. Lee Thompson’s The White Buffalo, co-starring Charles Bronson.

In 1978, Whitman appeared in several television miniseries, The Pirate, written by Harold Robbins, and The Seekers. He also starred in Delta Fox.

Around this time, Whitman collaborated twice with director René Cardona Jr. In 1979, he starred as Jim Jones in the powerfully disturbing Guyana, Cult of the Damned. The second film was Los Traficantes De Panico, also known as Under Siege.

“A lot of big people told me I was the number one man the networks wanted,” said Whitman. “I always wanted to play a cop with a heart, a guy who would use every possible means not to kill a man,” he said. “TV has needed a superhero… and I think Crown can be the guy.”

The Los Angeles Times did a profile on Whitman around this time, calling him “an actor of growing importance in a business that needs stalwarts to follow in the steps of the Clark Gables, Gary Coopers, and John Waynes… Whitman is like a finely trained athletic champion ““ a modest but self-assured chap who seems to know where he is going.”

“I’ve done lots of different parts since I left Hollywood High School and City College”, said Whitman in a 1960 interview, “so the sudden switch didn’t bother me too much. I hope 20th Century Fox will keep the roles varied and interesting.”

“I didn’t need to act to make a living, but I had a real passion for it,” he told writer Nick Thomas. “I just loved to act.”

Whitman described himself to Hedda Hopper as “a real American ““ have a little bit of English, Irish, Scotch and Russian ““ so I get along with everyone.”

“I went to so many schools””26 in all!””that I was always an outsider,” he later recalled. “It wasn’t until high school that I could really read . . . I always sat in the back of the room.”

Whitman’s early love for acting came through when he did three summer stock plays in New York when he was 12, but “nobody took that seriously,” he said.

“I reached a point where I said, ‘What are you going to do with your life? You got to get something going.'” he said. “I decided I wanted to spend most of my time on me. So I decided to develop me and educate me.”

According to John Gregory Dunne’s “The Studio,” Whitman was suggested for the title role in The Boston Strangler by John Bottomly, the Massachusetts assistant attorney general who prosecuted Albert DeSalvo. Instead, the role went to Tony Curtis.

Whitman had turned down a number of offers to star on television series over the years, including Mannix and Judd for the Defense. “I wanted more diversity in acting,” he said. “I felt I would limit myself.”

Whitman admitted, “I’m the type who must work constantly.” In the early 1970s, he worked increasingly in Europe. “I left Hollywood because it was getting to be a mad mess!” he said. “There are only about two really good scripts going around and they always go to the industry’s two top stars. I thought that in Europe, something better might come my way””and it did! I’ve made mistakes in the past, but I kept bouncing back. I always thought that an actor is destined to act, but I now realize that if you do one role well, you get stuck with it!”

After his final appearance in The President’s Man, Stuart Whitman retired from film and television in 2000.

Awards and honors included on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1998), Nominated for  Best Actor Academy Award, The Mark (1961), Winner (cast member) Western Heritage Awards, The Comancheros (1961)

“The Comancheros” John Wayne, Stuart Whitman 1961 20th Century Fox.

“I was filming Francis of Assisi 1961 In Italy with director Michael Curtiz IT was wintertime and a hard shoot And near the end of the film, Michael said “Stuart take a look at this script. It’s called The Comancheros” I read it over and said “˜boy, there’s a role in there that I’d love to be in” And he said I’d love to have you in it. I’m directing it. But the studio has got somebody else cast for that particular part. But we don’t start filming for another month, so when you get back to Hollywood see if you can get on the picture. I’d like to have you. “When I got back, I asked the studio and they said No you can’t do it We’ve got it all sewn up. So I called up Kurt Frings and told him what Curtiz said to me “Well he said “go see the Duke at Paramount He’s on Stage 17 Go talk to him.

Anyhow I worked my way into Paramount went to Stage 17 and when I got there (Wayne) was just going off to his dressing room. So I followed him in” “and Michael Curtiz wants me in your next picture. I really want to do it but the studio is putting up some blockage there. So I hung around there with Wayne for part of the day. And at the end of the day he asked me, “you really want to do the picture huh? Okay You’ve to the job. That’s how I got The Comancheros.”-Stuart Whitman

IMDB Trivia:

Alfred Hitchcock considered him, along with Cliff Robertson, Robert Loggia and Tom Tryon, for the role of Sam Loomis in Psycho (1960), but the role went to John Gavin.
Was a light-heavyweight boxer while serving the United States Army. Ironically, it was his role as a prizefighter in the play “Dr. Christian” that brought him his first leading role in a movie, playing Johnny in Johnny Trouble (1957) opposite Ethel Barrymore.
Was close friends with David Janssen.
In 1960, MGM toyed with the idea of doing an all-male remake of The Women (1939) which would’ve been entitled “Gentlemen’s Club.” Stuart Whitman would have been cast as (Oliver, the bartender who spills the beans about the illicit affair).

Another The Decks Ran Red co-star Whitman commented on was Dorothy Dandridge, who was going through a divorce and had to institutionalize her mentally ill daughter. Whitman was impressed with her strength and described her as a goddess.

Whitman told that when he first met Peter Falk on the set of Murder, Inc., they had differences but eventually became friends. Whitman found The Mark director Guy Green difficult to work with, finding him demanding and too strict, but they became good friends afterwards. On the set of Sands of the Kalahari, Whitman said he became best friends with fellow cast members Stanley Baker and Theodore Bikel, while he didn’t click with Jim Brown at first, they too became friends.

S.W.A.T. – Season Two – “The Running Man” 12/2/75 Stuart Whitman
FILM CLIPS HERE:
Cimarron Strip television show
Johnny Trouble 1957 as Johnny
 
Darby’s Rangers 1958 as Sgt. Hank Bishop
Ten North Frederick, 1958, as Charley Bongiorno
The Decks Ran Red 1958 as Leroy Martin
The Sound and the Fury 1959 as Charlie Busch
Murder, Inc. 1960 as Joey Collins
The Mark 1961 as Jim Fuller
The Comancheros 1961 as Paul Regret
Convicts 4 (1961) as Principal Keeper
The Day and the Hour, 1963, as Capt. Allan Morley
Shock Treatment 1964 as Dale Nelson
Signpost to Murder 1964 as Alex Forrester
An American Dream 1966 as Stephen Richard Rojack
The Invincible Six 1970 as Tex
Captain Apache 1971 as Griffin
Revenge! 1971 TV movie as Mark Hembric
Night Gallery 1972 Capt. Hendrick Lindemann (segment “Lindemann’s Catch”)
The Streets of San Francisco 1973 episode: “The Set-Up”) (1973) as Nick Carl
Shatter 1974 as Shatter
Crazy Mama 1975 as Jim Bob
Mean Johnny Barrows 1976 as Mario Racconi
Strange Shadows in an Empty Room 1976 as Capt. Tony Saitta
Ruby 1977 as Vince Kemper

Filmography

This is your everlovin’ Joey sayin’ goodbye, Stuart Whitman… we’ll always have your eyebrows and that sexy voice of yours to enjoy!

From the Vault: Ace in the Hole (1951) It’s a good story today. Tomorrow, they’ll wrap a fish in it.

Rough, tough Chuck Tatum, who battered his way to the top … trampling everything in his path – men, women, and morals!

Directed by Billy Wilder, and written by Billy Wilder, Lesser Samuels, and Walter Newman. Ace in the Hole stars Kirk Douglas as journalist Chuck Tatum, who Molly Haskell points out gives a “ferociously determined–over the top, sadomasochistic performance.” Jan Sterling is brilliant as she pulls off disdain and a bitter indifference to her dying husband, with “tremendous, nervy gusto” and a quite witty toss-out of funny one-liners. The cast also includes Robert Arthur, Porter Hall, Frank Cady as Al Federber, Richard Benedict as Leo Minosa, Lewis Martin, Ray Teal, and Gene Evans. The film has an eye-piercing grasp of realist cinematography by Charles Lang (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir 1947,  Some Like it Hot 1959, Charade 1963, Wait Until Dark 1967), a stirring score by Hugo Friedhofer, and costume design by Edith Head.

Ace in the Hole can be categorized as a socio-noir film, not unlike the films of Elia Kazan. Writer Molly Haskell puts it this way:

Noir in Broad Daylight By Molly Haskell Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole “almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against a relatively honorable hero. This emotional snake pit, the darkest of Wilder’s dark meditations on American folkways, takes place under the relentless sun of a flat New Mexican desert. The noir is the interior inside a mountain tunnel where a man is trapped and suffocating, and inside the mind of a reporter rotting from accumulated layer of self-induced moral grime.”

Andrew Dickos says in Street With No Name that “Wilder’s film noirs are problematic cases because their visions are steeped in cruel and corrosive humor, distinctive in its own right and in its ability to function apart from the noir universe.”

Film Noir The Directors edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini–“Wilder’s sunlit visual style set outdoors in rural New Mexico daylight shows a brighter noir look while his bleak worldview slams media, reporters, TV, radio, even the American public. Wilder constructed a huge set near ancient ruins with chiaroscuro tunnels where Tatum shines a flashlight for eerie demon lighting. His antihero reporter is a failed writer in an extraordinary cold hearted performance by Kirk Douglas who is caustic and unsympathetic toying with a philandering married blonde femme.”

An unethical crackerjack journalist Charles Tatum –recently fired from his job in New York rolls into town– is literally towed in without a cent in his pocket, and is virtually stranded in the sleepy New Mexican town of Escudero. He boldly walks into the small newspaper office and offers himself up for sixty dollars a week to the editor Jacob Boot (Porter Hall) who wears suspenders and a belt, both. After a year of dull reporting, Boot sends Charles Tatum to cover a rattlesnake hunt. Charles takes photographer Herbie (Robert Arthur) along with him, looking for a real story that he can grab hold of. On their way to cover the rattlesnake hunt, they stumble onto a local tourist attraction right off the main highway. There has been a cave and Leo Menosa is trapped. Leo was sacrilegiously poaching burial possessions from the ancient Indian cave dwelling, and that perhaps sealed his fate. He sells the pots at his family’s general store/diner run by his wife Lorraine (Jan Sterling). Lorraine is a sassy and icy-bleached blond who’s fed up with her life with Leo. Leo finds his legs pinned beneath heavy rocks with dirt and dust snowing all over his unshaven face. The sense of claustrophobia can make your own chest heave with the lack of oxygen each frame draws you inside the buried hole in the cave. 

Tatum hasn’t any morals and delays the rescue to develop a ‘human interest’ story — a real front page shocker!– that will probably get his job back at his cushy desk in New York City. He has his eyes on the Pulitzer Prize and not on the safety of the poor schnook who is buried alive in the cave. Tatum brazenly begins to manipulate the players around him so that he is in control of the story. He first arranges for the rescue operation to be diverted to the engineer going in through the top of the mountain which will prolong his recovery by a week instead of the 12 hours it could take to get poor Leo out. He ingratiates himself with the crooked sheriff angling for re-election and promises big-time publicity. This puts him in a position to keep other journalists from getting access to the story.

Charles Tatum: “I don’t belong in your office. Not with that embroidered sign on the wall; it gets in my way.”

Jacob Q. Boot : “Then it does bother you a little.”

Charles Tatum: “Not enough to stop me. I’m on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that’s alright with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a broken-hearted wife for Leo, then that’s alright too!”

 

Herbie Cook: “The old man sure looked bad. Did you see his face?”

Charles Tatum: “Yeah.”

Herbie Cook: “Like the faces of those folks you see outside a coal mine with maybe 84 men trapped inside.”

Charles Tatum: “One man’s better than 84. Didn’t they teach you that?”

Herbie Cook: “Teach me what?”

Charles Tatum: “Human interest. You pick up the paper, you read about 84 men or 284, or a million men, like in a Chinese famine. You read it, but it doesn’t stay with you. One man’s different, you want to know all about him. That’s human interest.”

Jan Sterling wants to just take her suitcase and leave the poor slob in the literal dust and get out of there. But Tatum, after a hard two slaps to the face raising welts (I swear those slaps were real!) tells her that she is going to play the grieving wife for the public face of the story. She decides to stay around when spectators from all over begin showing up and the money starts flowing in. They renamed the film The Big Carnival, as the entire site becomes a voyeuristic masturbatory orgy of onlookers and parasites who want to see Leo in the midst of his predicament. The unsavory hawkers sell their goods, Carnivals set up a Ferris wheel and rides, and push cotton candy and hot dogs, and balladeers make up hero songs about Leo and swarm like ants all over the tragedy to feed off the situation for their own curiosity. The human interest story in the film is more about the way human nature is geared toward our tendency to be social piranha, than about caring individuals who want to reach out a hand and help.

Tatum and Sheriff Gus Kretzer (Teal) strong-arm the construction contractor (Lewis Martin ) to take a longer route to the waning Leo to drag the story out for the week it will take for Tatum to make the headlines nationally. Drawing out the tragedy, Leo becomes a victim twice. The whole mood of the piece is claustrophobic and unsettling.

Lorraine throws herself at Tatum who treats her like garbage all the while Leo is daydreaming about getting out of the hole and celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary, for which he’s bought her a garish fur wrap.

From the beginning, Tatum has pretended to be Leo’s advocate to get himself out of the hole. Bringing him the newspaper and cigars, offering him a chance to come with him to New York City once he gets out. Even as Leo is slipping away, Tatum keeps trying to suck more life out of the guy just to prolong the story. He’s like a man who has made a deal with the devil and sold his soul for the story. He’s made it so he is the only one authorized to go into the cave and visit with Leo. Leo trusts him and considers him his friend, and doesn’t realize that he is exploiting him as a bargaining tool to get his NYC boss to rehire him back to the newspaper at $1000 a day.

The film is bold, in-your-face, and starkly grim. The frenetic outside “carnival” is offset by the closing in of the hole in the cave that is quickly closing in on Leo.

The film was a hit outside of the United States but did not do well in the U.S. Douglas and Starling were phenomenal in their roles. It was hard to decide who was the worse human being, though, Tatum comes in first as the conundrum of the self-effacing self-aggrandizing provocateur who laughs at the sampler in the office that boasts TELL THE TRUTH, who then causes Leo to lose his life. “Bad news sells best. Cause good news is no news.”

Sterling had some of the best lines in the film.  “I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, But you, You’re twenty minutes!”

When Tatum suggests that she get some rosaries and go with the ladies to pray for Leo she tells him–

“I don’t go to church, kneeling bags my nylons.” – Lorraine

 

In the end, the devil catches up with Charles Tatum…

He says to Editor Boot–“How’d you like to make yourself a thousand dollars a day, Mr. Boot? I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.

The film possesses intense moments while Douglas stares into the abyss, his eyes on fire, his face locked in a monomaniacal grimace as Leo slowly takes his last breath. There is not one atonement in Chuck Tatum’s character to iron out the cynicism of Wilder’s dark vision. There are few players who exhibit a scrap of humanity.

From Film Noir Reader 3 Billy WIlder interview by Robert Porfirio:

RB: Critics still haven’t written a great deal about it, but it was deeply affecting…{…}…being a depiction of how some people exploit others’ tragedies.

BW:   Our man, the reporter, was played by Mr. Kirk Douglas. Now, he was on the skids and he thought that a great story would get him back into the big time, big leagues. He remembered the Floyd Collins story.  Now, I looked up the Floyd Collins story. They composed a song, they were selling hot dogs, there was a circus up there, literally a circus, people came. I was attacked by every paper because of that movie. They loathed it. It was cynical, my ass. I tell you, you read about a plane crash somewhere nearby and you want to check out the scene, you can’t get to it because ten thousand people are already there: They’re picking up little scraps, ghoulish souvenir hunters. After I read those horrifying reviews about Ace in the Hole, I remember I was going down Wilshire Boulevard and there was an automobile accident. Somebody was run over. I stopped my car. I wanted to help that guy who was run over. Then another guy jumps out of his car and photographs the thing. “You’d better call an ambulance” I said. “Call a doctor my ass. I’ve got to get to the L.A. Times I’ve got a picture. I’ve got to move. I just took a picture here. I’ve got to deliver it.” But you say that in a movie, and the critics think you’re exaggerating.”

This is your EverLovin’ Joey saying just give me a shout if you’re ever stuck in a hole and I’ll come running!

Quote of the Day! (1952) if you want to play with matches that’s your business

SCANDAL SHEET (1952)

Directed by Phil Karlson with a screenplay by Ted Sherdeman, Eugene Ling, and James Poe. Based on the novel by Sam Fuller. With a score by the prolific George Dunning and gritty cinematography by Burnett Guffey (All the Kings Men 1949, From Here to Eternity 1953, Birdman of Alcatraz 1962, Bonnie and Clyde 1967).

Broderick Crawford is the new editor Mark Chapman of a New York newspaper who manages to grow the circulation of the ailing paper. But he sacrifices morality when it comes to increasing the range of his audience. He winds up turning the newspaper into a trashy tabloid rag, “pandering to the passions of the base moron.” John Derek plays top reporter Steve McCleary and Harry Morgan is wonderful as a wise-cracking photographer Biddle, both who are chasing down a sensational front page grabber about a lurid murder. At the center is a Lonely Hearts Club dance sponsored by Chapman’s wife (Rosemary DeCamp) whom he deserted years ago. When Charlotte Grant (DeCamp) threatens to cause Chapman trouble in a fit of rage he accidentally kills her. He stages her death to look like she slipped in the bathtub, hitting her head on the faucet. McCleary senses something isn’t right and convinces the cops that it’s a case of murder. In order to avoid getting caught Chapman must plan to kill again to cover his tracks, so he enlists McCleary hoping to divert his attention away from the truth. The film also co-stars Donna Reed as McCleary’s more traditional colleague, Henry O’Neill, and a cast of great character actors.

Biddle: “You know that wasn’t a bad-looking dame. Too bad the guy used an axe on her head. Spoiled some pretty pictures for me.”

Steve McCleary “Very rare items. Pictures of a dame with her mouth shut.”

CLASH BY NIGHT (1952)

Directed by Fritz Lang with a screenplay by Alfred Hayes based on the play by Clifford Odet. The film stars Barbara Stanwyck as Mae Doyle D’Amato, Paul Douglas as Jerry D’Amato Robert Ryan as the volcanic Earl Pfeiffer, Marilyn Monroe as Peggy, and J. Carrol Naish as Uncle Vince.

Clash By Night is a moody piece of noir with Barbara Stanwyck playing the world-weary and cynical Mae Doyle, who returns home to her fishing community after her disillusionment living in the city. “Home is where you come when you run out of places.” Fisherman Paul Douglas is the kindhearted lug who winds up falling for Mae though he knows she’s filled with a fiery discontentment. Once Jerry introduces Mae to his friend Earl, an alienated woman-hater, sexual tension develops. Earl spends his time getting drunk and obsessing about his stripper wife. At first, Mae feels an instant aversion toward the gruff misogynist. Escaping the gravitational pull of the sexual attraction she feels with the dangerous Earl pushes her closer to marrying the clueless Jerry who is confounded by his sudden good fortune. Unfortunately, this does not keep Earl away from Mae as he pursues her, who is by now disenchanted with playing the dutiful housewife and mother. Stanwyck is powerful as the unfaithful but guilt-ridden Mae. The film co-stars Marilyn Monroe as Peggy who idolizes Mae’s independent streak. J. Carrol Naish plays Paul Douglas’ no-good Uncle Vince who mooches off his nephew. More of a dark Soap Opera than noir for its lack of crime, the film’s moodiness and gloomy edginess hold for me a place for Clash By Night in the noir cannon.

Mae Doyle D’Amato: “What do you want, Joe, my life’s history? Here it is in four words: Big ideas, small results.”

Peggy: “Weren’t you ever in love, Mae?”

Mae Doyle: “Once.”

Peggy: “Where?”

Mae Doyle: “Saint Paul. He was big too, like Jerry. I’ll say one thing. He knew how to handle women.”

Peggy: “Is that what you want from a man?”

Mae Doyle: “Confidence! I want a man to give me confidence. Somebody to fight off the blizzards and floods! Somebody to beat off the world when it tries to swallow you up! Me and my ideas.”

DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK (1952)

Directed by British horror maestro Roy Ward Baker he brings a taut psychological spring waiting to be uncoiled. With a screenplay by Daniel Taradash based on the novel by Charlotte Armstrong. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard (The Killing 1956, The Wild Bunch 1969, The Getaway 1972) creates closed-in frames and a sense of paranoia and claustrophobic dread.

Marilyn Monroe is quite revelatory as Nell Forbes a very disturbed young woman who lives in a fantasy world and is a dangerous psychotic staying in a New York City hotel. Elisha Cook Jr. is the hotel elevator operator who is keeping an eye on his mental patient sister and tries to keep her out of trouble. He recommends that she babysit Jim Backus and Lurene Tuttle’s daughter. This turns out to be a very very bad idea!

In the meantime, Richard Widmark is Jed Towers the hard-hearted airline pilot who has just been dumped by his torch singer girlfriend (Anne Bancroft). Towers sees Nell through the window and gets the idea that the two can get together and share a drink. When Nell starts having delusions that Jed is her dead boyfriend, he realizes that something is wrong with this beautiful waif.

Jed Towers: “Are you the girl in 809?”

Nell Forbes: “Why, yes. Who’s this?”

Jed Towers: “I’m the guy in 821. Across the court. Can I ask you a question?”

Nell Forbes: “I don’t know. I suppose so. Are you sure you want me?”

Jed Towers: “Yeah. You’re the one I want, alright. Are you doing anything you couldn’t be doing better with somebody else?”

Nell Forbes: “I guess I’ll have to hang up!”

Jed Towers: “Why? You cant get hurt on the telephone.”

Nell Forbes: “Who are you?”

Jed Towers: “I told you. The man across the way. A lonely soul”

Nell Forbes: “You sound peculiar.”

Jed Towers: “I’m not peculiar. I’m just frustrated. I got a bottle of rye. And as I was saying, what are you doing?”

 

Jed Towers: “You and your wife fight, and argue all the time?”

Joe the Bartender: “Some of the time she sleeps.”

THE NARROW MARGIN (1952)

Directed by Richard Fleischer with a screenplay by Earl Felton from a story by Martin Goldsmith and Jack Leonard. With the polished, compelling, and claustrophobic cinematography by George E. Diskant. (They Live By Night 1948, On Dangerous Ground 1951).

Charles McGraw plays the tough Det. Sgt. Walter Brown is assigned to protect a mobster’s widow Marie Windsor as Mrs. Frankie Neall, who is traveling by train from Chicago to Los Angeles, while the vicious assassins try with fervor to take Frankie Neall’s wife out of commission so she can’t testify. Aboard the train is Jacqueline White as Ann Sinclair who Detective Brown fears will be mistaken for the mobster’s widow.

The sarcastic Windsor and rough-edged McGraw possess their usual grit and there’s a memorable scene where the corpulent actor Paul Maxey is blocking the train’s passageway he comments amiably that “Nobody loves a fat man except his grocer and his tailor.”

Det Sgt Gus Forbes: “What kind of a dish?”

Det Sgt Walter Brown: “Sixty-cent special. Cheap. Flashy. Strictly poison under the gravy.”

Walter Brown: “Sister, I’ve known some pretty hard cases in my time; you make ’em all look like putty. You’re not talking about a sack of gumdrops that’s gonna be smashed – you’re talking about a dame’s life! You may think it’s a funny idea for a woman with a kid to stop a bullet for you, only I’m not laughing!”

Mrs. Neall: “Where do you get off, being so superior? Why shouldn’t I take advantage of her – I want to live! If you had to step on someone to get something you wanted real bad, would you think twice about it?”

Walter Brown: “Shut up!”

Mrs Neall:  “In a pig’s eye you would! You’re no different from me.”

Walter Brown: “Shut up!”

Mrs. Neall: “Not till I tell you something, you cheap badge-pusher! When we started on this safari, you made it plenty clear I was just a job, and no joy in it, remember?”

Walter Brown: “Yeah, and it still goes, double!”

Mrs. Neall: “Okay, keep it that way. I don’t care whether you dreamed up this gag or not; you’re going right along with it, so don’t go soft on me. And once you handed out a line about poor Forbes getting killed, ’cause it was his duty. Well, it’s your duty too! Even if this dame gets murdered.”

Walter Brown: “You make me sick to my stomach.”

Mrs. Neall: “Well, use your own sink. And let me know when the target practice starts! “

This is your EverLovin’ Joey, just sayin’ in a noir world– if you play with matches you’re liable to get burned!

From the Vault: Christmas Holiday (1944) “You can let go now Abigail”

Love…was her crime! Love…was her punishment!

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY is Based on the screenplay by W. Somerset Maugham and the novel by Herman J. Mankiewicz and directed by the underrated Robert Siodmak who directed two of the most powerful film noirs of the 1940s- Phantom Lady 1944, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry 1945, The Spiral Staircase 1946, The Dark Mirror 1946 and The Killers 1946.

Starring Deanna Durbin, Gene Kelly, Dean Harens, Gail Sondergaard who brings that signature  artfully subdued menace (The Letter 1940, The Spider Woman Strikes Back 1946) , Gladys George and Richard Whorf.

It’s Christmas Eve and Army Lt. Charles Mason’s (Dean Harens) flight to San Francisco is forced to land in New Orleans. He is forced to spend a lonely Christmas there after receiving a telegram from his fiancée Mona that she has married another guy. Lt. Mason is heartbroken after being dumped and stranded by the bad weather. He winds up at a nightclub/brothel run by the amiable Valerie De Merode (Gladys George) where he meets sultry singer Deanna Durbin, named Jackie Lamont. Richard Whorf plays reporter Simon Fenimore who first introduces Jackie to Lt. Mason. Simon tells Jackie- “Isn’t that the way things always seem to happen. You’re getting along alight and suddenly boom! you have to make a forced landing.”

Jackie asks Lt. Mason if he’ll take her to midnight Mass, where she begins to break down. Jackie begins to to relate her story told in flashback of how she wound up feeling so despondent. Her real name is Abigail Martin/Mannette from Vermont. She tells him how she fell in love and married Robert Mannette a charming but troubled gambler with an Oedipal complex who is ruled over by his domineering and overly protective mother (Gail Sondergaard).

Jackie/Abigail tells Lt. Mason “He was so gay, so charming, so different.”

The newlyweds spend six months in bliss until Robert’s weakness and violent tendencies lead him to be arrested for the murder of his bookie.

Overnight their life changes. Robert comes home with an unexplained wad of cash and blood on his trousers, which his mother quickly burns in the incinerator out back, telling Abigail it’s her old dress she’s tired of. Lying to protect her son, all the time knowing he’s done something horrible, she even sews the cash inside the seams of the curtains. But Abigail burns the money before the police come with their search warrant.

Abigail calmly- “I burnt the money mother.” Mrs. Mannette-“Abigail I swear to you by all my love for him and for you that Robert did not kill Teddy Jordan.” Abigail-“You know, and I know mother… that he did.” Mrs. Mannette turns on Abigail maniacally –“Are you going to turn against him too. From the day you married him, I think now from the day you met him, you closed your eyes to what it was all about, to what he was all about. Selfishly just so you could be happy. He needed your strength that’s why I let him marry you. And all you gave him back was his own weakness!” 

“I love Robert” Mrs. Mannette- “No you don’t. It’s I who love him and keep on loving him.”

The film has a creeping sinister Siodmak atmosphere with it’s dark spaces and psychological narrative. Sondergaard hovers over the house like a lurking spider knitting a web of preservation for her son.

In a telling scene she gives her blessing to Abigail to marry her son thinking that she will be his strength and keep him out of trouble and make him, “stronger”.

Mrs. Mannette-“Just one last thing. I want to be completely honest with you. There are certain traits in Robert that you may not… they’re nothing really evil. Believe me. He just sometimes forgets his sense of responsibility, that’s all. And that’s why I’m so glad that you’re the kind of person you are. Between us, we will make him strong.”

As the the story unwinds, and Robert winds up in prison doing a life sentence, Mrs. Mannette blames her daughter in law for making Robert weak. Mrs. Mannette, “You killed him!!!”

Abigail feeling guilty about failing her husband, throws herself into self imposed exile by taking up at the bordello filled with self hatred and longing for Robert.

Jackie/Abigail tells Lt. Mason as he walks up and down the hotel room, thinking about Mona in San Fransisco,- “What is there about pacing back and forth like a caged lion that makes a man feel better? I tried it myself once didn’t do me any good.”

Once Jackie/Abigail finishes her story to Lt. Mason, the two part wishing each other luck. But the story does not end there. The beauty of the film is partly the lead actors being cast as doomed lovers both doing a fabulous job at playing against type. The music throughout the film is wonderful, in particular Durbin’s moving rendition of Irving Berlin’s Always, and the simply beautiful song I’ll Remember April performed as background music by the nightclub band.

Here it is December 17th and a perfect time to publish a tribute to this taut little noir gem that was originally performed on “Lux Radio Theater” broadcast a 60 minute radio adaptation of the movie on September 17, 1945 with Loretta Young as Jackie/Abigail, William Holden as Lt. Mason, and David Bruce as Robert Manette.

Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz changed the setting from a Paris brothel to a nightclub in New Orleans and the main character was changed from a prostitute to a more ambiguous nightclub singer and hostess, when adapting the 1939 novel of the same name by W. Somerset Maugham, due to the Hays Code.

This is your everlovin’ Joey saying have a lovely!, flaming!, brilliant!, dramatic! Christmas Holiday!

Enduring Grace: Barbara Rush

I’ve loved Barbara Rush for as long as I can remember. In every role where she graced the screen she left a lasting impression on me. I’ve followed her career from major motion pictures to wonderful dramatic television programs. To me, she is one of the great screen stars of all time "” there is no one quite like her and her subtle emotional layers of acting that get peeled away with each scene. Barbara Rush possesses an inimitable grace and fine beauty. She has a transcendent gracefulness and a speaking voice that pours like honey. And when her words are meant to cut it's not with knives or claws but with a feather quill carefully placed, an intelligent stroking, a gentle lash across the heart to cause the hurt. She has the finesse of diamond cut. She moves with great poise of a dancer, a beautiful gazelle stirring in the gentle quiet spaces of silent woods. A smile that beams like the sunniest of days.

When I think of Barbara Rush I think of a versatile acting style and an ability to draw out deep emotions. She delivers all of her lines with a deft swiftness that is subtle in all directions, ironically, witty, seriously thoughtful and always deeply from the heart.

When I see Barbara Rush I see beauty personified by elegance and an emanating dignity. Barbara Rush will always remain in my eyes, one of the most gentlewoman of the screen. No matter what role she is inhabiting, she brings a certain kind of class that is not learned, it's inherent. The actress also is the most kind and generous with her compliments and her fond rememberances of her fellow actors and colleagues. She worked with some the finest actors in Hollywood, stage, and television, co-starring with the most notable actors such as James Mason, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Richard Burton and Kirk Douglas. Her roles were diverse– from savvy independent society girls, and disillusioned house wives, to an Irish spitfire and an iconic science fiction heroine.

She was born in Denver, Colorado in 1927 and graduated from University of California in 1948. Then she joined the University Players, taking acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse School for Performing Arts in Pasadena, California.

By Susan King Los Angeles Times: “She talks about everybody she's worked with "” even the notoriously difficult Joan Crawford "” with an endearing sweetness that makes you feel like you've known her forever.
And in a way, we have…

She fondly recalls her time on the set with Niven and others. "I was just this foolish young girl," she said of her character. "David Niven, he made me laugh so hard. They couldn't [shoot] me because I was laughing so hard. I kept apologizing. He was a raconteur, always telling stories about what he did. Nunnally Johnson made me laugh all the time. I was really hopeless."

Rush worked with Frank Sinatra in the 1963 comedy Come Blow your Horn and in the 1964 Rat Pack musical "Robin and the Seven Hoods." She admitted she was nervous about working with Sinatra because she learned he didn't rehearse. "I am from the stage," she said. "I really can't do [a scene] unless I rehearse. I didn't know what to do."

Rush talked to an actress (Carolyn Jones) who had just worked with him. "She said, "˜This is what you do, Barbara. You go up to him and say, "˜Mr. Sinatra?' He'll say, "˜Call me Frank. Now what I can do for you?'

So, she asked Sinatra if they could rehearse their first scene just one time. "He said, ‘Baby doll, of course. I'll do that with you. Clear the stage. Get everybody to leave. Barbara and I are going to go over the scene.' We went over the scene just once. From then on, he said, "˜Are you OK? Do you want to go over it again?' He was just wonderful to me. And he gave me my wardrobe by Edith Head [from the film]. I wore the most wonderful clothes."

Paramount signed Barbara her to a contract in 1950. She debuted with The Goldbergs (1950) as Debby Sherman, acting with Gertrude Berg as Molly Goldberg. The Goldbergs became a popular television show that deals with the human interest story of famous Jewish Bronx radio & TV family the Goldbergs, their typical struggles and hilarious moments. The show co-stars David Opatoshu and Eduard Franz.

Barbara Rush met actor Jeffrey Hunter and they fell in love. The ideal pair became one of Hollywood's most beloved couples at 20th Century Fox. Barbara Rush and Jeffrey Hunter were married in December of 1950 until their divorce in 1955.  Tragically Hunter died of a stroke due to a head injury in 1969.

Barbara Rush also turned to work on the stage. She garnered the Sarah Siddons Award for her starring role in Forty Carats. Making her Broadway debut in the one woman showcase, "A Woman of Independent Means" which also subsequently earned her the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award during its tour. Other showcases included “Private Lives”, “Same Time, Next Year”, “The Night of the Iguana” and “Steel Magnolias”.

Barbara starred in director George Templeton’s Quebec (1951) with John Drew Barrymore and The First Legion (1951) directed by Douglas Sirk co-starring along side Charles Boyer.

Barbara Rush in When Worlds Collide (1951)

During her time at Paramount, Barbara Rush appeared in the science fiction catastrophic end of the world thriller directed by Rudolph Maté "”When World's Collide 1951 co-starring Richard Derr, Peter Hansen and John Hoyt. Then came her role as Nora Logan in Flaming Feather (1952).

Sterling Hayden, Barbara Rush and Forrest Tucker Flaming Feather (1952)

Barbara Rush in Jack Arnold’s It Came From Outer Space (1953)

In (1953) she appeared in Prince of Pirates co-starring John Derek. That same year she would take on the role of heroine Ellen Fields in Jack Arnold’s sublime  It Came from Outer Space that would become an emblematic performance of a smart and self sufficient leading lady in a science fiction masterpiece, that would leave a legacy for years to come. Ellen-“I just wish we had found just one of them really. Just one little monster to toss into the principles bedroom!”

In it, she co-stars with Richard Carlson who discovers an alien ship has crash landed in the side of a mountain. From the beginning Ellen supports him and doesn’t cower from the threat of extraterrestrials taking over her small desert town. She’s a strong feminist figure whose alien double wields a nifty ray-gun.

Then she starred as Oona in Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), In 1954 Barbara Rush appeared in director Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession co-starring Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson and Agnes Moorehead. Barbara plays Jane Wyman’s step daughter Joyce. Rock Hudson is a playboy who is seriously injured in a boat crash indirectly causing the death of Jane Wyman’s husband. When he tries to ingratiate himself into her life she becomes blinded. He spends the rest of his life trying to find a deeper understanding of life and the two fall in love.

That same year she appeared in director Rudolph Maté’s The Black Shield of Falworth with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. In 1955 Barbara Rush played Aga Doherty in Douglas Sirk’s Captain Lightfoot starring along side Rock Hudson, and acting with Jack Palance in the epic period piece Kiss of Fire (1955).

Barbara Rush in The Black Shield of Falworth (1955)

Barbara Rush and Jack Palance in Kiss of Fire (1955)

Captain Lightfoot 1955 takes place in 1815 Ireland struggling with the ordinary people of Ireland trying to separate themselves from the British Dragoons and seek their independence. Barbara is fiery and beautiful as Aga Doherty the daughter of an Irish Rebel Captain Thunderbolt played by Jeff Morrow. She falls for Rock Hudson a strong willed highwayman who strives to be like his hero Captain Thunderbolt. There is great chemistry between Hudson and Rush, as Aga adds a fiery spirit to the role, again exuding intelligence and that distinct sensibility to deliver lines in her sparkling cheeky manner.

Jeff Morrow, Rock Hudson and Barbara Rush in Captain Lightfoot 1955

Barbara Rush and James Mason in Bigger Than Life (1956)

In Bigger Than Life, mild-mannered schoolteacher Ed Avery (James Mason) suffers from severe headaches and blackouts. He is diagnosed with a rare inflammatory disease of the arteries. With death looming over him, he agrees to an experimental drug, cortisone. And at first he makes a remarkable recovery, but Ed begins to abuse the drug which causes wild mood swings and delusions of grandeur. Eventually he has a complete psychotic break and endangers the life of his family. Barbara Rush gives an emotionally heart wrenching performance as Ed's beleaguered wife Lou who must support him through the madness.

Between 1954-1956 she appeared in 4 separate episodes of Lux Video Theater’s theatrical playets for television. Then in 1956 starred in World in My Corner with Audie Murphy and Jeff Morrow in this lesser known boxing noir. In 1956 Barbara also starred in the emotionally riveting drama Bigger Than Life with co-star James Mason as a teacher who progressively grows psychotic after trying a new drug.

Barbara portrays the sexy Pamela Vincent in the slick film noir Flight to Hong Kong with Rory Calhoun directed by Joseph M. Newman. Barbara appeared in director Nunnally Johnson’s hilarious romantic romp Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1957) co-starring David Niven, Ginger Rogers and a quirky debut by Tony Randall. Afterwards  Barbara appeared in director Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment (1957) co-starring Joanne Woodward, Sheree North Tony Randall and Jeffrey Hunter.

Bigger Than Life (1956)

Oh, Men! Oh, Women! (1957)

In Flight to Hong Kong 1956 she plays an independent, sophisticated writer from San Fransisco who pursues a fling with the swarthy smuggler Rory Calhoun because he is wild and different than any other man she usually meets. Pamela is smooth as she maneuvers through the plot leading him on. But, she exploits their passionate fling to write another best selling book and goes back to living a high society life, leaving Tony to flounder after hiding out for a year on steamers. Barbara is good at being cool, collected and coy in this film noir. She plays a very unconventional femme fatale.

1957 Barbara appears as the flighty Myra Hagerman in Oh, Men!, Oh! Women. The scene with her emptying her purse is hilarious and showcases Barbara’s comedic timing. Myra is no stranger to dating men which throws the stiffly composed therapist into a tizzy because of her past. She’s set to marry psychiatrist David Niven who shows off his talent for finesse and comedic fortitude and it’s a delight to watch the banter between Barbara and Niven.

You can tell the actors were having fun with their roles, and you can almost see Barbara Rush holding back the laughter in her scenes with David Niven. They had to do many takes, as she tried to keep a straight face with him.

in director Martin Ritt’s No Down Payment 1957 Barbara does a fine job of playing housewife Betty Kreitzer married to Herman (Pat Hingle) with an ensemble cast in a film concerned with 1950s collective aspirations toward the American Dream and upcoming middle class white suburban families with frailties and secrets that's get aired out over nightly BBQs. Barbara's character is the steady rock in the community. She goes to church, isn’t a drinker, and is devoted to her husband Pat Hingle but she does not push him to strive for anything more than being mediocre and mainstream. Barbara Rush as Betty plays this type of middle class American housewife with an expert amount of reserved.

Barbara then appeared with Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and Dean Martin in The Young Lions (1958) about the intersecting lives of 3 soldiers, two Americans and Brando as a sympathetic Nazi soldier during WWII. Then cameHarry Black and the Tiger (1958) with theatrical television roles on Lux Playhouse “The Connoisseur” and Suspicion’s “A Voice in the Night.”

Marlon Brando and Barbara Rush in The Young Lions (1958)

In The Young Philadelphians (1959) Paul Newman plays Anthony Judson Lawrence an up and coming lawyer who is trying to navigate social pressures and balance his ethics while trying to make a place for himself in Philadelphia. Barbara Rush is wonderful as Joan Dickinson, the bright independent society girl who planned to marry Anthony. She wants him to stick to his morals, yet through misdirection by her father and the  misunderstanding that ensues she becomes disappointed in the direction his career goes. The two part ways but fate brings them back together once again. Directed by Vincent Sherman.

Joan Dicknson "At least you have someplace to go.
Anthony Judson Lawrence "Haven't you?"
Joan Dickinson "Are you kidding? I have no talents. Nothing. I was very well educated to be an idiot. And I was a good student."Â 

"I think Paul has made some really great films, he won Academy Awards and all kinds of things and he's done some wonderful work. But you know just as far as an audience watching a film likes to hear a good tale told, I think this is one of his most enduring films. And I think of all the films that I've done the best one that's played the most on AMC and Turner Classic Movies , they play it over and over again and I still get at least 20 letters about The Young Philadelphians. They love the story. And when I go on cruises and we play films and so forth they always want to see the young Philadelphians and it wasn't even in color, that was a black and white film but the love story is enduring and they seem to like it a great deal. Towards the end of the film Paul wanted certain changes with the script and I think Vincent Sherman was amenable to that and Stewart Stern was brought in and so he came in and did certain scenes and I think it just kind of spiced the picture up a little bit. You know who else was in the film that I loved her"¦ so often when I worked in film I worked with people that I admired a great deal so it was such a happiness to work with them to be able to work with them to be around them, was Alexis Smith. She was a wonderful woman. And I loved her scenes with him. And Otto Krueger, I worked with him on Magnificent Obsession, but I thought he was such a good actor. You know they have these wonderful character actors in it." –Barbara Rush

Barbara commands the screen in The Young Philadelphians. She plays a substantive role once again, delivering intelligent dialogue with swift splinters of her humor and intellect running throughout. When Anthony asks her “how bout a hamburger” she briskly replies “I'm a chili girl” to show that though she is entrenched in high society she is her own girl and has a down to earth nature at heart.  Joan is a likable character who is unfortunately mislead by her father (the wonderful character actor John Williams). She is gracious and thoughtful and not a spoiled ingénue. Instead, she exudes integrity. Joan had her heart set to marry for love. Throughout the film it is clear the powerful range of acting by Barbara Rush allows her emotions to build toward the films conclusion. As in each of her varied roles, her pacing temporally rises, finally to express her inner turmoil with beautifully achingly poignant moments.

No one cries quite like Barbara Rush. Though the film is a commentary on class and the focus is predominantly about the male relationships. Barbara's contribution works perfectly to condemn the masculine stubbornness she maintains a dignity throughout the picture never losing her sense of belonging to the narrative.

In 1959 Barbara appeared in Sunday Showcase “What Makes Sammy Run? as Kit Sargent.

Barbara then appeared in The Bramble Bush 1960 directed by Daniel Petrie co-starring  Richard Burton. The film deals with mercy killings and small town morals. Richard Burton plays a young doctor Guy Montford who comes back home to his small New England town in order to see his dying friend (Tom Drake) through his last days. Larry is suffering and begs Dr. Guy Montford to help him end his suffering which he does by overdosing him on morphine. Guy is haunted by the mercy killing and finds solace in the arms of Larry’s wife, Margaret, portrayed with a beautiful sensitivity by Barbara Rush. The chemistry is palpable and especially potent in the love scene when Burton and Rush kiss on the boat.

Margaret tells him “That’s the worst part of it. You know we had a passionate relationship our marriage was founded on it. It wasn’t so bad when we could still make love. Now he’s a stranger. A cold white sheet.”

From 1957-1960 Barbara appeared in Playhouse 90 “Alas, Babylon (1960) and “The Troublemakers” (1957). In 1960 Checkmate (TV Series)"¨ she plays Margaret Russell/Nikki"¨- The Dark Divide, a disturbed young women with split personality. She makes a wonderful transition from repressed mouse to sexy femme fatale, giving a stellar performance of a woman conflicted by repression and self-possession. Barbara Rush then appeared in television’s Sunday Showcase, “What Makes Sammy Run?”

Barbara then plays Eve Coe in Strangers When We Meet 1960. Kirk Douglas portrays Larry Coe a suburban architect who loves his wife Eve. This is a role that Barbara once again summons versatility to switch gears and play the epitome of middle class etiquette and decorum. Larry becomes weighed down by his “perfect” marriage and his mundane work, until he meets the sexually frustrated Maggie (Kim Novak) whose husband is not only keeping her in a lovely marriage but wields a big dose of morality on his desirable wife. The two start a passionate affair which leads to a question of complacency, morality and the dilemma of self fulfillment.

As Kirk Douglas’s wife Barbara plays the “pushy housewife” who is practical and uptight and wants Larry to conform. But Larry falls for Kim Novak. Neighbor Walter Matthau finds out about the affair and feels emboldened to try to have his way with Eve on cold rainy afternoon. Coming close to an assault, Eve’s reaction is intense and brutal and Barbara Rush pulls it off without being overwrought yet believable as a woman who has been violated and frightened all while being processing the incident.

It’s a very intense scene played very well by Barbara. Afterwards she realizes why Felix might have felt empowered to make a pass, Eve telling Larry about the attempted assault- “I’ve been sitting here thinking what gave Felix the peculiar notion that I’d be an easy mark.” Barbara does an excellent job of playing the middle class housewife who fits a certain mold, but eventually catches onto the affair and her raw emotions begin to surface. It shows her range, serious and vulnerable.

She appeared in the 1960 episode of Theatre ’62, “Notorious”, and also in 1962 General Electric Theater’s “A Very Special Girl.” She appeared in four episodes of Saints and Sinners– “New Lead Berlin” 1963, “The Home-Coming Bit” 1963, “Luscious Lois 1962” “Dear George, the Siamese Cat is Missing” 1962. And she appeared in a Ben Casey “From Too Much Love of Living,” directed by Mark Rydell.

The Eleventh Hour episode “Make Me a Place” to me is one of Barbara Rush’s stand out performances. Wendell Corey plays a psychiatrist in the series who helps his patients find their way through the maze of problems. Barbara Rush gives an extraordinary performance as Linda Kinkaid, a fragile woman who has had a breakdown. And is under the impression she might be trying to kill herself again. Barbara plays the role carefully restrained without appearing hysterical relating some of the most powerfully emotional scenes I’ve experienced anywhere. Her performance will rip your heart out, and leave you in tears. She should have won an Emmy for that acting feat. The episode co-stars David Janssen.

1963 Come Blow Your Horn, Tony Bill plays Buddy Baker who leaves his parent’s (Molly Picon and Lee J. Cobb) stifling home and goes to live with his swinging stylish brother Alan (Frank Sinatra) who has a slew of women. Barbara plays the one steady classy lady in Alan’s life, the sophisticated mature Connie who wants a commitment from the playboy and teaches him what love really is. The chemistry between Sinatra and Rush is once again very dynamic.

In 1964 she appeared in The Outer Limits “The Form of Things Unknown” as Leonora Edmund co-starring Vera Miles. A powerfully atmospheric fairy tale written by Joseph Stefano. Barbara Rush and Vera Miles play Leonora Edmond and Kasha Paine who are at the mercy of a ruthless blackmailer Andre (Scott Marlowe). When the two women flee after poisoning him they stumble onto a mysterious house during a rain storm. There they meet the butler Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Colus who tends to the house belonging to the brooding young inventor Tone Hobart (David McCallum) obsessed with his time machine made up of clocks.

Both Barbara Rush and Vera Miles turn in outstanding performances amidst this dark fairy tale landscape. Both women’s very antithetical roles play off each other brilliantly. Stefano’s writing is layered with psychological maelstroms and the cast interpret the story magnificently without reducing it to a simple hour long television fantasy yarn.

“Robin and the 7 Hoods” Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Bakalyan, Frank Sinatra, Hank Henry, Dean Martin, Barbara Rush, Victor Buono 1964 Warner Brothers ** I.V.

Barbara continued to make several significant television drama appearances in 1965, including Kraft Suspense Theatre “In Darkness, Waiting,” Vacation Playhouse, Convoy, The Barbara Rush Show, Checkmate “The Dark Divide”, Dr. Kildare “With Hellfire and Thunder” and “Daily Flights to Olympus” co-starring James Daly, and in 1966 Laredo, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater. 

Then came Robin and the 7 Hoods where she plays Marian, a classy vamp who's outfits are divine. She's cheeky, sophisticated, funny, and also cunning and deliciously mercenary as a mob boss who runs circles around all the hoodlums in the city.

In The Fugitive she plays Barry Morris’ wife Marie Lindsey Gerard in the episode Landscape with Running Figures (1965). It’s a dramatic performance as the wife of the man so driven to catch wrongly accused Doctor Richard Kimble that his obsession drives his wife away and into a dangerous situation. Barbara Rush conveys a woman who is repulsed by her husband’s mad course to bring the fugitive in. While leaving Gerard behind, she is injured in a bus accident and of course Dr Kimble is there. It is up the good doctor to get her the help she needs. Barbara plays the situation with pathos and intensity she is temporarily blinded and doesn’t realize that it is the man her husband has been pursuing who is helping her to safety. It’s one of the best episodes of the series. not least of which is due to Barbara Rush’s compelling, intuitive performance. “I should explain my marriage to you Mr. Carver (Richard Kimble’s alias) What you see before you is the losing end of a triangle. I lost my husband to a Will O The Wisp who drifted in and out twisting our lives. The little man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. He’s never there.”

Barbara Rush And Frederic March in a scene from the film ‘Hombre’, 1967. (Photo by 20th Century-Fox/Getty Images)

in 1968 Barbara starred in Hombre with Paul Newman directed by Martin Ritt. In the Batman (1968-69) television series Barbara played villainess Nora Clavicle and the Ladies’ Crime Club and Nora appeared again in “Louie’s Lethal Lilac Time.”

She starred as Marsha Russell in the popular dramatic television evening series Peyton Place, appearing in over 75 episodes of the show until it’s end.

Barbara also appeared in four distinctive Medical Center episodes. A Life is Waiting (1969) is a very feminist episode that challenges the idea that a women's body is her husbands property. Barbara Rush gives a powerful performance as Nora Caldwell, a woman who recognizes the tenuous hold she's had over her identity and her place in her husband’s world. Barbara delivers thoughtful cutting oft dark comedic lines while giving an emotionally potent portrayal of a women fighting to be heard. In Awakening (1972) Barbara plays Judy whose husband has woken from a coma after three years. Judy has moved on from her marriage and blames him for the death of their 9 year old daughter. She gives a tour-de-force as a woman torn between her own needs, and ties to the past.

BARBARA RUSH ACTRESS 01 May 1980 CTC4589 Allstar/Cinetext/

I would never resort to objectifying the great actress by reducing my commentary to just how beautiful she looks but I am bound to mention this or I'll bust"¦ Aside from her tremendous acting, I love her signature hair styles and her incredible fashion sense that has followed her throughout her career, on and off screen and to this day. And she carries it well.

Other television appearances during the 1960s-70s include Love, American Style 1970, The Mod Squad 1971 the television movie Suddenly Single 1971, Night Gallery 1971 “Cool Air” Cutter 1972 tv movie, Marcus Welby M.D. episodes “Silken Threads and Silver Hooks 1960”, & “Don’t Talk About Darkness 1972” McCloud 1972, The Eyes of Charles Sands 1972 tv movie, Cade’s County 1972, The Man 1972, Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law 1972. Barbara Rush plays Louise Rodanthe in the tv movie Moon of the Wolf 1972, Maude 1972 “Maude’s Reunion” Barbara plays old school pal Bunny Nash. Ironside 1971-72 episodes Ring of Prayer” &”Cold Hard Cash”, Crime Club 1973 tv movie, The Streets of San Francisco 1973 “Shattered Image”, Of Men and Women 1973 tv movie, The New Dick Van Dyke Show 1973-74, Medical Center 1969-1974 episodes “A Life is Waiting”, “Awakening”, “Impact”, & “Choice of Evils”, In Police Story 1974 “Chief” Barbara plays John Forsyth’s smart and stunning wife. She manages swift and clever lines quoting Shakespeare and being a dutiful and intelligent partner.

Fools, Females and Fun 1974 tv movie, The Last Day 1975 tv movie, Cannon 1975 “Lady on the Run”, Mannix 1968 episodes “A Copy of Murder”, & Design for Dying” 1975, Ellery Queen 1975-76 episodes “The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario”, & “The Adventures of Auld Lang Syne” 1975, The Bionic Woman 1976 as Jaime’s mother, ABC Weekend Specials 1977 “Portrait of Grandpa Doc” The Eddie Capra Mysteries “Dying Declaration” Death Car on the Freeway 1979 tv movie, The Love Boat 1979 2 episodes.

Barbara Rush also turned to work on the stage. She garnered the Sarah Siddons Award for her starring role in Forty Carats. Making her Broadway debut in the one woman showcase, "A Woman of Independent Means" which also subsequently earned her the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award during its tour. Other showcases included "Private Lives", "Same Time, Next Year", "The Night of the Iguana" and "Steel Magnolias".

Barbara Rush still possesses that transcendent talent, beauty, poise and grace. She will always be someone special, an actress who is memorable.

Though Barbara Rush skill shows incredible range and depth in her performances, the one great role of a lifetime never seemed to come her way, though what ever she has appeared in is brightened immensely by her presence. To think of what might have been had there been even MORE substantive scripts offered to her, what she could have accomplished like many fine actresses, in addition to her already impressive career, it makes you wonder of the missed opportunities Hollywood made by not taking advantage of Barbara Rush’s marvelous talent.

Television became a wonderful avenue for Barbara Rush's acting, and her performances are no less effective and adept than those in her major motion picture roles. To every performance, she brings an authentic reality to her characters with her bright engaging smile, the wisp of seriousness to her tone, streak of comedic talent within her ironic lilting mannerisms. Barbara Rush is an iconic actress who shows a special quality, spunk and spirit that begs to be cherished. I love you Barbara Rush, and will continue to enjoy the legacy of your work. You make me smile.

Barbara talking about starring in The Old Pros Radio Shows like Inner Sanctum at age 88!

Barbara Rush as adorable and kind as ever answers questions at the Aero Theater 9-29-2010

Barbara Rush still possesses that transcendent talent, beauty, poise and grace. She will always be someone special, an actress who is memorable.

Continue reading “Enduring Grace: Barbara Rush”

What A Character! Blogathon 2019 Thelma Ritter “Always a bridesmaid and never the bride”

It’s here again, my favorite blogathon that honors those unsung actors we love to see inhabit films and most often enhance them immeasurably!

I want to thank Paula’s Cinema Club, Once Upon A Screen… and Outspoken & Freckled for hosting this important event that brings to light those essential personalities that populate memorable films and television programs with their own rare brilliance. This year I am honoring the great Thelma Ritter!

With her warm and weather-worn face, Thelma Ritter is the quintessential expression of a working-class dame, the working-class mother, the everywoman. And no one can deliver a snappy quip quite like Thelma Ritter. Between her mournful tones of better days or raising a stink about this or that, you can almost see the cleaning rag over her simple brown hairdo hanging out the window in Brooklyn just chatting it up with the neighbors. Thelma Ritter, with hands-on hip, spouts barbs, and verbal gems from an endless fountain of everyday wisdom.

And I want to make this clear from the start, Thelma is no plain, dowdy, or shabby spinster, she’s a beautiful woman. So there’ll be no agism or misogynistic observations in this tribute.

"Usually looking like a cross between Mother Courage and a cafeteria lunch lady, [Mankiewicz], who would repeatedly explore the theme of the effects of ambition on his characters, was blessed with Ritter"˜s presence in allegedly subservient roles as truth-tellers disguised as maids in"¦ All About Eve (1950)." "”Moira Finnie Streamline, The Filmstruck Blog

Thelma Ritter's legacy is that of the wise-cracking and world-weary characters who inform us in any role that she is just a regular gal like you or me. We feel empathy for her, and we laugh along with the sharp-witted come backs she so famously utters. Whenever she shows up on the screen she enlivens whatever plot she was sent out to explore with that cynical and bold approach to life offering that dialogue that had razor-sharp teeth.

Ritter was one hell of a character actor/comedian who worked on the radio and then quickly established herself in top-billed supporting roles in post-war Hollywood. She was nominated 6 times without winning a single Oscar between 1950-1962. She tied with Deborah Kerr for the most nominated without winning the award. It is a crime that she never won a statue or a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

As writer Paddy Chayefsky wrote in his New York Times tribute for her death: “She was never properly publicly recognized as an actress. ["¦] She was a character actress, which means only that they don't write any starring parts for middle-aged women."

Frank Capra called her "the best of all character actresses."

Even in her performances of the most plain of women, she exuded sophistication, often classier than the upper-class people that satellite around her. She often played characters who had the answers and the gumption to say it like it is, the truth that circulates through each story, driving sanity, stability, clarity, and compassion into the narrative.

None of her roles could ever be considered ordinary. Her characters always exuded her own brand of humanity. The people she played were immediately relatable to all of us.

Thelma Ritter was born in Brooklyn New York in 1902 on St Valentine's Day on Hart Street in South Brooklyn. Born of a Dutch immigrant father and a Scottish mother. Thelma would have to rely on her wits as the family was not of an advantaged background. Maybe that's why she has a keen witty charm, a lovable persona, and a certain pluckiness and curt wisdom that doesn't allow for quick comebacks by the other actors. Though cast as a supporting actress, her name always appears on the bill or right up in the title close to the stars often being the more memorable in the picture. She brought cracking wise to a whole other level of artistry.

She attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts, the class of 1922, but did not graduate with her class as she had to quit to earn money. She made her Broadway debut in a comedy called The Shelf, costarring with other notable character actors Jessie Ralph, Lee Patrick, and Donald Meek. She appeared in 32 performances before the show closed in 1926. Then she was in Times Square (1931) which didn't have a very long run on Broadway. She took some time off to raise her children and then went back to work initially in radio. Her daughter Monica Moran is an actress, they appeared together in the 1966 road company of Bye Bye Birdie co-starring Tab Hunter.

Thelma Ritter was actually 41 at the time of her wonderful film debut as the uncredited harried Christmas shopping mother in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Ritter left such an impression on director George Seaton and 20th Century Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck that they lengthened her small part in the film and decided to cast her in other pictures. This sparked a career where she wouldn't make a multitude of films, but a film a year from 1947 until her retirement in 1969. The films she did appear in were extremely popular and received well by the critics.

Ritter's uncredited role of Captain's secretary in Call Northside 777 (1948) was left on the cutting room floor. The credits were left in, but she is nowhere to be seen in the film. Though again uncredited she appeared as the sharp-tongued maid Sadie Dugan in director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1949 melodrama A Letter to Three Wives starring Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, and Ann Southern.

In A Letter to Three Wives, Thelma Ritter plays the maid Sadie Dugan who works for an upper middle-class couple George (Kirk Douglas) and Rita Phipps (Ann Sothern). Kirk Douglas plays an English teacher and his wife Rita is a writer for a radio soap opera, played by Ann Sothern. Sadie ingratiates herself into the family feeling right at home telling Rita "The cap's out. Makes me look like a lamb shop with pants on" when Rita asks her to wear a frilly hat while serving dinner to important guests. Ritter has wonderful lines that she expresses with ease. The writing was handpicked for her brand of comedy that cuts through the melodrama of the film. While describing her disdain for Rita's radio program she comments, "Do you know what I like about your program? Even when I'm running the vacuum, I can understand it."

Ritter's first major role as a lady's companion was Birdie Coonan in All About Eve (1950). Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was so taken with Ritter’s style, that she was the first choice to play Birdie, the edgy ex-vaudevillian maid to theater Diva Margot Channing (Bette Davis in her Oscar-nominated role). He claimed he wrote the screenplay with Thelma Ritter in mind. Aside from Addison Dewitt (George Sanders), Birdie is the only one who isn't fooled by Eve (Ann Baxter). Ritter's character has a keen understanding of the realities of life and is honest and gruff with the waif-like manipulative and ambitious Eve. Her role was so impressive that she received her first of six nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

When Eve first recounts her sad background to Margot, Birdies reacts with the infamous line "What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end." The original line used was "˜ass' instead of "˜rear end.' But Joseph Breen's office was clamping down on "morals" and found the original word too vulgar.

All through the film All About Eve, Birdie tries to inform Margot of Eve's duplicitous nature, while everyone else is also taken in by the "˜kid'. Margot asks, "Birdie, you don't like Eve, do you? Birdie answers, "You looking for an answer or an argument?" Margo, "An answer." Birdie, "No." Margo, "Why not?" Birdie, "Now you want an argument."

Thelma Ritter's most significant trademark is her sassy streetwise meddling, to offer her wisdom and advice even when not being asked for it. After All About Eve, she would be cast in strong supporting roles for the rest of her career.

The next year she would once again be nominated for the wonderful picture directed by underrated directed Mitchell Leisen’s The Mating Season (1951) co-starring Gene Tierney, followed by With a Song in My Heart (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953) as Moe Williams (A film she should have won the Oscar for her outstanding performance) then came Pillow Talk in 1959 and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).

John Lund and Thelma Ritter in a scene from the film ‘The Mating Season’, 1951. (Photo by Paramount Pictures/Getty Images)

While most older female character actresses go loveless in their films, Thelma Ritter is one who manages to not always fly solo in the storylines. She often gets to have a love interest. The Mating Season (1951) directed by M. Leisen, is a satirical look on class culture, and a hilarious story of mistaken identity. Thelma as Ellen McNulty runs a small hamburger joint in Jersey and when the bank forecloses she goes to Ohio to be with her son Val (John Lund), who has just married socialite Maggie (Gene Tierney). Maggie is not a snob, but Ritter's son is embarrassed by his humble background. Miriam Hopkins plays Tierney's mother and former ambassador's wife and pretentious elitist, Fran Carleton.

Robert Osborne called The Mating Season a delightful romantic comedy that most people don't know about. The film brought Thelma at age 48 "the closest to inheriting the mantle of the great Marie Dressler than anyone in Hollywood since Dressler's death in 1934."

Ellen secretly works to make enough money to buy an $18 hat to wear when she meets her daughter-in-law. The way Thelma Ritter uses the hat as a prop in the storyline adds an endearing touch to the film. Thelma drops in unexpectedly to meet her new daughter-in-law and is mistaken for a domestic that the new bride has hired to cook and serve at her dinner party. Her son's boss, Mr Kalinger (Larry Keating) falls for Ellen after she rubs liniment on his chest while he is sick. She finds out he's much like her dead husband"” the kind of guy stray dogs take to.

Ellen –"If you’re a chicken, you can fool people about your feathers. But when you start laying eggs all over the place, they know you’re a chicken."

Ellen: “You don’t know what it was like working with her yesterday. I felt like I was 21 again.”
Val: “Oh Malarky”
Ellen: “Look wiseguy, I didn’t feel like I was 21 when I was 21.”

"Despite the fact that she usually played variations of a Shakespearean "wise fool", she often played a person whose keen awareness of her place in our supposedly classless society made her secure enough in it to voice her opinions without fear.” -Moira Finnie

Ritter finally receives above-the-title star billing in George Cukor's delightful romantic comedy starring Jeanne Crain and Scott Brady, The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951) Another highly underrated picture. Director Cukor adds a sensitive touch to this endearing film creating a world with plenty of witty dialogue and quirky characters. The cast is filled with lonely-hearted misfits including Nancy Kulp, Zero Mostel, and Dennie Moore. Ritter plays good-hearted, wryly-witted yet sympathetic matchmaker Mae Swasey who just doesn't want anyone to be alone after her own husband had left her for another woman years before. Mae goes on a mission of mischief to fix up Matt Hornbeck (Brady) with model Kitty Bennett (Jeanne Crain) though Hornbeck initially puts up a good fight saying he has no intention of getting married… that is until he meets Kitty.

Mae to Mr. Wixted (Zero Mostel) about planning a date with Nancy Kulp, "A real live wire, low voltage but steady.”

THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER [US 1951] SCOTT BRADY, JEANNE CRAIN, THELMA RITTER Date: 1951

"Anybody with four pints of blood that can stand on their two feet long enough to say I do is in a position to get married."-Mae

Dan Chancellor (Jay C. Flippen) "Beautiful up here, isn’t it? Those trees. I’ve always liked that poem that said, “Only God can make a tree.”

Mae Swasey, "Yeah, but on the other hand, you gotta figure, who else would take the time?"

As Young as You Feel (1952) Monty Wooley, Allyn Joslyn, and Thelma Ritter

Following the romantic comedies Ritter appears in one of the most extraordinary and evocative noir masterpieces by director Samuel Fuller, Pickup on South Street (1953).

In Pickup on South Street 1953 directed by Samuel Fuller, Ritter plays Moe Williams the best pickpocket stoolie in the business. A police informant who sells neckties on the street corners and wants a fancy funeral and a nice plot out on Long Island. Robert Osborne couldn't have stated it better, "Moe Williams lives in the underworld and ekes out a living by selling secrets and information for a price. It's a far cry from the kind of roles Thelma usually plays. More sinister than lovable."

Moe is streetwise and world-weary. She's broken down by her years getting by on the rough streets of New York City selling ties and secrets to the police. She also cares about what happens to Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) one of the local petty thieves who picks pockets and chills his beer in the river.

Jean Peters is fantastic in the role of Candy, and Thelma Ritter in Pickup on South Street.

As Moe Williams In Pickup on South Street (1953), Ritter inhabits a darker world than we're used to seeing her in. Worn down by life on the street as a tie hustler and informant to the law, her weakness for telling the truth puts her in harm’s way. It's one of the most gloomy and heart-rending roles in any of her films as it takes a hardened dismal look at crime, postwar greed, and the fear of Communist infiltration. Throughout the picture Moe is fatalistic about her future. She is a character we feel empathy for, and I think it's one of Ritter's finest performances.

In a heartbreaking tour de force Ritter gives a performance that should have garnered her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Director Sam Fuller created a role just typed for Ritter's blood, as she poured every ounce of her soul into the character that'll make you hold your breath, then weep.

She appeared in the 1953 version of Titanic with Barbara Stanwyck. She plays affluent Maude Young who once again, is mistaken for a domestic, with some of the best lines in the picture added for comic relief.

Maude Young: [after Richard (Clifton Webb) has rejected his son Norman and refused to play in the shuffleboard match with him] "It certainly clouded up. Well, word’ll do it faster than a hickory stick any time."

Maude Young: “Where I come from this is either a revival meeting or a crap game.”

Maude Young: “I’ve seen that look before. He’s a runaway. Earl Meeker: From what, some woman?Maude: No, he’s running too fast for that.”

Ritter made several significant appearances on the small screen between 1953 and 1962. In 1955 she played Mrs. Fisher in The Show-off, and Agnes Hurley in Paddy Chayefsky's The Catered Affair (Bette Davis played Agnes Hurley in the film version a year later). Playwright Paddy Chayefsky was so taken with Thelma Ritter that he wrote about the 1955 television play, "The Catered Affair was an unfocused piece in which the first act was farce and the second was character comedy, and the third was abruptly drama. There aren't a dozen actresses who could make one piece out of all that; Miss Ritter, of course, did."

The Farmer Takes a Wife 1954 as Lucy Cashdollar plays Betty Grable's friend on the Eerie Canal Lucy Cashdollar- "Don’t forget, I’m a five-time widow, and when they died they all left me everything they owned. Rest their souls." Fortune Friendly "What do you want with me I'm broke?" Lucy Cashdollar-"Well, I figure after five rich husbands, the next one would be on the house."

Also in 1955, Thelma Ritter played Abby in 20th Century-Fox Hour's television adaptation of Sidney Howard's play, Christopher Bean. Thelma is often compared to the great Marie Dressler, who played the same role in the 1933 film Christopher Bean. Thelma Ritter takes on the ironic and poignant role of a woman whose worth is seen through the eyes of an alcoholic artist who paints a portrait of her.

Ritter finished her 6-year contract with Twentieth Century Fox in 1955, playing Alicia Pritchard in director Jean Negulesco's Daddy Long Legs. Ritter did return in The Second Time Around in 1961.

When explaining why her contract had not been renewed, Ritter joked that “I don't look so good in a toga." Referring to Fox's preference at the time for epics filmed in CinemaScope centered around all things ancient.

Rear Window 1954 Thelma plays the feisty wisecracking nurse, Stella. The scenes with Thelma and Jimmy Stewart were marvelous. Her character's voice delivered both reason and common sense and in their scenes, we learn about Jimmy Stewart's character. Thelma brought her comic flair to the role of Stella. As Pat Hitchcock explained "The humor that Thelma Ritter brought to Rear Window was absolutely wonderful. And my father, he loved that because he knew that you couldn't keep going and keep going. You had to give the audience a break. You had to have them laugh at something. His whole life was about the importance of having a sense of humor with whatever you do."

Deborah Kerr rides in a jeep with Thelma Ritter in a scene from the film ‘The Proud And Profane’, 1956. (Photo by Paramount/Getty Images)

After twenty-six years away, Thelma returned to Broadway in 1957 to play Marthy in the hit musical New Girl in Town, based on Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie. For her part, she won a Tony Award (in a tie with Gwen Verdon who won for Anna). This was the first time in history that two actresses won from the same show.

Cameron Pru'Homme, Thelma Ritter, and Gwen Verdon –On the set of New Girl In Town.

American actors Thelma Ritter (1905 – 1969) and Cameron Prud’homme (1892 – 1967) in a performance of the Bob Merrill play, ‘New Girl in Town’ at the 46th Street Theatre, New York, New York, mid-1957. (Photo by Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)

At the Tony Awards with Robert Preston Thelma Ritter Helen Hayes Ralph Bellamy.

She went on to appear in the hit romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959). She played the supportive lead with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, exchanging her usual barbs this time with Doris Day about her love life. "If there's anything worse than a woman living alone it’s a woman saying she likes it."

She continued to act in successful roles in the 1960s in films like John Huston's The Misfits in 1961 (playing Isabelle Steers, co-starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach). Then, in How the West Was Won in 1962, and then she was once again paired with Doris Day and James Garner in Move Over, Darling in 1963.

Ritter also appeared on television shows like General Electric Theater in 1960 and the popular Westerner Wagon Train in 1962. She appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Presents in a very chilling, nail-biting episode called The Baby Sitter.

In director John Frankenheimer's Birdman of Alcatraz (1963) Thelma Ritter delivers quite a drastic departure from any of her other roles. She portrays the numb and obsessive mother, loyal to her son Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster) in one of his most lucid performances. The movie creates a claustrophobic relationship between mother and son, as she is stricken with a myopic vision of championing for him while he is locked away in prison. Axel Nissen calls it "one of the most emotionally ugly characters in her filmography she is cold and uses stillness brilliantly."

Ritter received her last Oscar nomination for her performance as Burt Lancaster's controlling mother. She lost to Patty Duke for The Miracle Worker.

In 1963 she was in A New Kind of Love (1963) starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Ritter plays Leena, who wears a perfume called "My Sin" and is a buyer at Bergner's Department Store. Leena is attracted to her boss, George Tobias.

She also appeared in the disastrous Broadway production of UTBU 1966 with Margaret Hamilton and Tony Randall.

Coming full circle, Ritter made her last big screen appearance in a small role in George Seaton's What's So Bad About Feeling Good? 1968 In Feb 1968 she co-starred with Tab Hunter and her own actress daughter Monica in a stock production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park at the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey, before retiring. She did not live long enough to enjoy her retirement.

Thelma died of a heart attack in New York City just nine days before her 67th birthday. Thelma Ritter was very beloved amongst her colleagues and co-stars, and also critics adored her.

"On screen, Ritter projected a wonderfully sanguine and calm acceptance of human frailty and need. It is this quality, combined with her rueful humor and notorious wisecracks, that give depth to her finest performances"¦{"¦} Though she played a few middle-or upper-class women towards the end of her career, Ritter was obviously best suited to playing women on the lower echelons of the social ladder"¦{"¦} She represents the legion of women who keep the wheels of the world turning"– Alex Nissen

CLIPS

Miracle on 34th Street (1949) Peter's mother

A Letter to Three Wives (1949) Sadie Dugan the maid uncredited

City Across the River (1950) Mrs. Katie Cusack

Perfect Strangers (1950) Lena Fassier

All About Eve 1951

I'll Get By 1951 Miss Murphy

The Mating Season 1951

The Model and the Marriage Broker 1951 as Mae Swayse

As Young as You feel 1952 as Della Hodges

Titanic 1953

Pickup on South Street 1954

The Farmer Takes a Wife 1954 as Lucy Cashdollar

Rear Window 1955 as Stella

Daddy Long Legs 1955

Alfred Hitchcock Presents 1956 The Baby Sitter Lottie Slocum

The Proud and Profane 1956 as Kate Connors

A Hole in the Head 1959 as Sophie Manetta

Pillow Talk 1959 as Alma

The Misfits 1961

Birdman of Alcatraz 1962 as Elizabeth Stroud

Move Over, Darling 1963

The Incident 1967 as Bertha Beckerman

FILMOGRAPHY & AWARDS

Thelma Ritter won a Tony Award on Broadway in 1957 for the hit musical New Girl in Town, for which she won a Tony in a tie with Gwen Verdon in 1958. She won an Emmy (in 1956), Nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for the Goodyear Television Playhouse production of The Catered Affair. A Golden Globe Awards Nominated for Best Supporting Actress for All About Eve (1950) The Mating Season (1951)) With A Song in My Heart (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953), Pillow Talk (1959), and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and nominated for a Golden Globe for All About Eve, The Mating Season and Boeing Boeing (1965)

  • Miracle on 34th Street (1949) Peter's mother
  • A Letter to Three Wives (1949) Sadie Dugan the maid uncredited
  • Call Northside 777 (1949) captains secretary uncredited her scene was left on the cutting room floor
  • City Across the River (1950) Mrs. Katie Cusack
  • Perfect Strangers (1950) Lena Fassier
  • Too Dangerous to Love 1951
  • All About Eve 1951 as Birdie Coonan "”companion to theater Diva Margot Channing the only character aside from George Sanders' Addison Dewitt who isn't fooled by conniving Eve.
  • I'll Get By 1951 as Miss Murphy
  • The Mating Season 1951 as Ellen McNulty
  • The Model and the Marriage Broker 1951 as Mae Swayze
  • As Young as You feel 1952 as Della Hodges
  • Radio Broadcasts 1953 Theater Guild on the Air "A Square Peg"
  • With a Song in my Heart 1953 as Clancy
  • radio shows such as Radio Broadcasts Theater Guild on the Air "A Square Peg" (1953).
  • Titanic 1953 as Maude Young playing a version of the Unsinkable Molly Brown done up to the nines again mistaken for a housekeeper or maid.
  • Pickup on South Street 1954 directed by Samuel Fuller as Moe Williams the best pick pocket stoolie in the business
  • The Farmer Takes a Wife 1954 as Lucy Cashdollar plays Betty Grable's friend on the Eerie Canal
  • Rear Window 1955 as nurse Stella
  • Lux Video Theatre 1954 Christmas in July theatre guest
  • The Best of Broadway The Show Off 1955 Mrs. Fisher
  • Daddy Long Legs 1955 as Alicia Pritchard
  • Goodyear Playhouse 1955 The Catered Affair as Mother created the role that Bette Davis adapted to the screen.
  • Repertory Theatre 1955 The Ghost Writer as Muriel
  • Lucy Gallant 1955 as Molly Basserman
  • The 20th Century Fox Hour 1955 “Christopher Bean” as Abby
  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents 1956 The Baby Sitter Lottie Slocum
  • The Proud and Profane 1956 as Kate Connors
  • New Girl in Town (1957) on Broadway
  • The United States Steel Hour 1957 The Human Pattern as Ma Garfield
  • Telephone Time 1957 plot to save a boy as Mary Devlin
  • A Hole in the Head 1959 as Sophie Manetta
  • Pillow Talk 1959 as Alma plays her housekeeper who likes to drink she's hilarious
  • General Electric Theater 1960 Sarah's Laughter as Doris Green
  • Startime 1960 The Man as Mrs. Gillis
  • The Misfits 1961 as Isabelle Steers
  • The Second Time Around 1961 as Aggie Gate
  • Birdman of Alcatraz 1962 as Elizabeth Stroud plays Burt Lancaster's mother
  • Wagon Train 1962 The Madame Sagittarius Story as Madame Delphine Sagittarius
  • How the West Was Won 1962 Agatha Clegg a middle-aged woman looking for a husband on the wagon train heading west across America
  • For Love or Money 1963 as Chloe Brasher
  • A New Kind of Love 1963 as Lena O'Connor
  • Move Over, Darling 1963 as Grace Arden plays James Garner's mother, a wealthy upper-class woman who is an atypical character for her
  • Boeing, Boeing 1965 as Bertha
  • The Incident 1967 as Bertha Beckerman
  • What's so Bad about Feeling Good? 1968 Mrs. Schwartz

This is your EverLovin’ Joey saying you may have thought you were often only a bridesmaid but to so many of us, you’ll forever be the Queen of character actors and unrelenting quips! We love you Thelma Ritter…