November 23, 1928—With the silent films that made her a star under assault by the talkies, Lillian Gish appeared in The Wind, her last film in the old medium—and one that taxed her physical and emotional resources as perhaps no other actress has been, before or since.
I've racked my brain for other actresses who were pushed so close to their physical limits, and the only two that I can come up with are:
a) Tippi Hedren, forced to endure an assault by countless real birds, rather than mechanical ones, in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (“One of the birds tied on my shoulder only just missed scraping its claw into my eye,” she said in an interview for The Times of London earlier this year)
b) Kate Winslet, who supposedly was dubbed "Kate Whines a Lot" after being continually drenched with ice-cold water, catching colds, and running up fevers while being filmed in Titanic—then had the man who came up with the nickname, director James Cameron, begin calling her "Kate Weighs a Lot" when she put on a few pounds (not exactly gallant behavior on the part of the Oscar-winning, self-styled “King of the World,” if you ask me!).
Now, Gish would have been seriously pushed to the edge merely by virtue of her Wind role as Letty Mason, whose pampered Virginia background leaves her unprepared for both the consequences of her actions as well as the harsh Western landscape (embodied by that omnipresent titular wind) that restricts her at every turn.
True, Gish’s most famous collaborator, D.W. Griffith, had continually cast her as a virgin threatened with rape and all kinds of other mayhem. But after she ended her association with him, she had been cast in psychologically more complicated roles by Swedish director Victor Seastrom, first in The Scarlet Letter, then in The Wind.
In the course of the latter movie, Gish’s Letty Mason has to:
* move to a godforsaken, next-worst-thing-to-a-shack abode in Texas owned by her cousin;
* lose her shelter even there when her cousin grows jealous of the attention her husband is paying this newcomer;
* wed, on the rebound, a tongue-tied cowboy she doesn’t love;
* fend off a rape when a flirtatious stranger on a train comes to the house when her husband is away—then, when he won’t take no for an answer, she pulls the trigger of a gun in the best “Thelma and Louise” style.
* dispose of the corpse as the wind tosses her to and fro; and
* watch from her window as the wind uncovers the dead man by blowing the thin strip of sand away.
If you’re an actress trying to negotiate a character’s shifting psyche, your best possibility for maintaining mental health is remembering the famous Hitchcock dictum, “It’s only a movie.”
But matters get infinitely more difficult if, like Gish, you’re forced to endure "one of my worst experiences in filmmaking." Here's just some of what this actress, considerably tougher than suggested by her waif-like appearance (she’d volunteered to perform her own stunt for Griffith by floating on an ice floe for the climactic scene in Way Down East), had to endure for The Wind:
* The Mojave Desert location shooting featured heat that reached 120 degrees—temperatures so intense that film emulsion melted, rendering much of her hard work for nought (this problem was ingeniously solved by freezing the footage, which was then defrosted and developed back in Culver City.)
* At one point in this environment, Gish absent-mindedly grabbed the metal handle of her car—and for her pains suffered second-degree pains.
* Sand was blown at her by eight airplane propellers.
* Her hair was burned by the hot sun.
Today, The Wind is regarded as one of the summits of silent cinema. When it premiered, however, its box office was poor—and that was even after preview audiences had been so markedly cool to the downbeat original ending that MGM studio production head Irving Thalberg was forced to ask for a more upbeat finale.
In Lulu in Hollywood, fellow silent-screen actress Louise Brooks suggested that MGM greased the skids for Gish’s departure. In any case, like her contemporary Mary Pickford, Gish had to realize that her previous ingénue roles were unsustainable as she approached middle age.
I've racked my brain for other actresses who were pushed so close to their physical limits, and the only two that I can come up with are:
a) Tippi Hedren, forced to endure an assault by countless real birds, rather than mechanical ones, in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (“One of the birds tied on my shoulder only just missed scraping its claw into my eye,” she said in an interview for The Times of London earlier this year)
b) Kate Winslet, who supposedly was dubbed "Kate Whines a Lot" after being continually drenched with ice-cold water, catching colds, and running up fevers while being filmed in Titanic—then had the man who came up with the nickname, director James Cameron, begin calling her "Kate Weighs a Lot" when she put on a few pounds (not exactly gallant behavior on the part of the Oscar-winning, self-styled “King of the World,” if you ask me!).
Now, Gish would have been seriously pushed to the edge merely by virtue of her Wind role as Letty Mason, whose pampered Virginia background leaves her unprepared for both the consequences of her actions as well as the harsh Western landscape (embodied by that omnipresent titular wind) that restricts her at every turn.
True, Gish’s most famous collaborator, D.W. Griffith, had continually cast her as a virgin threatened with rape and all kinds of other mayhem. But after she ended her association with him, she had been cast in psychologically more complicated roles by Swedish director Victor Seastrom, first in The Scarlet Letter, then in The Wind.
In the course of the latter movie, Gish’s Letty Mason has to:
* move to a godforsaken, next-worst-thing-to-a-shack abode in Texas owned by her cousin;
* lose her shelter even there when her cousin grows jealous of the attention her husband is paying this newcomer;
* wed, on the rebound, a tongue-tied cowboy she doesn’t love;
* fend off a rape when a flirtatious stranger on a train comes to the house when her husband is away—then, when he won’t take no for an answer, she pulls the trigger of a gun in the best “Thelma and Louise” style.
* dispose of the corpse as the wind tosses her to and fro; and
* watch from her window as the wind uncovers the dead man by blowing the thin strip of sand away.
If you’re an actress trying to negotiate a character’s shifting psyche, your best possibility for maintaining mental health is remembering the famous Hitchcock dictum, “It’s only a movie.”
But matters get infinitely more difficult if, like Gish, you’re forced to endure "one of my worst experiences in filmmaking." Here's just some of what this actress, considerably tougher than suggested by her waif-like appearance (she’d volunteered to perform her own stunt for Griffith by floating on an ice floe for the climactic scene in Way Down East), had to endure for The Wind:
* The Mojave Desert location shooting featured heat that reached 120 degrees—temperatures so intense that film emulsion melted, rendering much of her hard work for nought (this problem was ingeniously solved by freezing the footage, which was then defrosted and developed back in Culver City.)
* At one point in this environment, Gish absent-mindedly grabbed the metal handle of her car—and for her pains suffered second-degree pains.
* Sand was blown at her by eight airplane propellers.
* Her hair was burned by the hot sun.
Today, The Wind is regarded as one of the summits of silent cinema. When it premiered, however, its box office was poor—and that was even after preview audiences had been so markedly cool to the downbeat original ending that MGM studio production head Irving Thalberg was forced to ask for a more upbeat finale.
In Lulu in Hollywood, fellow silent-screen actress Louise Brooks suggested that MGM greased the skids for Gish’s departure. In any case, like her contemporary Mary Pickford, Gish had to realize that her previous ingénue roles were unsustainable as she approached middle age.
So Gish went back to the stage for a number of years, and, when she wasn’t caring for her ailing mother (the reason why she was forced to turn down Tennessee Williams when he asked her to originate the role of Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire), returning for the occasional supporting character role in Duel in the Sun or Night of the Hunter.
Gish’s last film, The Whales of August, in which she played Bette Davis’ younger sister (quite a feat, given that she was 15 years Davis’ senior), came out in 1987—nearly three-quarters of a century after her first appearance in front of the camera for a new art form she would do so much to advance.
One of Gish’s biographers, Charles Affron, was dismayed to discover after her death that the actress occasionally bent the truth. Maybe so, but she sought to put the truth of life into everything she did onscreen, and she could be witheringly funny in comparing today’s cinema to the one of her youth: “The love scenes I did years ago were sensitive and romantic, but in today's (filmed) lovemaking, couples are trying to swallow each other's tonsils.”
Gish’s last film, The Whales of August, in which she played Bette Davis’ younger sister (quite a feat, given that she was 15 years Davis’ senior), came out in 1987—nearly three-quarters of a century after her first appearance in front of the camera for a new art form she would do so much to advance.
One of Gish’s biographers, Charles Affron, was dismayed to discover after her death that the actress occasionally bent the truth. Maybe so, but she sought to put the truth of life into everything she did onscreen, and she could be witheringly funny in comparing today’s cinema to the one of her youth: “The love scenes I did years ago were sensitive and romantic, but in today's (filmed) lovemaking, couples are trying to swallow each other's tonsils.”
No comments:
Post a Comment