This Day in Film History (Death of Wallace Beery, Oscar-Winning Lovable Lug)

Apr. 15, 1949— Wallace Beery, whose burly frame and gruff voice propelled him from supporting roles to an Oscar-winning box-office mainstay, died of a heart attack at age 64 at his Beverly Hills home.

The character actor, one of the busiest of the silent and early sound eras, started in the entertainment industry at age 16 with Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant to the elephant trainer, then transitioned to musical variety shows before heading west to Hollywood in 1913.

Over the next 15 years, he appeared onscreen 150 times, chiefly at Keystone, Universal, and Paramount Studios, before the arrival of sound led the industry to a virtually wholesale liquidation of much of their talent.

Beery was looking for work when “Boy Wonder” MGM producer Irving Thalberg sensed potential in the actor. 

It was a shrewd guess: Within a year, the illness and death of Lon Chaney opened up an opening for a plum role as a three-time murderer in jail for life in The Big House, and screenwriter Frances Marion, noticing Beery eating spaghetti at the studio’s cafeteria, reminded her of San Quentin prisoners she’d interviewed during her research for the movie.

Beery was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the role, and he would win it for playing a washed-up prizefighter desperately providing for the son he loves in the 1931 movie The Champ (remade, to far less box office and critical acclaim, in 1979 with Jon Voight).

Throughout the Thirties, MGM did everything it could to milk their suddenly hot property for everything he was worth, in such films as Mexican outlaw Francisco Villa in Viva Villa!, grasping capitalists in Dinner at Eight and Grand Hotel, and Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

The last three roles could be at best edgy and at worst treacherous. But the studio assembly line that emphasized typecasting increasingly frustrated the actor so that, by the end of the decade, his acting “took on the boozy self-consciousness of a department store Santa with a chronically overdeveloped sense of his own charm,” according to Tom Sutpen’s February 2006 post from the blog for Bright Lights Film Journal.

Audiences couldn’t get enough of the actor. With his lined face and beefy build, he looked like one of them, and film fans weren’t as besotted with physical perfection as they would become in later decades. They were disinclined to believe that someone seemingly so earthy and easygoing could be unprofessional and perhaps violent away from the cameras.

It did not become known till years later, then, after MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer and his PR crew were no longer around, that the reality regarding Mayer was quite different.

There seems little doubt, for instance, that Beery couldn’t stand juvenile actors, because they had the unconscious habit of stealing scenes from them. As adults, Dickie Moore, Margaret O’Brien, and Jane Powell all described him as abusive, and O’Brien even accused him of stealing her lunch!

But the youngster who seems to have suffered the most at Beery’s hands was Jackie Cooper. The success of The Champ led the studio to pair the two in three more pictures that must have been absolute agony for the youngster.

The extent to which Beery wreaked havoc on adults is just as egregious as his conduct towards juveniles, if more disputed. One of the more persistent stories that emerged after his death was that he and two friends got into a drunken brawl in 1937 with Ted Healy that resulted in the death of the creator of The Three Stooges.

Details have varied over the circumstances surrounding Healy’s death, and I am inclined to believe that Jon Ponder, in this “West Hollywood History” blog post, disproved the story.

But it says something about both Beery’s dark side and MGM’s fabled ability to fix scandals that so many industry observers were ready to credit the tale.

At the time of Beery’s death, he was involved in a paternity suit, charged by actress Gloria Schumm with reneging on an agreement to give her child his first name. The court dismissed the proceedings after the actor’s death.

The other unseemly tale involving Beery and adults concerned Gloria Swanson, who claimed that, on the night of their wedding (which fell on her 17^th birthday), he returned from the hotel bar to rape her. When the future Sunset Boulevard star became pregnant, she wrote in her autobiography, he gave her a concoction that induced an abortion.

The marriage only lasted two years. It would take six decades, but Swanson would finally have revenge of a sort on her ex in her memoirs. 

She related in its opening pages the story of his mistreatment of her. Combined with the other stories that others have come out with, it makes laughable the Los Angeles Times obituary that observed that he was “soft spoken, unexcitable and entirely lacking in temperament at home.”

This Day in Film History (“Sunset Boulevard” Premieres)

August 10, 1950—Billy Wilder’s mordant melodrama about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, premiered at Radio City Music Hall, on its way to an all-time house record for a non-holiday release there with a box-office take of $166,000.

What audiences at the famous New York film palace didn’t realize, however, as they greeted the movie with rapture, was that the bitter satire had come perilously close to becoming one of the great Tinseltown bombs, courtesy of a preview audience that laughed uproariously—at all the wrong places.

The key scene in this regard was the opening, which can be seen now on recent DVD releases of the movie: “Conversing Cadavers.” In the Los Angeles County Morgue, we hear the voice of a corpse. Soon others are joining in, explaining how they got there, too.

Wilder loved this scene, but in Evanston, Ill.—chosen especially as an ideal Middle American audience that would serve as a lab test for the film’s racier themes—the audience was so busy laughing that they didn’t know what to expect from the rest of the film.

So Wilder and co-screenwriter Charles Brackett (this would be their last collaboration) huddled and came up with the iconic opening we know today: also featuring a corpse in voice-over, but this time alone, face down in a swimming pool. I don’t know if Wilder and Brackett had this in mind or not, but it echoed one of the closing scenes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, where another young man pays dearly for his dreams by being shot in a pool.

Sunset Boulevard is a cinephile’s delight, of course, from its brilliant dialogue (“I am big. It's the pictures that got small”) to the multiple ricocheting ironies of the casting (Erich von Stroheim, playing the chauffeur who used to be Norma Desmond’s director, was star Gloria Swanson’s director in real life, and a scene from the disastrous production that short-circuited both their careers, Queen Kelly, is briefly glimpsed).

For me, however, the film gains much of its power as a study in desperation. Silent-screen star Desmond’s mad desire to get back into the movie industry, of course, drives the plot, but the two men who made the film work were Swanson’s director and male co-star, both of whom were intimately familiar with despair.

As a 20-year-old transplant from Vienna, waiting for writing jobs to turn up, Billy Wilder allegedly supplemented his income as a “taxi dancer”, or paid dancing partner, in Berlin’s Eden Hotel. He went into exile from Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power, and later his mother and grandmother died in the Holocaust. He knew all too well exactly what a human being would do to survive when hungry and/or hunted (Lena Wertmuller’s Holocaust film, Seven Beauties, would have been ideal subject matter for him—if it hadn’t been too personal).

If Wilder’s knowledge of desperation derived from a painful past, William Holden’s came from much more immediate experience. After his star-making turn in 1939’s Golden Boy, his good looks had become something of a liability, as he became continually cast in boy-next-door roles. He had taken to drinking heavily, and Wilder, none too impressed with the actor’s recent work, was not thrilled that Montgomery Clift’s rejection of the role of failed screenwriter-gigolo Joe Gillis had led him to this second choice. (Make that third choice—Fred MacMurray had turned down the role, too.)

Instead, Holden channeled all of his pent-up self-loathing into the role and revived his career, and he would go on to make two other films with Wilder (Sabrina and the actor’s Oscar-winning Stalag 17) that would make him one of the box-office champions of the 1950s.