Bonus Quote of the Day (David Denby, on ‘Consummate Actress’ Deborah Kerr)

“Deborah Kerr…started out by portraying nuns and nice English ladies. It is commonly said that she saved her career by playing openly sexual women. This is true, though one hastens to add that, unlike the era’s bombshells, Kerr, a consummate actress, displayed many different ways of being sexy….Deborah Kerr made maturity exciting. There’s no one remotely like her today.”—David Denby, “Critic’s Notebook: To Eternity,” The New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2007

Deborah Kerr was born 100 years ago today in Helensburgh, Scotland. The “openly sexual” characters that Denby had in mind were undoubtedly the compassionate (and neglected) football coach’s wife in Tea and Sympathy and the bitter (and horribly hurt) officer’s wife in From Here to Eternity.

Kerr’s versatility and range enabled her to elevate even decidedly pedestrian material to something like a touch of class. With stronger scripts, such as From Here to Eternity and the 1961 adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” The Innocents, she played a central part in the making of classics.

Long after her film heyday, I saw her in a 1980s TV remake of Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution. I chuckled at the starchiness she injected into the barrister’s nurse played in the original by Elsa Lanchester. I kept hoping, in vain, to see more of her.

The next time I saw her was far sadder: in 1994, when Hollywood finally got around to awarding her the Oscar she should have won decades before (and even this time, it was a consolation prize—an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award). My heart sank at the sight of the nervous, aging woman onstage far from the vibrant actress of my memory.

Fortunately, we have those films to remind us of her subtlety, elegance—and a deeper, luminous quality present in the accompanying photo, explained, not long before her death in 2007, by her second husband, writer Peter Viertel:

“The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.”

Quote of the Day (David Denby, on Reading as an ‘Opening to a Wider Life’)

“[T]he liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people's lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble.”— David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives (2016)

(Photo of David Denby, from February 2016, taken by Michael Bednarek.)

Quote of the Day (David Denby, on the Language of Silents)

“Silent film is another country. They speak another language there—a language of gestures, stares, flapping mouths, halting or skittering walks, and sometimes movements and expressions of infinite intricacy and beauty.”—David Denby, “A Critic at Large: The Artists,” The New Yorker, February 27, 2012

David Denby’s essay on silent cinema appeared the week before the Oscars this past Sunday night, but the triumph of The Artist makes all the more timely his analysis of film in Hollywood’s formative period. I have my problems with one or two of his points (e.g., John Gilbert did not have a voice unsuited to the talkies, as I discussed in a prior post). Moreover, his piece is neither as pathbreaking as James Agee’s 1949 Life reexamination, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” nor as lovingly detailed as Walter Kerr’s 1975 tribute to Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and their imitators, The Silent Clowns.

But Denby does recover a feeling lost in nearly a century in which filmmakers have employed so many technical tricks that the original revolution has been forgotten.

By the 1930s, Charlie Chaplin, the last holdout against the onslaught of talkies, was viewed as a mossy throwback, a Luddite. Today, The Artist is regarded, even by admirers, very much like a pleasurable stunt, hardly likely to inspire any imitators.

What Denby does, better than anyone I’ve read since God knows when, is revivify the shock of the new bred by this new art form, which “hit the world like a hurricane, destroying elite notions of culture overnight.”

Far from being a conservative, quaint, even reactionary medium, silent film, he notes, was “an art devoted to physical risk and to primitive passions, to rage, lust, ambition, and obsession (silent made emotions more extreme in many ways), and it produced obsession in its huge audience.”

Denby is especially good in distinguishing poor silent actors (the luckless Gilbert again, joined by the even more unlucky Rudolph Valentino, pictured here), from the best of “the hams” (Lon Chaney, John Barrymore), and especially Douglas Fairbanks, possessed of “a sense of the absurd that helped him triumph over the claptrap.”