This Day in Film History (Gloria Grahame, Oscar-Winning Good-Bad Girl, Dies)

Oct. 5, 1981—In New York’s St. Vincent's Hospital, actress Gloria Grahame—far from her Hollywood zenith due to insecurity and scandal, with her body badly weakened by the cancer she had fought for years—died at age 57.

There’s a good chance that this Christmas, as well as so many others over the last half-century, millions of Americans will catch Grahame in her early eye-catching, scene-stealing role as Violet Bick, the blonde flirt who served as a foil to Donna Reed’s wholesome small-town girl as an early rival for Jimmy Stewart’s affections, in It’s a Wonderful Life.

In a way, that role would prefigure several of the film noir characters in which Grahame would shortly specialize: Crossfire, In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat, Human Desire, and Odds Against Tomorrow.

I’m thinking of the nightmare sequence in Frank Capra’s Yuletide classic, where Stewart’s George Bailey gets to see what life would have been like had he never been born. One of the many people whose life is changed for the worse, in the dark honky-tonk town now known as Pottersville, is Violet—not given a chance to start life out of town through a loan from George, but instead hauled away screaming by cops arresting her for prostitution.

Grahame was the ultimate “good-bad girl”—a woman who moved easily across, and beyond, the traditional confines of the goddess, the siren and the victim prototypes of noir. These characters’ vivacity led them to seek excitement, but as objects of the male gaze they drew trouble—whether as the anxious girlfriend of a screenwriter with an unexpected violent streak (In a Lonely Place), the lonely mistress of a racist heist participant (Odds Against Tomorrow), and, perhaps most notably, a gangster’s moll who, for defying him, suffers hideous disfigurement at his hands (The Big Heat).

While her role as the sweet southern belle who serves as the muse of her novelist husband in The Bad and the Beautiful had none of these violent overtones, it was every bit as tragic, and it helped Grahame win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1952 on her second try.

The ceremony should have been Grahame’s moment to celebrate. But she was so anxious that her four-word acceptance speech (“Thank you very much”) led to whispers that she had been drunk, and her dismay at how she looked onscreen resulted in repeated plastic surgery that only subtracted from her appearance.

Far worse would engulf her by mid-decade, when she appeared in the screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma. In this case, her nervousness had a more solid foundation: unlike others in the case, she was not a professional singer. Her apprehension took concrete, and unwelcome, form when she struck co-star Gene Nelson on the set, virtually sealing her reputation as difficult to work with.

But her reputation took its biggest hit with the 1960 announcement of her marriage to her former stepson Anthony Ray. Anthony’s father, director Nicholas Ray and another ex-husband of Grahame’s, Cy Howard sued Grahame, suing her for custody of their respective child with her. The resulting sensational headlines reportedly led Grahame to a nervous breakdown at the most difficult passage that actresses in that time experienced: career decline at age 40.

I was surprised to find, while channel-surfing the David Janssen series The Fugitive, that Grahame had appeared in an episode. But these small-screen appearances became more characteristic of her career in the 1960s than the high-profile movies of the prior decade.

Through most of the Seventies, Grahame toiled onward, in supporting roles in theater, television, and onstage. Even in the last six years of her life, as cancer increasingly ravaged her, she bravely continued working and maintained a relationship with a younger lover, Peter Turner—a period recounted in the biopic Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, starring Annette Bening as the actress.

In a retrospective of Grahame’s best films on the Web site of the British Film Institute, David Parkinson aptly summarized the nature of her appeal: “With her lisping voice and sleepy eyes, Grahame… gave femme fatality a raw but touchingly vulnerable sensuality, ensuring she was always much more than just good at being bad…. At her best…, Grahame lit up the screen with her beguiling, intense presence.”

Movie Quote of the Day (‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ With George in Mr. Potter’s Spiderweb)

Mr. Potter [played by Lionel Barrymore] [to George Bailey]: “I'm offering you a three-year contract at $23,000 a year, starting today. Is it a deal or isn't it?”

George Bailey [played by James Stewart]: “Well, Mr. Potter, I... I... I know I ought to jump at the chance, but I... I just... I wonder if it would be possible for you to give me 24 hours to think it over?”

Potter: “Sure, sure, sure. You go on home and talk about it to your wife.”

George: “I'd like to do that.”

Potter: “In the meantime, I'll draw up the papers.”

George: “All right, sir.”

Potter [offering hand]: “Okay, George?”

George [taking his hand]: “Okay, Mr. Potter.”

[As they shake hands, George feels a physical revulsion. He drops his hand, then peers intently into Potter's face.]

George [vehemently]: “No... no... no... no, now wait a minute, here!  I don't have to talk to anybody!  I know right now, and the answer is no! NO!  Doggone it!” [Getting madder all the time] “You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn't, Mr. Potter! In the... in the whole vast configuration of things, I'd say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider!”—It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), screenplay by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra, based on an original story by Philip Van Doren Stern, directed by Frank Capra

I haven’t watched It’s a Wonderful Life yet this year, but after multiple viewings, I don’t think I need to anymore. Over the last few weeks, this snatch of dialogue sprang to mind.

I think many of us have encountered a “scurvy little spider” at some point in our lives. I can think of at least one at the national level—maybe you can, too.

The message of Frank Capra’s film classic—and of this holiday season—is that such ceaseless schemers don’t win, and that for every Potter, there’s a George Bailey in our community—and maybe even our own family.

Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls—and beyond!

(By the way, for an absorbing look at one of the little-known aspects about the environment in which It’s a Wonderful Life was released, see this article from the Website “History Collection” about how the FBI initially regarded the film as Communist propaganda, even though Capra, a conservative Republican, not only loathed Marxism but even Franklin Roosevelt. It seems that, in J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoid organization, Mr. Potter was seen as an insidious reflection of the capitalist system as a banker—even though George and Peter Bailey also ran financial institutions.)

Quote of the Day (Albert Brooks, With a Different Take on a Beloved Holiday Film)

“Watching It's a Wonderful Life am I the only one who identifies with Potter?”—Comedian/actor Albert Brooks, tweet of December 6, 2014

This Day in Film History (‘Wonderful Life,’ American ‘Christmas Carol,’ Opens)

December 20, 1946—Arguably Frank Capra’s greatest tribute to the common man he celebrated his entire career, It’s a Wonderful Life, opened in New York City. Though the movie was nominated for five Oscars (including for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, for star James Stewart), it won none and languished at the box office. It would take another three decades of multiple showings on television before America recognized it as a classic.

You can examine this film from dozens of different perspectives, and they would all repay the scrutiny. It’s natural for many to focus especially on Stewart, in what might have been his quintessential Everyman role, or Donna Reed, still only in the early stages of her fine career.

But Stewart’s George Bailey needs a foil, a polar opposite who can test him and push him to the extremities of despair from which he needs to be rescued on Christmas Eve. That is supplied, in a masterful performance, by Lionel Barrymore (pictured left, with Stewart).

I have written a prior post about this movie as “An American Christmas Carol.” Its single greatest connection to the Charles Dickens classic was through Barrymore, who had made something of a holiday tradition in the 1930s with his radio broadcasts as Ebenezer Scrooge.

The actor was, in fact, ready to put his stamp on the role in the first American film version of it in 1938. His longtime studio, M-G-M, had cast him in the role when fate intervened. The death of Jean Harlow required reshooting of a few scenes of her last film, Saratoga. When Barrymore came back to that set for what was basically a mop-up operation, he slipped over a sound cable and broke his hip. For the rest of his life, he was confined to a wheelchair. (The role of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol went to the actor Barrymore recommended, Reginald Owen, who made something of a career highlight of it.)

By the time he signed up later that year as Grandpa Vanderkof in Capra’s adaptation of You Can’t Take It With You, Barrymore was in disabling pain. Arthritis in his “hands, elbows, feet and knees…[left him] stiff and knobby as old oak roots,” the director recalled in his memoir, The Name Above the Title. Only hourly shots got him through production.

When he heard about Capra’s first postwar production for his new venture, Liberty Films, Barrymore committed to the project without even reading the script, convincing MGM to loan him out for the project. In substance, if not in name, Mr. Potter was Scrooge, the film role that got away from Barrymore. You can practically see him tear into the part with relish.

More so than his accomplished siblings, John and Ethel, Lionel was not merely comfortable but accomplished with film--every aspect of the medium. He had been acting in short films as early as 1911, and had directed and composed as well as acted for the cinema.

In his most memorable outburst against the miserly small-town banker, Bailey lashes out against Potter as a “frustrated old man.” Barrymore had his own frustrations in life--not merely his terrible physical pain, but the sense of disappointment that he could not make a living out of what he saw as his real vocation: painting.

One of the things he learned about art--use all the colors in one’s palette--was something he employed in It’s a Wonderful Life. Barrymore's wheelchair becomes a prop--all the characters come to Potter, like some blighted sun god--and the most notable point when he moves it--right after discovering that George’s Uncle Billy has absentmindedly left him with the Bailey Savings and Loan’s cash--is the precise point when the plot propels forward in earnest. And then there’s that raspy voice--which the actor used most often beforehand to suggest an irascible but essentially kindly figure, but here to evoke villainy.

The ironic aspect of this, of course, was that, according to Capra, Barrymore was “the humblest, most cooperative actor I’ve ever known.” His performance stands out even amid the great cast of supporting players (Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, H.B. Warner, Gloria Grahame, Ward Bond, Frank Faylen, and Sheldon Leonard) that the director assembled for his Yuletide classic.

“It‘s a Wonderful Life”: Two Perspectives on “The American Christmas Carol”

Upteenth viewings (or, for that matter, readings) need not dim our fascination with a classic: In fact, it might add to it. Case in point: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Critically well-regarded at the time of its release in the 1940s, the movie was still not embraced wholeheartedly by TV audiences until the mid-1970s, when an expired copyright thrust it into the public domain—i.e., it could be broadcast repeatedly without the original copyright holder being paid. That’s how I came to watch it, when, urged on by my brother John, I sat down and became more intoxicated than I ever could with the most potent eggnog as I watched the vintage entertainment then playing on Channel 5 (WNEW) in the New York City area.

I’ve just referred to the Frank Capra classic as “The American Christmas Carol.” The most obvious similarities between Dickens’s novel and Capra’s film are that they concern a spiritual regeneration of a lost soul on Christmas Eve and that they prominently feature a conniving miser.

Lionel Barrymore, in fact, had supplied the voice of Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio for years, but had to pass up the opportunity to play him on the big screen because arthritis and a hip injury increasingly confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Yet, eight years later, as greedy banker Mr. Potter, that same disability provided him with an invaluable prop. As George Bailey notes, Mr. Potter “sits there like a spider” plotting stratagems, and Barrymore’s hands tighten on the wheelchair as much as his eye sockets do. Yet, while seemingly immobile, he can, whenever occasion requires it—such as when Uncle Billy’s misplaced money falls into his hands—move the wheelchair—and the plot—rapidly enough.

If you’re like myself, you felt in September a sudden astonished identification with at least one element in the plot: the scene with the run on the bank. I never thought I’d love to see the day when that all-too-common Depression scenario would ever replay in real life.

For readers who might not have come across these, I thought I’d highlight two newspaper pieces with different perspectives on the film.

The first, from USA Today, concerns the town that might have inspired it: Seneca Falls in upstate New York. American history buffs and feminists are likely to know of this village for another reason: it is often considered the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement, the site of an 1848 meeting in which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a group of close friends produced a “Declaration of Sentiments” patterned after the Declaration of Independence.

It would be ironic indeed if tourism to this town increased more for a film not based on real events than for a real-life event of crucial importance to American history. But I’m sure the town fathers wouldn’t mind any boost it could get, particularly in this crushing recession.

The second article, printed in The New York Times within the last week, is a somewhat curmudgeonly piece by Wendell Jamieson on George Bailey’s “Pitiful, Dreadful” life. I say “curmudgeonly,” though, to be sure, Jamieson performs the same kind of useful function that Lionel Trilling did when observing Robert Frost as a “terrifying poet” with more in common with Sophocles than with Longfellow: that is, reclaiming from accusations of empty sentimentality an artist who plunges to the depths of the human heart.

I really must draw the line, however, at Jamieson’s suggestion that Pottersville is a cooler place—and a more economically viable one to boot—than Bedford Falls…