Legends

Clint and Gloria Grahame miss the list

Peter Keough and I of the Phoenix were two of the lucky 1800 chosen to vote in the American Film Institute's poll of 50 greatest screen legends, the winners being unveiled in a recent NBC special. I have no quarrel with the 25 actors and 25 actresses who topped the poll, though there might have been at least one non-English speaker (Jean Gabin?) among the actors; and Sophia Loren, the only non-English-speaking actress on the list, has made exactly one good film, Two Women (1961), in a lightweight, undistinguished career.

Several of my votes, I guess, didn't stand a chance: Sterling Hayden, whose quirky, paranoid presence in any movie (Johnny Guitar, Dr. Strangelove, The Long Goodbye) guaranteed that it will be weird, off-kilter cinema; Divine, John Waters's 300-pound muse, the subterranean Liz Taylor. And the original ballot of 400 names excluded Elisha Cook Jr., the all-time "fall guy," murdered a dozen terrible ways (The Big Sleep, Shane, etc.), and Vera Miles, who had her Roger Maris run between 1956 and 1962, appearing in four of the greatest films ever made: Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man and Psycho, John Ford's The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Someone else I adore who missed out in the voting: Gloria Grahame, the ultimate hard-luck dame of 1940s and 1950s "noir" melodrama (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Bad and the Beautiful) who fell desperately in love with Bogart's intellectual-with-a-Maileresque-violent-streak in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place and was the cruel victim of psychopath Lee Marvin's raging cup of coffee in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat. She had heart and guts and honesty and a sympathetic intelligence; but men would rather have danced her back to their underlit flats than brought this kittenish babe home to mama.

British critic Ian Cameron: "Perhaps Gloria Grahame was just a little too far out . . . to be a big star. She never lacked talent, but her looks were some way from the norm of conventional prettiness, with wide-open eyes and an upper lip that seemed a couple of sizes larger than the lower one. With this goes a small voice, short on consonants and usually Southern-accented."

There's a marvelous double whammy of prime Grahame at the Brattle this Monday (July 12), two "noir" Fritz Langs. The aforementioned The Big Heat is complemented by an very important revival (and a major 35mm restoration) of the smoldering Human Desire (1954), Lang's sleek Hollywood remake of Jean Renoir's 1938 La bête humaine, with Grahame as "the femme fatale."

In Human Desire (what an illicit title for the Eisenhower '50s!), Grahame is doubly, triply cursed. As a 16-year-old, she was raped by her livery-maid mother's boss. She's married now to a gravel-voiced, humorless hunk of meat (Broderick Crawford) who pimps her for the afternoon to that same boss to get his lost job back, then beats Gloria black-and-blue for her forced adulterous act. Then he makes her a culprit in murder. Our Gloria doesn't stand a chance in this mean, unfair world, though she is teased by a few good hours with an ex-Korean War soldier (Glenn Ford) who's making a go engineering trains.

"We weren't meant to be happy," Gloria tells Glenn, offering the prototypal "noir" take on romance. "Now it's too late. It's always too late."

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Patrick McGilligan, a former Boston Globe arts writer now living in Milwaukee, has written well-received film biographies of Jack Nicholson, Robert Altman, George Cukor, and Fritz Lang, and he recently penned Clint: The Life and Legend, about actor/filmmaker Eastwood. In this last case, McGilligan's American editor balked at publication because the book was judged to be unnecessarily negative about its celebrity subject. For now, Clint has been published only in England, by Harper Collins; and I've been made privy to the 1999 British version.

Well, Clint is quite downbeat, lukewarm for the most part about Eastwood's artistry, and decidedly agnostic about his Nixonian/Reaganite politics, his meanness to ex-employee friends, his obsessively womanizing character. McGilligan, who offers a jaded eye on "the Don Juanism that grew to dominate his [Eastwood's] private life," makes sure to contrast his suspicious view of Eastwood with the good-guy whitewash of Richard Schickel's recent authorized biography.

Could there be two Eastwoods? In my just-completed tenure as acting curator at the Harvard Film Archive, I was beneficiary to Eastwood's generosity, as he shipped three of his private 35mm prints to be shown as benefits. I know how decent he's been to my producer friend Bruce Ricker in offering financial aid for the completion of Ricker's jazz documentaries. But McGilligan's claims of Eastwood vindictiveness are supported by what I heard a few years ago when I interviewed Frank Stanley, the cinematographer for Magnum Force, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and The Eiger Sanction. Stanley told of being lowered on a rope with his camera while shooting The Eiger Sanction and being accidentally dropped onto a rock. While he recovered in the hospital, Stanley alleged, "macho" Eastwood never visited him, then dropped him without explanation as an employee. When Stanley told me this story, he cried and cried about the horrors of dirty Clint.