"Morning Glory," or All About Eva

Katharine Hepburn won a Best Actress Oscar for the 1933 film "Morning Glory," but you could be forgiven for asking if the film hurt her career as much as it helped it.

As Eva Lovelace, who's come from small-town Vermont to New York City to be a capital-A actress ("I'll never, under any circumstances, play any part with which I don't feel a sincere congeniality"), Hepburn is by turns irritating, vulnerable, affected, passionate and pretentious. And even though she's acting, her characterization became such a part of the Hepburn persona that you have to think that audiences at the time wondered where the real personality left off and the performance began. When you see those Warner Bros. cartoons from the 1930s with a parody of Hepburn saying things like "I'm so happy to be here -- rally, rally I am," this is the performance they're referring to. Maybe even Hepburn realized the problem -- after being labeled "box office poison" by theatre exhibitors in the late 1930s she worked with Philip Barry to puncture her screen image in "The Philadelphia Story."

"Morning Glory" begins in the office of theatrical producer Louis Easton (Adolphe Menjou). Into the waiting room walks the guileless Eva, who strikes up a conversation with Robert Hedges (C. Aubrey Smith), a kindly character actor. Eva wastes no time in telling him her story:



Inside Easton's office, the producer is meeting with playwright Joe Sheridan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). It isn't long before Eva ends up cornering them as well, and they're intrigued, but they have no part for her. Sheridan is working on a new play, but temperamental actress Rita Vernon (Mary Duncan) already has the lead wrapped up.

Hedges takes Eva under his wing, and as he comes out of the theatre one night he sees her having a cup of coffee. He doesn't know it, but she's starving and she's too proud to tell him. He invites her to a party at Easton's apartment. There she sees Joe again, as well as other literary lights she's only read about. She also drinks a couple of glasses of champagne on a very empty stomach, and starts doing Shakespeare.

Lowell Sherman directed "Morning Glory." He's probably better known for his roles as a wisecracking drunk in several pre-code pictures, including "What Price Hollywood?" and "Ladies of Leisure." Sherman knew his comedy, but he directs "Morning Glory" with a brave sensitivity. When a sauced Eva is doing Shakespeare at Easton's party, we're not sure how to feel. Sherman doesn't tell us how to feel about her, and refuses to undermine the scene -- or any of Eva's dreams -- with easy laughs. When Eva finishes her performance at the party, the verdict comes from Hedges, her guardian angel -- "Beautiful. Childishly beautiful, impossibly beautiful."

The next morning, Eva is still at Easton's apartment, and the producer sheepishly tells Joe that he and Eva had a romantic rendezvous. He gives Joe a check to give to Eva to ease his conscience. But she's on cloud nine and dreaming of their future together. For Joe to tell her otherwise would be like waking a sleepwalker:



See what I mean? Is that good/bad acting or bad/good acting?

Easton doesn't respond to Eva's overtures. Rejected, she takes a series of job in stock companies and vaudeville. Then comes the opening night of Joe's new play, and leading lady Rita Vernon makes impossible demands just before going on. Joe thinks he knows who can step in and fill her shoes -- Eva, who's playing a small role in the play. Easton calls Rita's bluff, Joe gives Eva a pep talk, and a star is born.

Backstage afterwards, Eva is surrounded by her three male supporters -- Easton, Hedges and Joe. "The three of you make me very proud," Eva tells them, "and I'm going to make you so very proud of me. I'll be wonderful." She starts to get romantic thoughts about Easton again, but he stops her cold by calling her "the most valuable piece of property I've ever had." Joe confesses his love for Eva, but she can't listen right now. She's comforted by her new wardrobe mistress, a former actress herself who was a "morning glory" -- a flower that faded before the sun was very high. Eva swears she won't be like that in a very ambivalent ending:



It's always interesting to re-watch a movie after a long period of time. When I first saw "Morning Glory," I was in my late 20s, a bit of a know-it-all, and easily irritated by Hepburn's performance. Now I'm in my mid-50s and I find it very touching -- and brave. Rally I do.

Here are the complete credits for "Morning Glory"

"Ladies of Leisure," or Easel to Love

Barbara Stanwyck enters the 1930 film "Ladies of Leisure" -- and film history -- in a rowboat. The oars squeak. Her face is marked by mascara-streaked tears and she's clutching a broken dress strap. She's Kay, a party girl who just left a wild one on a yacht.

On shore is Ralph Graves as Jerry, who's also left a wild party, this one at his Manhattan penthouse. He's gone for a drive, but now he's fixing the flat tire on his Lincoln. Stanwyck climbs on shore, shivering.

Kay: How far is it to town?

Jerry: What town?

Kay: There's only one town.

So Jerry gives her a ride back to Manhattan, where the night is obliterated by blinking neon signs selling Squibb's Dental Creme and Aeolian Player Piano Rolls -- but where Kay will eventually learn to see beyond them to the stars.  

"Ladies of Leisure" isn't Stanwyck's first film, but it's the one that made her a star. It also marked the beginning of a five-picture collaboration with director Frank Capra (seen with Stanwyck at right) -- one that almost didn't happen. Capra wasn't impressed with Stanwyck at their first meeting, and she left upset. It wasn't until Capra was bawled out by Stanwyck's husband, comic Frank Fay, who urged Capra to watch an older Stanwyck screen test, that she was cast in the role.

Now back to the plot -- Jerry's an artist who's anything but starving. He lives high thanks to his family wealth -- dad runs a couple of railroads. On the ride back, Kay dozes off:



While she's asleep, Jerry sees something in Kay's face -- something that leads him to use her as a model for his new painting, "Hope."

"She had a mask on, like everybody else," Jerry tells his mother, "but underneath I think she had this."

The tricky part is getting down to it, and their first rocky sessions together show a bit of improvisation on Stanwyck's part:



 Jerry knows that if Kay can get past her streetwise exterior, Hope will come through. But she's a tough nut to crack.   

Jerry: It's like a man I knew once. He was suspicious, bitter, harsh, cruel. Those things were written in hs face like a map of his life. He died -- I saw him laid out. His face was a new face -- it was fine, noble. There was peace in it. He was himself again. Do you see what I mean?

Kay: No. All I get out of it is you gotta die to find yourself. Not me -- not for two dollars an hour.

Also hanging around is Jerry's upper crust fiancee (Juliette Compton). She's cool and controlling -- we know she isn't right for our hero because she calls him "Jeddy." Marie Prevost is around for comic relief as Kay's roommate and best friend. And then there's Jerry's boozy friend Bill Standish, played by the ever-welcome Lowell Sherman. He and Stanwyck are perfectly matched in the wisecrack department:

Kay (seeing Bill enter): Drunk again!

Bill: Congratulations, so am I.

Of course, Jerry eventually gets through to Kay and she lets down her defenses and becomes a perfect model. They also fall in love, in a scene that echoes the moment in Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" when George Bailey (James Stewart) realizes in a mixture of anger and awe that he loves Mary Hatch (Donna Reed):



 The Jerry-Kay relationship upsets Jerry's wealthy parents, and there's a father-son standoff. Jerry's mother (Nance O'Neil) visits Kay and tries to get her to break up with Jerry for his own sake, and in return mom gets the full Stanwyck:



Capra writes in his autobiography that, if she was filming an emotional scene, Stanwyck left everything on the field in the first take. And in this performance, so early in her career, she already has the ability to combine outer toughness with a sudden inner vulnerability that can tear your heart out. Sherman and Prevost perform like the pros they are. Graves, who was already a star thanks to his roles in the Capra-directed action pictures "Flight" and "Submarine," has a tough time impersonating someone with artistic temperament.

Here are the complete credits for "Ladies of Leisure."

The Noel Francis Film Festival: "Bachelor Apartment" and "Smart Woman"

Of all the actresses who appeared in 1930s movies, Noel Francis (1906-59) was certainly one of them.

Noel Francis Madison

Not to be confused with Noel Madison, who was a guy, Noel Francis was an attractive blonde with a winsome expression. She had been a dancer on Broadway, appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies during the mid-1920s, often with the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey. She came to Hollywood in 1929 and ended up being signed to a contract at Warner Bros.

In Hollywood, she made over 40 movies, most of them during the pre-code period, so she usually played mistresses and prostitutes, potential mistresses and prostitutes, or former mistresses and prostitutes.

In the 1931 film ”Blonde Crazy," for example, she's the mistress of Louis Calhern and she helps him bilk the film's star, James Cagney. In "Smart Money," released the same year, she helps bilk Edward G. Robinson. In 1932's "Night Court," she's the mistress of crooked judge Walter Huston.

Her best-known film credit is probably 1932's "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang." She plays a prostitute who James Allen (Paul Muni) meets after his first escape from the gang. Her appearance is brief, but memorable:

Francis was rarely the female lead; she usually received fifth or sixth billing. In the 1931 film "Bachelor Apartment," for example, she is one of several women who are seduced by the film's hero, Lowell Sherman, who also directed. Sherman plays Wayne Carter, a bachelor whose apartment is just busting with women -- the movie is like a pre-code "Boeing Boeing." When the taxi Francis's character is riding in gets involved in an accident, Sherman -- who has been eyeing her from his limousine -- sweeps in and scoops her up:


Once Sherman gets Francis back to his bachelor apartment, he "accidentally" spills a drink on her dress, forcing her to change into something more comfortable:



Sherman has an impish comic quality and he's always fun to watch -- he also played the dipsomaniac director who discovers Constance Bennett in "What Price Hollywood?" -- and the film's storyline has him leaving girls like Francis behind so he can marry his proper stenographer, played by Irene Dunne.

In "Smart Woman," also released in 1931, Francis has a more substantial part. She's Peggy, the other woman who Mary Astor's husband (Robert Ames) has taken up with while Astor was with her sick mother in Paris. Gracefully directed by Gregory La Cava, "Smart Woman" is more comedy than soaper, thanks largely to the presence of Edward Everett Horton as Astor's husband's business partner. Astor decides to fight fire with fire, and invites the mistress and her mercenary mother to a weekend at the family estate; then she enters, carrying lawn shears:



Astor also tries to make her husband jealous by implying that she's been having an affair of her own with the kind Sir Guy (John Halliday), a British millionaire she met on the cruise back from Paris. But when Peggy learns of Sir Guy's fortune, she sets her cap for him:



It's too easy to blame the decline in Francis's career on the advent of the Production Code in 1935, but it's true that under the Code, parts like the ones Francis played were frowned upon. At any rate, by the mid-1930s, her career had declined to the point that she was appearing in quickie Buck Jones westerns and her final feature was 1937's "Left-Handed Law."

Here are the full credits for "Bachelor Apartment" and "Smart Woman."
 

"What Price Hollywood," or A Star Is Torn

You can't talk about the 1932 film "What Price Hollywood?" without dishing some Hollywood dirt -- that the plot, for instance, was inspired by the real-life marriage of rising star Colleen Moore and producer John McCormick, or that Lowell Sherman based his portrayal of dipsomaniac director Max Carey on his one-time real-life brother-in-law, John Barrymore.

"What Price Hollywood?" benefits from those anchors in reality. True, the rise of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) from waitress at the Brown Derby to a movie star billed as "America's Pal" is a little too speedy, and studio mogul Julius Saxe (Gregory Ratoff) is a little too fatherly, but the movie doesn't shy away from satirizing and, in some cases, criticizing Hollywood and its star culture.

We begin in a Hollywood apartment where Mary is simultaneously fantasizing and getting ready for work:


    
(Didja know that the trademark for the short-lived RKO-Pathe partnership was a giant rooster standing in Iceland?)

"You can't see a smile over the radio, Constance
-- allow me to try some bird calls."

Anyway, at the restaurant Mary waits on brilliant-but-boiled director Max Carey (Sherman). He's taken with her looks and spunk and invites her to attend a movie premiere with him -- in a broken-down tin lizzy he just bought as a gag. She ends up wangling a small role in Carey's next picture, and after a rough start she makes good. Then she's signed to a long-term contract and becomes "America's Pal."

The relationship between Mary and Carey remains platonic, but nonetheless he's bothered when Mary falls in love with polo-playing Lonnie Borden (Neil Hamilton). Lonnie's kind of a stuffed shirt, but he does love Mary, and he even goes along with it when their wedding is Hollywood-ized by Saxe and his staff. The result plays like something out of "Day of the Locust":


It doesn't take long, however, before Lonnie starts resenting Mary's career and her loyalty to Carey, who's on a fast downhill slide. When Carey shows up at the house drunk in the middle of the night, Lonnie leaves in a huff -- a 1925 two-door Huff, to badly paraphrase Groucho Marx.

But Mary stays true to Carey, even bailing him out of the drunk tank and bringing him home to recover.

Mary: From tonight on, you're going dry.

Max: From tonight on, I won't cause you any more trouble.  

Mary exits, and Max gets out of bed. Then, in a striking montage co-created by Soviet great Slavko Vorkapitch, he makes some decisions of his own:



Mary's shock at finding Max's body echoes her first movie bit for Max, where she played a party girl who ends up in the same situation. Nicely done.

Max's suicide at Mary's house triggers rumors of a scandal, and her films are boycotted by "upright" women's groups. Mary's only thought is that Lonnie will now challenge her for custody of their young son, so she escapes to Europe. By the end, however, Mary and Lonnie have reunited and there's talk of a comeback film, because if there's anything Hollywood loves more than a fall from grace it's forgiving the fallen woman (see Bergman, Ingrid).

There are other nice little touches in "What Price Hollywood?," including this exchange between Mary and Saxe about her next film:

Mary: I don't think I should have a baby in every picture I do.

Saxe: This one is different -- you're getting married first!     

Ratoff, with his heavy Russian accent, is part parody and part perfect as Saxe -- in one scene he sits at his massive desk and nurses his ulcer with a bowl of crackers and milk. It's interesting to see Eddie Anderson, a few years away from achieving comic fame as Rochester on "The Jack Benny Program," as Carey's non-stereotypical valet, and Neil Hamilton, later Commissioner Gordon on the 1960s TV series version of "Batman," as a romantic lead.

Bennett is fine, but the real person to watch in "What Price Hollywood?" is Sherman. He handles this role with an easy grace, probably because in real life, he was a director as well as an actor (after this film he would direct Mae West in "She Done Him Wrong," followed by Katharine Hepburn in her Oscar-winning role as the star of "Morning Glory.") He would die shortly thereafter, in 1934. 


Here is a listing of full cast and credits.