KH Film #1: A Bill of Divorcement (1932)

Director: George Cukor
Screenplay: Howard Estabrook & Harry Wagstaff Gribble, based on the play by Clemence Dane
Producer: David O. Selznick
Studio: RKO
Cinematographer: Sidney Hickox
Costume Designer: Josette de Lima

Cast: John Barrymore (solo billing above title), Billie Burke, Katharine Hepburn, David Manners

US Premiere: September 30, 1932

KH Firsts:

• First film
• First film at RKO
• First film directed by George Cukor
• First film produced by David O. Selznick film

A Bill of Divorcement (Sydney Fairfield)

It's Christmas Eve, the Fairfields are giving a party and love is in the air. Mother Billie Burke has just obtained [film title] from father John Barrymore, who has spent the past 15-odd years in an insane asylum. She is planning to marry Paul Cavanagh, the lawyer who *ahem* helped her get her divorce, in January. And before night's end, daughter Katharine Hepburn will be engaged to David Manners. Come Christmas Day and everyone is thrown for a loop when Barrymore is released from the hospital (he is billed above the title after all) and returns home to try and pick up the pieces of his life. Hepburn is in for the biggest shock of them all, as she has been led to believe that her father's mental illness is entirely the result of shell shock from the Great War, when in fact, it is a hereditary condition. Or, in her words, "So... in our family there's insanity."

Really, the biggest obstacle in enjoying the film is its treatment of mental illness. The words "mental illness" aren't ever even used. Whatever is wrong with Barrymore, it's simply referred to as "insanity." Either they didn't know any better or they assumed the audience didn't know any better - it doesn't really matter, as the film's treatment of the issue was handled with sensitivity for its time.

What does matter is that both Barrymore and Hepburn give strong performances. Nowadays, a popular actor playing a mentally ill character may as well be costumed in a "Nominate Me for an Oscar" sandwich board. It's clear that in this case, Barrymore is only concerned with giving a sensitive and genuinely moving performance. Which he does.

But this is a Katharine Hepburn blog, isn't it? in Me: Stories of My Life, KH describes her entrance in the film:

"The first shot was at a party my mother [Burke] was giving. In a long white dress, I floated down the stairs into the arms of David Manners." (p.141)

"Floated" is the exact right word to describe the moment. George Cukor was the perfect director for KH's first film - and just because we now know how well their films always turned out (they made ten in all, spanning five decades.) Cukor was a marvelous director (check out his filmography) with a keen eye for presenting an actress to her best advantage. From Me:

He was primarily an actor's director. He was primarily interested in making the actor shine. He saw the story through the eyes of the leading characters.

When I made A Bill of Divorcement, he set out to sell me to the audience: running down the stairs into the arms of David Manners - throwing myself on the floor - in Barrymore's arms. A sort of isn't-she-fascinating approach.

I'm sure it helped that she was as fascinating as he made her seem. She's good, especially for the first time out. What's remarkable is seeing a young actress with so much promise, already knowing that her career would exceed all imaginable expectations. Everything she had that made her a great actress and a great star is apparent, even if she hasn't quite learned how to use it all just yet.

This next part covers a major spoiler and I just hate it when a reviewer tells you a movie is worth seeing and then tells you how it ends. Highlight the big blank part to read it.

Burke goes off to marry Cavanagh as originally planned. Barrymore accepts that her life has moved on without him and he loves her enough to not deny her her happiness. He is content to live with his daughter and finally enjoy the company of the child he never knew. She hasn't told him that she's engaged and she forbids anyone else from revealing same, ultimately giving up her fiancee for her father, the man who needs her more. All of this is beautifully depicted in one gesture. Hepburn and Barrymore are sitting together after Burke and Cavanagh have gone and she hears Manners calling to her (they whistle to each other, it's cute) from outside. She gets up, walks to the window, closes the drapes and goes back to her father. No tears. No speeches. It's heartbreaking and devastating.

End spoiler.

Rating: 7/10

Availability: VHS is out of print, but used copies are readily available and reasonably priced; shows up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time.

The New York Times Interviews Marni Nixon

Voice of the Many, but Rarely Herself

Frank J. Prial, New York Times, 6 March, 2007

The role of Mrs. Higgins, the mother of Prof. Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, requires an actress capable of expressing hauteur, exasperation and motherly concern, sometimes all at once. What it does not require is a singing voice, as it is among that classic musical’s few roles without a song.

So who has been cast in the New York Philharmonic’s concert-style revival at Lincoln Center this week?

None other than Marni Nixon, perhaps the most famous singing-voice-without-a-face in the history of motion pictures.

“I’d love to have a song in the show,” Ms. Nixon said during an interview in her West End Avenue apartment in New York. “I’d love to be able to call up Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe and say, ‘Please, can you add something called ‘Mrs. Higgins’s Lament?’ But it isn’t going to happen, of course.”

Among her unseen roles were the singing voices for Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Margaret O’Brien in The Secret Garden — as well as, most famously, Audrey Hepburn in the Oscar-winning screen version of My Fair Lady. Most recently, in 1998, she was the animated Grandmother Fa in Disney’s Mulan.

For her part, Ms. Nixon, 77, said she understood perfectly why the studio moguls chose to place famous faces in the starring roles and relegate her to the shadows.

“Hollywood wanted recognizable stars,” Ms. Nixon said. “And the fact that a lot of the stars couldn’t sing was only a minor inconvenience to the big producers.”

Her first dubbing job was for Miss O’Brien in The Secret Garden. Miss O’Brien, 12 at the time, was one of Hollywood’s top child stars. Ms. Nixon was 19.

Her first major job, she said, was singing the role of Anna in The King and I. “Deborah was tough to work with, but she was a complete professional,” Ms. Nixon said of Miss Kerr. “We worked on phrasing, we worked on interpretation, everything. It’s hard to believe now, but each number took a week.”

A dubber, Ms. Nixon explained, doesn’t simply substitute her voice for the actress’s voice. “The important thing is to sound as the actress would sound if she were doing the actual singing,” she said.

It being Hollywood, of course, sometimes the jobs verged on the ludicrous. Her work with Marilyn Monroe, for instance, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), consisted of just one phrase in one song — perhaps the musical’s most famous, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The phrase: “These rocks don’t lose their shape.”

If the studio bosses had had their way, Ms. Nixon said, she would have done more. “Actually, the studio wanted her entire voice dubbed,” she said. “They thought her voice was silly. I thought her voice suited her persona beautifully.”

In 1964, when Ms. Nixon was tapped to sing Eliza Doolittle in George Cukor’s screen version of My Fair Lady, one of her chief concerns was how the choice would sit with Julie Andrews, who had had great success with the role onstage but was passed over by Hollywood for the established star: Hepburn.

“I did the job,” Ms. Nixon said, “but I felt uneasy,” especially when she and Ms. Andrews later worked together in The Sound of Music.

The story is now part of Hollywood lore: Ms. Andrews came out ahead by starring in Disney’s Mary Poppins and winning the Oscar for best actress in the same year that “My Fair Lady” was released. [Ms. Nixon voiced the animated geese in "Jolly Holiday" in that film.]

Ms. Andrews seemed to harbor no grudges, Ms. Nixon said. When the two appeared in The Sound of Music, she said, Ms. Andrews made a point of seeking her out, shaking her hand and saying, “I like your work.” (Ms. Nixon played one of the nuns.)

When Ms. Nixon was cast as Eliza in a City Center revival of My Fair Lady, Ms. Andrews helped her overcome anxiety about handling the role.

Ms. Nixon received a modest reward for her highly praised dubbing work: stepping in front of the camera before millions of people as a presenter at the 1969 Academy Awards. The category? Best musical score.

Perhaps naturally, not all the people whose voices she dubbed were happy about it. When filming West Side Story, Wood refused to cooperate, and Ms. Nixon worked by herself on the musical numbers. It was not entirely Wood’s fault; the studio bosses were keeping her in the dark about Ms. Nixon’s true role.

“She thought I was there for backup and that she would be doing the entire picture,” Ms. Nixon said. “In fact, they didn’t like her singing, and, without telling her, proceeded to use my voice.”
And when Wood found out? “Well, she was enraged,” Ms. Nixon said. [Natalie Wood's vocals can be heard on the special edition DVD of West Side Story. The correct decision was made.]

Ms. Nixon will be surrounded by a high-wattage cast at this week’s Philharmonic staging of My Fair Lady, including Kelsey Grammer as Henry Higgins, Kelli O’Hara as Eliza Doolittle, Brian Dennehy as Alfred P. Doolittle and Charles Kimbrough as Col. Hugh Pickering. There will be four performances in Avery Fisher Hall, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.

Born in 1930 into a musical family in Southern California, Ms. Nixon started learning the violin at 4. Soon she had a singing act with her sisters. But young Marni had bigger plans. As a child she was an extra in dozens of films. As a teenager she joined the Roger Wagner Chorale (in which her best pal was another teenager, Marilyn Horne) and began to sing in local concerts. She won enough parts to make her solo debut at 17, in Carmina Burana, under Leopold Stokowski at the Hollywood Bowl.

Though the dubbing work has drifted away, Ms. Nixon said, she keeps busy. “I still do a lot of singing,” she said. “The idea is to choose the things that are possible for me to do well and to be useful to the play at the same time. It’s just too bad people know how old I am because my voice sounds like I’m much younger.”

She was in the Broadway musical James Joyce’s The Dead, with Christopher Walken, in 1999, and she has put together a one-woman show about herself, titled The Voice of Hollywood.

She describes her show as a stroll down memory lane. “I show some stills from the films I dubbed, tell some stories, sing a few things and answer questions about my life,” she said. “People always love to ask me questions. And why not? I’ve had a really fantastic life, I think.”


Nixon also dubbed for Deborah Kerr in An Affair to Remember. The liner notes in the remastered edition of The King & I's soundtrack feature more of Nixon's recollections of working with the great Deborah Kerr. The album also contains some material that was cut from the film, including Mrs. Anna's soliloquy, "Shall I Tell You What I Think of You?" The number shifts back and forth between dialogue and song, and Kerr and Nixon recorded it standing side by side at the same microphone, each pointing to the other when it was her turn to take over.

When I was in college, I took a film class on the genre of the movie musical. My professor told us that Barbara Cook dubbed Audrey Hepburn's voice in My Fair Lady. I tried to tell him he was wrong by asking, "Wasn't it Marni Nixon?" He assured me that it wasn't and I let it go. Don't I tell the best stories?

For further reading... Ms. Nixon has also recently published a biography, I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story, that was co-written with Stephen Cole, who has also written, among other things, the book and lyrics to a musical version of The Night of the Hunter.

Seriously. I have the album.

Katharine Hepburn: The TCM Spotlight Collection to be released on May 29th

It's about damn time!

Kate the Great, one of the finest actresses in the whole history of celluloid, is finally getting her due with her very own DVD collection, to be released 17 days after her 100th birthday (and *ahem* 25 days before my 31st birthday). This is not to begrude the Powers That Be (those who own rights to her films) on the number of her films that are available on DVD. We already have a Tracy-Hepburn collection (which was comprised of three films that had already been available for four years and a fourth that you could only get with the collection), three of her films were included in the Classic Comedies Collection, and numerous titles are available individually, including three stage performances. Compare this with the TWO Norma Shearer film currently available, and neither of them are from her richest years, before Irving died... but I digress.

But why quibble...more? Warner Home Video is bringing us six Katharine Hepburn films, all previously unavailable on DVD and all worth owning for the low low price of $59.95. At least, that's the suggested retail price. The cheapest I've found is DVDPlanet for $41.96, plus shipping. DeepDiscount has it for $43.52 and the shipping is free. The bastards at Best Buy have priced it above the SRP at $69.99, which apparently is how they make up for selling so many individual movies so cheaply. I'm really getting off track here. On to the movies:

Katharine Hepburn: The TCM Spotlight Collection:

The Corn Is Green (1979, George Cukor) is a made-for-TV remake of the 1945 Irving Rapper classic (currently unavailable, but it shows up on TCM from time to time), which featured Bette Davis as Miss Moffat, a spinster schoolteacher in a Welsh mining town. This is the only film in the collection that I haven't seen and I can only imagine that a 72-year-old Kate offers a much different interpretation of the role than did the 37-year-old Davis. Hepburn was nominated for an Emmy, and this was the last of ten films she made with Cukor, 47 years after the first. The Corn Is Green also offers the best tangential side note of the bunch: In 1974, Miss D agreed to reprise her role in a Broadway musical, entitled Miss Moffat. The show tried out in Philadelphia, where it closed. It seems the lading lady "hurt her back" and was unable to bring a ghastly show into New York. Stranger still is the fact that this would have been Davis's second Broadway musical. The first was 1952's Two's Company, which ran three months but was mercifully recorded and is now available on CD.

Dragon Seed (1944, Jack Conway & Harold S. Bucquet) is based on the novel by Pearl S. Buck. It's the story of a Chinese village and the most prominent Asian is the cast is the 14th-billed Clarence Lung, who may not even be Chinese (imdb didn't have any bio info). But this is Hollywood in the 1940s, so what can you expect? Caucasians aside, the acting is terrific and much less condescending than you'd think. At least as far as I can remember. I don't think I've watched Dragon Seed this century. The film received two Oscar nominations: Aline MacMahon (Supporting Actress) and Sidney Wagner (B/W Cinematography).

Morning Glory (1933, Lowell Sherman) features Kate's first Oscar-winning performance. She plays an actress trying to make it on Broadway. So she makes it with producer Adolphe Menjou. Luckily, this was made in the pre-code era, so everyone is very sophisticated about sex. Hepburn forgives Menjou for tossing her aside since she's much more interested in her career. The 1958 remake, Stage Struck, stars Susan Strasberg and Henry Fonda and is a prime example of the difference between the pre-code and enforced-code years. And that's really the only reason to ever watch Stage Struck.

Sylvia Scarlett (1935, Cukor) is the first of four movies Kate made with Cary Grant. Sylvia and her father (Edmund Gwenn) are on the lam from the law, so she cuts her hair short and poses as a boy. Every time you come across an article on Katharine Hepburn's sexuality, a still from Sylvia Scarlett will accompany the text (see top of this post). A very young, kind of goofy and very cockney Cary Grant plays an amiable con man who hooks up with the Scarletts for a time. You might say that the film captures Cary Grant at his most Arch.

Undercurrent (Vincente Minnelli, 1946) is the only time Kate worked with Vincente and the only film noir either of them made. Which isn't all that surprising considering the rest of their careers. Her co-stars are Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum, with Edmund Gwenn once again playing Kate's father (one year later, he won an Oscar for playing Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, in case you were wondering Who That Was.) Honestly, all I remember about this film is that I think I liked it. I didn't even know Robert Mitchum was in it until I looked at the cast list, and I love me some Mitch.

Without Love (1945, Bucquet) is the lone film in the set that pairs Kate with Spencer Tracy. They're scientists who marry out of convenience instead of love (hence the title), but guess what happens? My memory on this one is a little foggy, too, but the supporting cast is pretty impressive with two of my favorite ladies, Lucille Ball and Gloria Grahame, as well as Keenan Wynn and Felix Bressart, who, even if you didn't know his name, you would likely recognize from his work in three Lubitch classics: Ninothcka, The Shop Around the Corner and To Be or Not To Be.

On DVD this Tuesday...

I love the holiday gift giving season. All kinds of new things make it to DVD and most of them are on sale. You can view a comprehensive list of all December 5th releases at DVD Aficionado. Among the highlights...

Kino releases four silent films by Ernst Lubitch (not available as a set): Anna Boleyn (1920); Die Austernprinzessin (1919) with Ich möchte kein Mann sein (1920); Sumurun (1920); and Die Bergkatze (1921).

Sony Pictures releases The Premiere Frank Capra Collection: American Madness (1932); It Happened One Night (1934); Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); You Can't Take it with You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939); and Kenneth Bowser's 1997 documentary, Frank Capra's American Dream.

From the Turner Classic Movies Archives: Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1: Two versions of Baby Face (1933, Alfred E. Green): the original pre-release director's cut and the less coherent, censored theatrical version. Baby Face, with Barbara Stanwyck in the title role, was so risque, it was censored before the 1934 Production Code went into effect. Red-Headed Woman (1932, Jack Conway) marked a turning point in Jean Harlow's career. Waterloo Bridge (1931, James Whale) stars Mae Clarke (Cagney shoved a grapefruit in her face in The Public Enemy) and features an early Bette Davis performance.

Criterion's re-issue of Grey Gardens, includs the Maysles Brothers' brand new follow-up, The Beales of Grey Gardens. Criterion has also kindly (and wisely) chosen to release The Beales of Grey Gardens separately, so anyone who already has Grey Gardens will not be forced to buy it again.

The Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant classic Holiday (1938, George Cukor) was previously only available as a part of Columbia's excellent Cary Grant Collection. It is now being released separately and just in time for New Year's Eve!

Anchor Bay celebrates the famed German director with The Wim Wenders Collection: Chambre 666 (1982); Tokyo-Ga (1985); Falsche Bewegung (1975); Lightning Over Water (1980); Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe (1973); Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky (1995) Der Amerikanische Freund (1977); and Aufzeichnungen zu Kleidern und Städten (1989)