All About The Katharine Hepburn Project...

The Katharine Hepburn Project was a grand idea that fell victim to my short attention span and my inherent distaste for following any kind of creative structure. As soon as I had to watch a KH movie a week, I wanted to do anything but. I'm transferring all of the entries from that blog over to this one and then shutting that one down. I still like the idea of watching all of her films in order, so I may keep it up - or I'll just delete everything related to it and insist to anyone and everyone that it simply never existed, which is pretty much what KH did with The Iron Petticoat, a copy of which I was actually able to find!

(I wrote pretty much the same post here.)

That sounds like rock and/or roll

I'm sure you've seen the OK Go video for "Here it Goes Again."



Very popular video. Won the first YouTune Video of the Year Award. I've only just now watched it for the first time, which isn't especially unusual since - surprise, surprise - the guy who writes the Katharine Hepburn blog isn't all that up to speed on current music.

But here's the thing. The guy in the pink shirt and vest? The bass player? Tim Nordwind? I know him. We went to college together. We made up half of class of 98 playwriting department at The Theatre School.

Tim is a brilliant playwright. One of the most creative I've ever read. His voice (as a writer) was so unique that he was my hero - something I told him all the time in college.

He wrote a play in college called... actually, it had several titles and I don't remember the final one, but the title isn't important. It was about the circus and I played the fortune teller, which isn't important either. What's important is that I based my entire performance on Katharine Hepburn's voice, circa On Golden Pond. Whenever I had trouble with getting into character, I just did a bad KH impersonation and presto! Worked every time.

I really should read the alumni newsletter more often, huh?

KH Film #2: Christopher Strong (1933)

Director: Dorothy Arzner
Screenplay: Zoe Akins, based on the novel by Gilbert Frankau
Producer: David O. Selznick
Studio: RKO
Cinematographer: Bert Glennon
Costume Designer: Walter Plunkett & Howard Greer (both uncredited)

Cast: Katharine Hepburn (solo billing above title), Colin Clive, Billie Burke, Helen Chandler

US Premiere: March 31, 1933

KH Firsts:

• First film with solo billing above the title
• First film with costumes by Walter Plunkett, who would work with KH on nine more movies, through the late 1940s

Christopher Strong (Lady Cynthia Darrington)

I'll confess that I had to watch Christopher Strong twice. Why? Because the first time I tried to write this entry, I couldn't remember half of the movie. I remembered the cast, a few of the themes and the basic plot elements, but none of the particulars stuck around long enough to take root in the vast wasteland of my mind where I store all the other cultural minutiae. What's so strange is that I like Christopher Strong. I liked it the first time I saw it, several years ago. I liked it last Sunday and I liked it tonight.

We begin at a treasure (scavenger) hunt party, hosted by Irene Browne. In order to win, one must produce a man who has been married more than five years, is still in love with his wife, has never had an affair, and is willing to say so in public; and a woman over 20 who has never had a love affair and isn't afraid to admit it. Helen Chandler and her unhappily married lover Ralph Forbes are determined to come out on top and go prude hunting.

Oh, the 30s. When the spoiled children of the upper class had nothing better to do than drink all night and look down on the unsophisticated.

Oh, the pre-Code era. Where men and women acted like Men and Women, without the need for third act repentance.

Chandler drives home to grab the most loyal husband she know, her father (and title character) Colin Clive. Forbes borrows a motorcycle and goes after Chandler, only to end up in a drag race with Katharine Hepburn, a well-known twenty-something aviatrix who - what luck! - has never had a love affair. Chandler talks Clive into coming to the party (he is Browne's brother) and Hepburn agrees to go back to join Forbes - it's the least she can do after running him off the road when their drag race is interrupted by a cement mixer.

I just love Hollywood.

All of the above takes place in the first ten or so minutes. What happens next is pretty obvious since the man who has never cheated meets the virgin and they're played by the two top-billed actors (third billed Billie Burke plays Clive's wife.) Clive and Hepburn are introduced and take an immediate liking to each other, and Hepburn becomes a big sister of sorts to only child Chandler. Their friendship (Hepburn and Chandler) make it all the more difficult for Hepburn and Clive to fight their feelings for each other. But when they unwittingly end up alone in a motorboat together on moonlit night (don't ask), complications, as they say, ensue.

KH is very good in this picture. We're first introduced to Lady Cynthia through a year-old newspaper trumpeting her latest achievements as a pilot and featuring several photos. She has made a success of herself in a man's world, but has it been at the expense of living?

Perhaps I've played the fool myself in choosing to live such a lonely life.

What makes the line so effective is that she utters it without a trace of self pity; she's simply wondering aloud. When she and Clive first begin their affair, she's troubled by the effect it will have on his family, and at the same time enthralled in the throes of her first love affair. One scene in particular has her waiting for Clive's arrival at her home. She paces around the room, nervously smoking cigarettes, without saying a thing. She doesn't need to tell us about her anguish because we can feel it. It's a marvelous moment, a lesson in screen acting.

As I mentioned above, KH has solo billing above the title. For her second film. Granted, a large part of that is the way the studio system worked. KH's role in A Bill of Divorcement - a lovely young woman supporting the older established Star - is the type that exists in countless scripts designed to get an actress noticed. It worked and the RKO machine went into overdrive to sell their new glamour queen, beginning with Christopher Strong. And what's the best way to sell a new face? Copy someone else's look, of course! Repeatedly, but not throughout, KH is lit with what was called a "north light effect:" one light is placed high above the actress, causing her cheek bones to cast shadows down on her face.

Look familiar? It's the same technique Josef von Sternberg used to show off Dietrich, who had taken Hollywood by storm just three years earlier (though, like everything else, the effect was more dramatic on Dietrich.)

I think it's also significant that KH wasn't cast in another ingenue role or two before achieving star billing. Most of the actresses we now think of as legends (Bette Davis, John Crawford, Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy) started out as extras, but not KH. While she paid her dues in the theatre - she was fired from her first several plays - she was a star in Hollywood virtually from day one.

(Add that to her wealthy New England breeding (not to mention that accent) and it's easy to see why she may not have been the most well-liked person on the RKO lot, earning the nickname "Katharine of Arrogance.")

Christopher Strong also marks the first time KH played a lady of society. Contrary to popular belief, she was an actress of remarkable range - a topic I'll delve into in another post at another time - and her most heartbreaking performance is as the decidedly middle class Alice Adams. But her persona as an actress and as a star was built around roles like Lady Cynthia Darrington: Terry Randall Sims (Stage Door), Susan Vance (Bringing Up Baby), Linda Seton (Holiday), Tracy Samantha Lord (The Philadelphia Story), Tess Harding (Woman of the Year), Amanda Bonner (Adam's Rib), Violet Venable (Suddenly Last Summer), Christina Drayton (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), and let's not forget Eleanor of Aquitaine (The Lion in Winter) were all, if not born to their respective manors, moved into them soon enough. After being declared box office poison in 1937, she had a major comeback with The Philadelphia Story in 1940, having learned the lesson that audiences liked seeing her taken down a peg - a lesson that became the formula for her most successful pairings with Spencer Tracy.

While the society role doesn't exactly mark a turning point in her career, it does make Christopher Strong a significant part of the KH canon. And as far as film history goes, it is the only time KH worked with Dorothy Arzner, the only female director in Hollywood at the time.

And where else are you going to see KH dressed as a moth in silver lamé?

Availability: VHS is out of print, used copies are somewhat scarce and run pretty high (the cheapest copy available through an amazon seller as I write this $36.94); it is in the TCM library and shows up from time to time.

Box Office Mojo: "Close-Up: Robert Osborne on Katharine Hepburn"

Scott Holleran, boxofficemojo.com, 05/09/07

An excellent interview with the host of Turner Classic Movies on KH.

Box Office Mojo: Why didn't Katharine Hepburn attend the Oscars?

Robert Osborne: She was never sure she was going to win and she certainly didn't want to lose. There's probably no one more conceited than Katharine Hepburn. She always wanted to be the most fascinating person in the room.

Complete interview.

It's not a flattering quote about KH, but it's honest and a perfect example of why you have to separate the artist from her work (a lesson well-learned in 1992 when faced with the prospect of never again watching Annie Hall , but I digress). Like Garbo, whom Osborne also mentions, James Dean, Judy Garland and others, KH's legend has outgrown her self. We don't want to know anything about her that would in any way negate the image we've drawn from the characters we love. We need to believe that Jo March was named Woman of the Year and then settled down and grew old with Norman Thayer, Jr.

I have William J. Mann's Kate: The Woman who Was Hepburn, which is by all accounts an excellent biography, with much of the praise centered around Mann's deconstruction of KH's persona and legend. I'm both fascinated by the possibility and reticent to let go of the legend.

The House Next Door's 5 for the Day: Kate Hepburn

Sheila O'Malley, of the thoroughly enjoyable blog, The House Next Door, featured her 5 favorite Katharine Hepburn anecdotes - all backed up with actual research. She sums up KH's character (not characters) well:

These stories bring tears to my eyes. The bravery, the willingness to NOT KNOW, to still learn, to be okay with failing, to get up and try again.

Absolutely.

Be sure to check out the comments there as well. Some good discussion by people who type full words.

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 Shelf's Top 11 Katharine Hepburn Films

Based on the three entries I just read, The Shelf is a blog you definitely want to bookmark. I disagree with a few of the choices on their KH list (Rooster Cogburn?), but that's the beauty of blogging, isn't it?

Behold My Other Blog!

thekatharinehepburnproject.blogspot.com

New York Times: "Hepburn, Revisited"

William Mann, New York Times, 5/12/07

Mann, author of Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, penned this op-ed piece for today's Times.

Hepburn became an American Rorschach test, mirroring the ways we wanted to see ourselves. Each generation redefined her, rubbing out and adding to her myth.

Full article.

New York Post: "True Grit: Wayne vs. Hepburn"

Lou Lumenick, New York Post, 5/10/07

"Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne, born two weeks apart 100 years ago this month, wouldn't seem to have much in common besides being icons of Hollywood's Golden Age and their late-in-life teaming in Rooster Cogburn (1975). "

Lumenick continues with an amusing comparison of their careers.

Full article.

Katharine Hepburn Celebrated on Turner Classic Movies

In honor of Katharine Hepburn's approaching centennial, Turner Classic Movies is airing a week-long tribute to the actress, beginning Monday, May 7th.

An article about KH and the complete list of films can be found at the TCM website. Of special interest are the rarely seen (for good reason) Spitfire and The Little Minister (both on 5/7) and KH's 1973 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, aired in two parts on May 9th and 10th.

And on the subject of Katharine Hepburn, stay tuned to this space for my own personal tribue, coming soon.

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.

Joan Blondell: 5 Decades, 5 Movies

Joan Blondell's first feature film was in Lloyd Bacon's The Office Wife (1930), where she stole the show from star Dorothy Mackaill. Her last role was in Joseph Van Winkle's The Woman Inside, which was released in 1981, but obviously filmed sometime before Blondell died in 1979. Her career didn't just span five decades, it lasted five decades. The longest she went without working was between 1947's Christmas Eve and 1950's For Heaven's Sake...years she spent married to theatrical impresario Michael Todd, who filed for bankruptcy and then ditched Joan for Elizabeth, who left him after she stole Eddie from Debbie.

So this Friday, I salute Joan Blondell, one of the very first and very best of the wisecracking blondes.

1930s: Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933, Mervyn LeRoy). Despite the fact that she didn't really sing, Blondell was cast in musical after musical at Warner Brothers in the 1930s. In this one, she pretends to be her roommate, Ruby Keeler, in order to teach Warren William a lesson or two about chorus girls so the real Keeler can keep dating William's younger brother Dick Powell (who was married to Blondell at the time in real life) behind his back. It's a very lightweight Busby Berkeley musical until the finale, "Remember My Forgotten Man," when Blondell leads the entire company in a grandly staged indictment against Herbert Hoover. I miss the 30s.

1940s: Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding). Blondell plays a fortune telling carny/scam artist alongside Tyrone Power, who eventually descends into drug-addled madness and is forced to take a job biting the heads off of live chickens. The film did not do well at the time.

1950s: Desk Set (1957, Walter Lang). Blondell works with Katharine Hepburn in the research department at a TV network. Enter computer man Spencer Tracy, who the women suspect of trying to automate them to the unemployment line. Joan and Kate have a terrific scene together getting drunk at the office Christmas party.

1960s: The Cincinnati Kid (1965, Norman Jewison). Blondell plays Lady Fingers, a card dealer who really gets under Edward G. Robinson's skin.

1970s: Opening Night (1977, John Cassavetes). Blondell plays a playwright who has very little patience for Gena Rowlands's existential crisis.

Every single one of these movies is available on DVD, so I just planned your weekend for you. You're welcome.

Germanine Greer on Lauren Bacall v. Catherine Deneuve

Siren song

Lauren Bacall was tough, funny and sexy; Catherine Deneuve was meek, passive and expressionless. Germaine Greer laments the decline from feisty broad to simpering Barbie

Germaine Greer, Guardian, 30 Dec 2006

The movie phenomenon known as Lauren Bacall took time to put together. The woman who began life as Betty Joan Perske studied dancing for 13 years, then acting, and became a stage actress and model called Betty Bacall. Her picture on the cover of Harper's Bazaar caught the eye of the wife of movie producer Howard Hawks, who cast her in To Have and Have Not (1944) and created the movie star Lauren Bacall. She was not a regular beauty; her face was too broad, her mouth too wide, her eyes too far apart, and her ears too big. She was also neither blonde nor dark, but sallow and mousy.

Catherine Deneuve is the opposite. Everything about her is perfect: eyes beautifully set in perfect oval face, mouth neat, skin transparently fair, a body that could serve as the template for the first blow-up doll. Only her name and her hair colour were fake. She was born Catherine Dorléac, daughter of stage and screen actor Maurice Dorléac and his actress wife, whose maiden name she eventually took. Deneuve got her first screen role when she was only 13, and she has been in movies non-stop for 50 years. She never thought of doing anything else, and at 63 she still doesn't. She says she never works more than half of any year, but what she does with the other half is unknown.

Bacall was 19 when she played her first scene opposite Humphrey Bogart; within a few weeks she was in his bed and his marriage to Mayo Methot was over. Already she was doing stuff that would reverberate through the decades. You can still see her as Slim Browning standing in the doorway, saying: "You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you Steve? You just put your lips together and ... blow."

Slim Browning - hotel thief, real name Marie - has won her new name from Harry Morgan (Bogart) because, when faced with extreme danger, she lost no smidgen of her cool. The name she was given was that of Hawks's second wife, the person who identified her as a Hawksian woman in the first place. Slim's coolness and courage also give her the right to initiate a sexual encounter, and to challenge her male partner, who has to challenge her right back. Their mutual wariness and occasional gruffness with each other builds the sexual tension between them to the point that when they finally get it on, we all feel like cheering.

Try as I might, I can't remember anything said by any character that Deneuve ever played, but the difference is as much one of era as of talent or personality. When Bacall came into the limelight the war was still on, and women were still self-sufficient, bouncing around in short skirts and chunky heels, talking loud and drawing a crowd. Before the Hays Code sanitised the movies in 1934, a series of remarkable actresses, including Bebe Daniels, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, Norma Shearer and Jean Harlow, had created female characters who managed to be tough, funny and sexy all at once.

In a way, I can see how Ruby Keeler would ber included in this group. She usually played the sassy virgin to counter-balance the more "experienced" dames embodied by Ginger Rogers or Joan Blondell. I love Ruby Keeler's films. I love Ruby Keeler as a movie star. But a remarkable actress she wasn't.

The type of spunky working girl was established by ex-chorus-girl Joan Crawford in the 1930s - most unforgettably as Flämmchen in Grand Hotel, which won best picture at the 1932 Academy Awards. Crawford was soon joined by Rosalind Russell, who was in her element playing feisty women such as the divorced reporter who ends up working for her ex-husband in His Girl Friday (1940), also directed by Hawks.

Hawks directed another unforgettably stylish, wisecracking, sexually aggressive female in Bringing up Baby (1938), namely Katharine Hepburn. In Only Angels Have Wings, made by Hawks the next year, Jean Arthur's character tells her male counterpart: "I'm hard to get, Geoff. All you have to do is ask me." These were women with their own agenda, who took risks knowingly, and took the consequences.

It was 1944 when Bacall joined the select group of Hawksian women. By the time Hawks had finished directing her in The Big Sleep two years later, time was running out for women who could give as good as they got. With all his clout in Hollywood, Hawks couldn't keep them alive. The war was over and women were back in the bedroom and the kitchen, working on the baby boom. Hawks's next starring ladies would be Marilyn Monroe (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953) and Joan Collins (Land of the Pharaohs, 1955) in the cinch-waisted, pointy-breasted, simpering 1950s.

By the time Bacall was teamed with Bogart again in 1948 in Key Largo, directed by John Huston [actually, they made Dark Passage for Delmer Daves one year earlier], hemlines had dropped and lipstick was pink, and nobody knew what to do with her. All she had to do in Key Largo was mime the family feeling and warm-hearted wifely innocence that went with high-heeled rope-soled espadrilles and a scraped-back hairstyle that showed her big ears. The thing Bacall always knew was how to pace a scene, how to time her lines, how to balance a word with a look. She didn't emote in any obvious way. It was all in the stillness, the upward glance, the few words. She had some successes in the 1950s, notably in Young Man with a Horn (1950), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Designing Woman (1957), but they only went to prove that nobody was writing films for grown-up women. [I've always found Designing Woman to be an especially irritating film. I wouldn't have thought that the combined efforts of Bacall, Gregory Peck, Dolores Grey and Vincente Minnelli would result in anything this...shrill.]

Which is where Catherine Deneuve comes in. Her big breakthrough was Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), a masterpiece of romantic French whimsy devised, written and directed by Jacques Demy, in which 20-year-old Deneuve played Geneviève, the 16-year-old daughter of the proprietress of a shop called Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. She and her mechanic boyfriend are in love and want to get married but he is called up for military service in Algeria. They go to bed together, he leaves, she bids him farewell at Cherbourg railway station - et voilà, she is pregnant. In fact, Deneuve had just given birth to her son by Roger Vadim when she started work on the movie.

Geneviève was a role for a French Olivia Newton John, and Deneuve was probably the nearest thing they had, but without a voice. What she did have was hair, as much hair comparative to the rest of her as any Barbie doll, and bleached beyond an inch of its life. The mass of hair did all the acting and most of the dancing for her. Under the hair was the perfect face, virtually expressionless, endlessly caressed by the camera. Though the plot requires Geneviève to jump the gun and have premarital sex with her boyfriend, Deneuve conveys not one scintilla of sexual desire. She might as well be going to the dentist as going to lose her virginity. Bacall could signify sexual interest with a glance; Deneuve cannot project it at all. This is not so much a matter of personality as of changed priorities.

Deneuve's film career began in 1963, when Roger Vadim cast her as Virtue in his film Le Vice et la Vertu. He had already moulded one young actress into the phenomenon called Brigitte Bardot, and it was only to be expected that he would create the Deneuve brand as well. Once he had identified Deneuve as Virtue, given her a baby and dumped her, she would continue in the same mould through film after film - meek, passive, expressionless. With a brow never furrowed and not a single laugh-line, she would take over from Bardot in 1985 as the face of Marianne, the symbol of the French republic, and her face would still be on the money 15 years later.


Deneuve's is what they call "time-less beauty"; she preserves it by keeping her revs very low. She comes to every role immaculately prepared, and she follows every directorial instruction to the letter. She begins by underplaying and allows the director, in her own phrase, to push her up, if he can be bothered. She has been described as "a receptacle for every conceivable imagination", and this is her strength in cinematic terms. Her cinematic presence is like the dress "the colour of time" that she wore in another of Jacques Demy's fantasies, Peau d'Âne, on which different images and colours were projected. Her effortless blankness allows her to take the imprint of her viewers' fantasies, and so she has achieved a reputation as one of the sexiest film actresses ever to grace the screen.

Belle de Jour (1967) has a reputation for being one of the sexiest films ever made, simply because Deneuve behaves throughout like a pre-adolescent girl. Through the prism of the 21st century, the film seems oddly contrived; what is now a cliche - the child who, subjected to the sexual advances of an adult, then becomes a frigid woman who is only turned on by squalor - is coyly exploited as a series of fetishistic images that juxtapose her fantasy life with her actual life. As Séverine Serizy, Deneuve moves through the imagery of what are meant to be her own fantasies like a sleepwalker. By her own account, director Lous Buñuel could not relate to her at all and never told her what he wanted. Unconsciously, she gave him what he wanted, which was as little as possible. The fantasies were his, after all.

The decision to have her dressed by Yves Saint-Laurent adds a bizarre dimension to the nonexistent plot; we seem to be living within the pages of a glossy magazine, with product placement everywhere. Everywhere Séverine goes, she is conspicuous by her catwalk presence, from her shiny patent leather pumps to the helmet that holds in her mane of Barbie-doll hair. The sex scenes in the brothel consist of her stripping to the full armour of suspender-belt, knickers, stockings and padded brassiere, and allowing ugly men to kiss her. In one extraordinarily unsexy sequence, she is required to process through the rooms of a ducal chateau dressed in nothing but a cloak of black georgette and a crown of white roses. She trots ahead of the camera like a lamb to the slaughter. She should have used a body double; it is typical of her passive obedience that she didn't. Lauren Bacall would never have done that for anyone, would never have stripped and had them shoot her bare arse from the back as she trotted through take after take. The Hawksian woman would have decked any man who asked her.

Buñuel used Deneuve again in Tristana (1970), a far better film than Belle de Jour but much less successful. Again, his real subject was not Tristana but himself. What activates the film is Buñuel's deep hostility to the hypocrisy of Spanish provincial society. Deneuve acts as the surrogate for his child self, the innocent orphan who is seduced by her guardian, who tries to express her own sexuality with a younger man who uses her; mutilated and helpless, she is forced to regularise a union with the man who took her virginity. What remains in the memory is not the shocking last scene or Deneuve's performance, but Buñuel's evocation of 1930s Toledo, seen as through the lens of childhood, wonderfully shot by José F Aguayo. Again, Deneuve's impassivity is exactly what Buñuel needs. It is the still point in his turning world.

Lauren Bacall's film career foundered in the 1950s, and never recovered. She has since played cameo parts and had considerable success on the stage [including Tony Awards for the musicals Applause and Woman of the Year]. Meanwhile, Catherine Deneuve has been, as well as the face of the republic, the face of Chanel No 5, and most recently the face of cosmetics companies MAC and L'Oréal.

The Hawksian woman was an idea that flourished at a time of crisis, in the depression and during the war, when the full energies of women were needed if they were to survive. After the war she was supplanted by the female eunuch, weighed down with huge hair and false eyelashes, unequal to any challenge - all things to all men and nothing to herself.

For further reading...


Lauren Bacall has written two memoirs: By Myself was first published in 1978 and an updated edition was released in 2005, under the title By Myself...and Then Some. By Myself is an exemplar of the memoir genre. Bacall is candid and honest - sometimes brutally - about her life, her marriage to Bogart in 1945 until his death from cancer in 1957; her later marriage to and divorce from Jason Robards; her experience as a Jewish model in the garment district in the early 1940s; the sudden rise and slow ebb of her film career; and her very unexpected success in two Broadway musicals.

Bacall's second book, Now, was published in 1994 and in its introduction, she is quick to point out that it is not a sequel to By Myself. Rather, Now is Bacall looking at her life as it was in 1994, rather than a review of everything that had happened since 1978. Each book is a delightful read; Bacall is one of the few memoirists who doesn't use a ghost writer and doesn't need one. She simply tells her (remarkable) story.

Maria DiBattista writes about many Hawksian women in Fast Talking Dames (2001), a look at women's roles in films of the 1930s. Chronologically, she doesn't get to Bacall's 1944 debut, but many Hawks-directed performances are examined, including Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.

Howard Hawks's second wife, Nancy - aka Slim - the one who discovered Lauren Bacall on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, and on whom Bacall's character in To Have and Have Not was based, penned a memoir, Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life, as Slim Keith. I haven't read it yet - though I did pick up a copy last weekend - but, according to Ms. Bacall, "This is the story of an American original - a woman of rare wit, intelligence, and beauty. Some of the most important men of our time were drawn to Slim Keith; to know why, one need only read this thoroughly entertaining book." And why would Lauren Bacall lie to me on a dust jacket?