November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 91
BOOKS
her long-time lover, the newspaper magnate
William Randolph Hearst, on Garbo’s behalf.
There’s plenty more pathos: from talent
agent Charles K. Feldman, lamenting Gary
Cooper’s terminal cancer diagnosis in 1961,
to Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle,
imploring director William Wyler to join him in
sponsoring Jews to escape Europe in 1938. And
in 1949, actor Gilbert Roland writes a wistful
letter to his former lover and co-star Clara
Bow, then residing in a psychiatric hospital in
Connecticut. “It would be very pleasant seeing
that,” he writes of The Plastic Age (1925), the film
they made together. “And then it might be very
beautiful, and suddenly it might be very sad.”
If Hollywood life was hostile, the workers
often responded with humour. A few lines from
Groucho Marx to Jerry Lewis in 1962, when the
latter was in a legal wrangle with his studio,
contain almost as many gags as you could wish
for (“I hope your suit with Paramount turns out
more successfully than the one I’m wearing”),
and Humphrey Bogart banters fruitily with
John Huston while trying to offer suggestions
for Beat the Devil (1953). Other missives are
wholly conceived as in-jokes and spoofs.
Mindful of the Huac in 1951, George Cukor
updates his screenwriter Garson Kanin on the
progress of Pat and Mike and The Marrying Kind
- both released the following year – in the style
of a spy communiqué. Mabel Normand presents
herself as a potential starlet to Zukor in 1922: a
beauty at 7ft 9in tall, with a large nose, a receding
chin, and hair “just like Sid Grauman’s”. It’s a gag
Henry Fonda repeated in a telegram to William
Wyler after his daughter Jane was born during
the shooting of the director’s Jezebel (1938): “I
would like to work for you I am eighteen minutes
old.” Wyler’s reply, signed “the Jezzies” is far
funnier and very cheeky about Jane’s father.
There’s a similar exchange later in the
book, between a genuine young hopeful and
director George Roy Hill. “It is all together
fitting and proper that you should ‘discover’
me,” writes the high-school thespian who
nevertheless self-deprecates at the crucial
moment: “I am a nobody ... I am not built like a
Greek God, and I can’t even grow a mustache.”
The young man’s name was Thomas Hanks,
and his subsequent success may prove the
value of being able to write a good letter.
Henry Fonda announces the birth of his daughter
SHOW PEOPLE
A History of the Film Star
By Michael Newton, Reaktion, 448pp,
ISBN 9781789141566
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
‘Star’, in the context of film,
is an incongruous word.
Actual stars, however
bright they shine, are
remote and cold; whereas
film stars – unlike their
predecessors in the theatre,
where the term originated
- feel terribly close. What
makes a film star, as opposed to a mere actor,
is the sense the audience has of warmth,
the illusion that we know these people.
Michael Newton’s Show People is not really the
history of the film star its subtitle promises, but a
collection of 40 essays covering 50 major figures
in more or less chronological order. It starts with
Mary Pickford, the first true film star, and ends
with Andy Serkis, for Newton an example of what
he calls “posthuman stars”. Running throughout
is a concern with the emotions cinema stirs, the
attachments it creates in us, the ways it shows
people. Show People could be seen as both a sequel
and a riposte to David Thomson’s 2006 book
on Nicole Kidman, which was among other
things an attempt to cut through the pieties of
film criticism to talk about the basic sexiness of
cinema, the way it panders to fantasies of kiss kiss
and bang bang. Newton wants to acknowledge
the attraction of stars, but also to argue that sex
is only a part of the picture: we sympathise or
identify with them; our fantasies may be that
they are people we could hang around with. So
in his chapter on Katharine Hepburn and Cary
Grant, he suggests that what draws us to them
is their sheer “loveliness” – a word not often
recruited to the critical vocabulary, but one that
does get close to the heart of what makes Holiday
and Bringing up Baby (both 1938) such fun.
The book’s richest chapters are about pairs
of actors rather than individuals – richest not
just in what they say about particular players or
particular films, but in their deep implications.
In a chapter on Greer Garson and Joan Fontaine,
Newton considers the relationship between love
and memory in Random Harvest (1942), in which
amnesiac soldier Ronald Colman marries Greer
Garson, then recovers his memory and forgets
her; and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948),
in which Joan Fontaine loves a concert pianist
who every time they meet cannot place her. From
the battle between love and forgetting Newton
pirouettes into the transience of pop culture
(and of human life) and the rise of the instant,
forgettable celebrity. In an essay pairing Janet
Leigh and Tippi Hedren, meanwhile, Newton
nods at Hitchcock’s penchant for torturing
blondes but is more interested in detecting in
Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) foreshadowings
of novel approaches to narrative, more fractured,
more open-ended, and a changing sense of
what a star might represent to an audience.
A number of the essays are reflections on a
single film, and the ostensible star can seem
rather beside the point: the chapter on Gloria
Swanson is really about Sunset Boulevard (1950).
Other chapters move away from Hollywood
to stars of other cinemas, among them the
Indian stars Nargis and Raj Kapoor, who share a
chapter, and Hara Setsuko and Mifune Toshiro,
who get chapters of their own; and to animal
stars Cheeta the chimpanzee, who befriended
Tarzan in the films of the 1930s, and Asta, the
wire-haired fox terrier in The Thin Man (1934).
The quality of the essays is patchy, but at his
best Newton has subtlety, originality and a wide
range of reference, as readers of his excellent
BFI Classic on Kind Hearts and Coronets (2003)
will know. He has the knacks of apt quotation –
citing Brecht apropos of Carole Lombard: “One
may state that tragedy deals with the suffering
of mankind in a less serious way than comedy”
- and sharp summary. A lot of the pleasure
lies in arguing with him (Swanson breaks the
fourth wall at the end of Sunset Boulevard? Isn’t
it rather that she is playing to an imaginary
camera that happens to occupy the same space
as the real one?). In a few places, though, he
does get things wrong, as when, discussing
masculinity and Woody Allen, he appears to
suggest that his current shabby reputation is
based solely on an unproven allegation of child
abuse. At odd times, the thinking stops short:
it’s not clear precisely why he thinks Vivien
Leigh’s Blanche DuBois is “simply one of the
greatest pieces of acting in any American film”.
Newton’s such a good critic that the book really
ought to be better. From some of the recurrent
ideas and images – love and forgetting, the
actor as marionette – it feels as though he is
groping towards a more sophisticated book,
about the meaning of acting and its relationship
TELEGRAM FROM HENRY FONDA: THE WILLIAM WYLER PAPERS, MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, AMPAS. COURTESY OF JANE FONDA.Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Holiday to life. That ought to be worth waiting for.
Newton acknowledges the
attraction of stars, but argues that
sex is only a part of it: we also
sympathise or identify with them
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