I’ve been thinking a lot of late about “Jack.”
In May, 2020, my big sister mentioned Fedora (1978), and sent along a link to a review which I will not read, until I write my own.
About two years ago, I bought the DVD from Barnes & Noble, at an exorbitant price ($23?), because amazon didn’t have it, no way, no how. I recently determined that amazon now has it at a reasonable price.
Several months ago, Grand Rapids Anonymous also brought up Fedora, while persuasively arguing that Billie Wilder was the seventh-greatest director of all time.
I finally saw it about three months ago. All I can tell you is that it’s a suicide mystery about a reclusive, Garboesque Golden Age Hollywood movie star (Marthe Keller), with brilliant plot twists.
I wish Wilder had retired after this, because the next picture he made, Buddy, Buddy (1981), a black comedy starring Lemmon (as a target) and Matthau (as a hit man), was awful.
This one stars Wilder’s first alter ego, Bill Holden, who was wonderful in it, along with Keller and Hildegard.
I’m convinced that Hildegard was doing stand-in duty for Marlene, whom Wilder would have begged to do it. She’d co-starred in his pictures, A Foreign Affair (1948) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957). However, by then, she was very insecure about her looks, as Max Schell would learn the hard way.
Hildegard was a Marlene knock-off, a German singer-dancer-actress, who gave live performances. She’s listed in the credits as “Hildegard Knef,” but when a news magazine (60 Minutes?) did a puff piece on her, circa 1970, Nana (1893-1976) referred to her simply as “Hildegard.”
It’s not a spoiler for me to call Fedora a suicide mystery, because it opens with Fedora leaping to her death in front of a train, just like the ending of the talkie version of Anna Karenina (1935), starring Garbo, who had starred in the silent version in 1927 with John Gilbert (Love).
No movie performer was ever as mysterious or as intriguing, in silents or talkies, to men and women alike, as Garbo.
Barry Detweiler is a middle-aged, down-on-his luck producer who travels to the Greek island where Fedora lives in seclusion, to try and get her to star in a remake of Anna Karenina. In his younger days, friends called Detweiler “Dutch.” When he meets Fedora 30 years later, she calls him “Dutch.”
It’s been called a bookend piece to Sunset Boulevard.
I’m sure Wilder thought to himself, “If I hit a home run (or, at least, a triple) with Fedora, I’ve still got it!” It turned out to be his last hurrah.
Billie Wilder wasn’t the only director who made brilliant pictures about Golden Age Hollywood (there were Mr. Cukor and Vincente Minelli), but he made the greatest picture about it. And “Jack’s” shadow loomed large over both Fedora and A Star is Born (1937 and 1954).
In early 1937, Mr. Cukor saw Jack in a Hollywood sanatorium, where he was trying to dry out. It had such a profound effect on him that he told one of the people re-making his first picture, What Price Hollywood? (1932), and it was worked into the story that year, with Freddie March in the sanatorium. Then when he did his own re-make in 1954, he re-created the incident, with James Mason as “Jack.”
(I had remembered the 1954 version as Judy’s picture, with Mason along for the ride, but I saw it three times in the course of a month, last summer, and have reversed my judgment. The picture had a problem, and the problem was Judy. She was great most of the time when she was singing and dancing, but when she had heavy dramatic scenes to do, she fumbled. Mason carried her.)
When my big sister and I were kids, we read Jack’s quips in Bartlett’s Quotations. He needed no ghost-writer.
“Repartee is what you wish you’d said 24 hours earlier.”
“Why is there so much month left at the end of the money?”
“You can’t drown yourself in drink. I’ve tried; you float.”
“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”
“America is the country where you can buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar and use it up in two weeks.”
“A man must pay the fiddler. In my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra often had to be subsidized.”
“Dying is the last thing I will ever do.”
“Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.”
“I am thinking of taking a fifth wife. Why not? Solomon had a thousand wives and he is a synonym for wisdom.”
“I’ve read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.”
“In Genesis, it says that it is not good for a man to be alone; but sometimes it is a great relief.”
“My wife is the kind of girl who will not go anywhere without her mother, and her mother will go anywhere.”
“I would like to find a stew that will give me heartburn immediately, instead of at three o clock in the morning.”
“Love is the delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.”
“The way to fight a woman is with your hat. Grab it and run.”
“Brides aren’t happy - they are just triumphant.”
“Method acting? There are quite a few methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass, and some cracked ice.”
“My only regret in the theater is that I could never sit out front and watch me.”
“My wife was too beautiful for words, but not for arguments.”
“Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.”
“The good die young, because they see it’s no use living if you have got to be good.”
“The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women and so little time.”
In Fedora, someone reads one of his love letters to Fedora aloud, signed “Jack.”
Jack was John Barrymore (1882-1942). He was considered not only the prettiest of the Barrymores, but the most talented of the three.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), directed by John S. Robertson
Other Complete, Silent Classics (with One Exception) Available at WEJB/NSU:
C.B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914);
D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915);
D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (1916);
Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (1918);
Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920);
Buster Keaton's One Week (1920);
D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920);
F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1921);
The Kid (1921), Charlie Chaplin’s First Feature as Director;
Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s First Pictures Featuring the Evil Genius, Dr. Mabuse: Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Teil I (Dr. Mabuse, the Player, Part I); and Dr. Mabuse, Teil II: Inferno (both 1922, released one month apart) with English Subtitles;
James Cruze’s The Covered Wagon (1923);
John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924);
Buster Keaton’s The General (1926);
John Ford’s 1926 Western, 3 Bad Men;
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927);
F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927);
Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Dystopian Science Fiction Epic, Metropolis (1927), the Greatest S/F Picture Ever, Plus Its Soundtrack Suite;
Frank Borzage and Austin Strong’s Seventh Heaven (1927); and
Fritz Lang & Thea von Harbou’s First Talkie: M: Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931) (M: A City Searches for a Murderer).
3 comments:
There was a discussion about film noirs after 1965 and I brought up the movie "Fedora" as one lthat could be a possibility.That same discussion was ehen I suggested that Billy Wilder join your list of top directors.
So he ended with a bomb--most artists do.
--GRA
Probably some reader has already told you this, but I’ll mention it anyway: your Nana may have been thinking of the American cabaret singer known as Hildegarde (born Hildegarde Loretta Sell, 1906-2005); I recall seeing her on the Ed Sullivan show. The younger Hildegarde Knef, a German actress, was sometimes billed in US films as Hildegarde Neff, but to my knowledge never without a surname. She wrote two well-received autobiographies.
Thanks for the reminder, GRA. Sorry about the oversight. I just added a reference to you.
I haven't gotten around to writing an essay in honor of Wilder yet. He made so many masterpieces, classics, and other wonderful pictures!
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