What's My Wednesday? #4: Her Dulcet Tones

Color me organized this week - I'm actually and at last running Our New Wednesday Feature on a Wednesday.  And it's a little love, my little loves...

All Hallow's Roz

Funny, really - you don't think of Rosalind Russell as someone who spent too much time in the stills gallery, at least doing this kind of theme-y leg art.

Birthday Girl: Auntie Roz

Miss Rosalind Russell would have been 105 today, and a chance to think about her life and work is never something to pass up. 

It's no secret how fond I am of Roz, and I know I trade far too frequently in superlatives, but still:  she was, to my mind, Hollywood's most sensible star, the one least taken in by fame (I'd accord that honor to Miss Lillian Gish, who was equally dismissive of her own - titanic - powers, but who was instead almost fatally smitten by those of Mr. D.W. Griffith).  She was a marvel of versatility. Just when she seemed doomed to a second-string career as an affable leading lady, she lashed out with a tense star turn in Craig's Wife (I prefer her Harriet to Crawford's), and then, just when drama seemed her forte, out from nowhere came the over-the-top virtuoso farcicality (is that a word? It ought to be.) of Sylvia Fowler and The Women.  She could play biopics, classics, screwball, and even, after a fashion, musicals, you name it, and she created a gallery of characters whose names still resonate:  Harriet, Sylvia, Hildy Johnson, Ruth Sherwood, Mame Dennis, Momma Rose (although the last was perhaps more brave than well-advised - she's good or better than good in Gypsy - but then there's Merman. Game over.).

While of course there's no denying the supremacy of Auntie Mame, I have a very fond spot for Roz in Picnic, a picture in which she pulls together all her talents - comic and tragic, ridiculous and heartbreaking - to play spinster schoolteacher Rosemary.  She's Sylvia without the millions, Mame without whimsy, a roiling mix of pedestrian convention and raw need.  It's a fearless, fantastic performance, played without a trace of vanity (except the character's own, very particular sort), one of the great supporting roles played with the kind of bravura only a true star could bring to it.

Roz was the guest of honor at a party in 1974, a gala do at the Rainbow Room; Joan Crawford, her old co-star and friend, was a guest. When Crawford saw the photos the next morning, unflattering images of Russell showing all too clearly the puffiness cause by her arthritis medication and Joan herself looking roc-like and raddled, she ended her public life, at one go.  Roz soldiered on, for two more years.  They make an interesting pair, those two - polar opposites in stardom, totally different, but genuinely peers.  About the only part that either played that was interchangeable was Harriet Craig - it's equally hard to imagine Russell as Mildred Pierce or Crawford conquering Broadway in Wonderful Town.  Still, they share something, a kind of invincibility, a steely core.  The difference, though, is that even with all the folderol of stardom, the gloss that came from having been a Metro star, the decades of acclaim - Russell kept her sense of her own self, a bright girl from Connecticut, and her sense of humor.

Hell; she may, per TV Week, have hosted "Women of the Year" in 1973, but she's a woman for any year, and it's a privilege to wish her many happy returns, wherever she is.  She had a gift for living and imparting life:  it's a banquet, after all, and most poor sons of bitches...

The Star Parade

The inimitable Roz, superb in a hat that I think Tom and Lorenzo would have a name for, a muff for the ages, and a somewhat imaginary pet.

Isn't she just the best?

Did You Know...

...that in France, Mame Dennis is Satan?

They Met at MGM

Aren't they spectacular? That's what stars look like, kids.

What I don't understand is how they could have made a picture together that I have literally never heard of. Granted, it's not reputed to be in the top few of either of their oeuvres, but still: it's Roz and Clark. Not to mention Peter Lorre, Jessie Ralph, and my favorite smarmy 30s ethnique, Eduardo Cianelli, all directed by Clarence Brown, art directed by Cedric Gibbons, and gowned (well, at least Roz and Miss Ralph) by Adrian.

It's called They Met in Bombay, which certainly sounds promising.


It sounds pretty diverting, too; the leads are rival jewel thiefs, it features exotic settings (the title city, followed by a chase across the China Seas to Hong Kong), and it even has a patriotic twist when Clark reforms and ends up a war hero.

It sounds like a kind of combination of a screwball caper like Palm Beach Story or Jewel Robbery combined with In Which We Serve, but how bad can a 1941 MGM A-feature like this be? Especially if it features a stateroom-surprise scene?

Not to mention the prospect of Roz in a very Sylvia-Fowler-recalling hooded frock, Clark reprising his It Happened One Night deshabille, and Peter Lorre in yellowface?

Has anybody seen it? Is it a hidden demi-gem or something worth giving a miss? Enquiring minds want to know!

Identity Crises of the Stars

Sometimes whole weeks would go by in 1940 when Ann Sothern wasn't entirely sure that she hadn't started drifting into an uneasy compromise halfway between Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell.

But then she would give herself a good shake and visualize the glorious future that would take her out the B Unit and right to the top on television. If it meant having to be friends with Lucille Ball, she'd just have to grit her teeth and get on with it.

Twenty-odd years later, if she even for a moment wondered if it had all been worth it, all she had to do was glance down at her insinuating gaze on the cover of TV Guide to know the answer:

Absolutely.

The Wonder of Roz, or Life as a Banquet

Rosalind Russell ended her career one of the Biggest of the Big - Wonderful Town's gala Ruth, Auntie Mame, Mama Rose.

I kind of love, though, that she spent so long paying her dues. It took the Hollywood bigwigs a good five years to realize that their serious dark-haired leading lady was actually a genius comedienne, a romantic lead, and a stunner to look at.

In the meantime, she played an awful lot of what she later called "Lady Mary" parts - you know, the proper dull stick who says of whichever floozie Jean Harlow is playing, "She's rahtha vulgar, isn't she?" just before being dumped by the leading man.

She was certainly pleasant, and lovely enough to look at, but somehow a shade generic. A workmanlike lead in straight parts in light comedy, she made a decent stab at drama - her Harriet Craig is less hysterical than Crawford's later incarnation, but somehow even more disturbed. But still she hadn't really clicked.

She wasn't, it has to be admitted, all that easy to photograph; in 1936, Fox thought nothing of releasing this still, in which she looks like a mildly bad-tempered Scarsdale matron.

She was well on her way to being not only just a leading lady, but a rather second-tier one, playing second fiddle to bigger names like Myrna Loy (who did her own years before the mast before MGM finally figured out how to make her score).

She must have wondered how long she'd have to do novelty stills, just one rung up from the calendar shots and leg art assigned to just-arrived starlets...

Even in sure-fire settings like the Big Telephone Scene, she seems to lack confidence, the total self assurance of the real Top Thesp.

But then - finally - after a string of now-forgotten pictures like Man-Proof, Live, Love, and Learn, and Four's a Crowd - came Sylvia Fowler, The Women. Roz clicked, and in the face of big time competition; the biggest really: in wifeliness, from Mrs. Thalberg; in glamour, from Paulette Goddard; in evil, from Crawford herself; in comedy, from Mary Boland and Marjorie Main and the whole ridiculous mise en scène. And Lady Mary walked away on top.

Don't, it turned out, force her to be proper, or even myrnaloyishly genial. Let her loose. Let her be awkward, loud, cackling, mean: hilarious.

Suddenly, when Hurell photographed her, you saw what had always been there, waiting:

Screen gold. Then came His Girl Friday, which added romance and smarts to her mix, and there was no stopping her. Oh, there was still the occasional misfire - anyone for Hired Wife (1940) or Tell it to the Judge! (1949)? Sometimes she over-reached; her Mourning Becomes Electra did favors neither to Eugene O'Neill nor her career; even at the end, her last real starring vehicle, 1967's Rosie!, is as putrid a film as any.

But from 1940 on, Rosalind Russell was a name to conjure with, the joy of audiences and critics both, the star you could equally imagine next door or at the most glamourous of Mame's Manhattan soirées. Isn't she somebody, still, you'd love to have a drink at the Plaza with, were it still, say, 1957?

Image du Jour: Roz - is that you?

One day, if this picture is to be believed, Rosalind Russell - perhaps running late after a little too much fun the night before - raced into makeup and, paying no attention, sat one chair to the right of where she was supposed to be. Ninety minutes later, she arrived on set, much to everyone's confusion, done up as Ann Sheridan.

Well, that's as near as I can figure. What do you suppose happened? 'Cause that sure ain't the Roz I'm used to...