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Now That's Acting!

Classic Films archive a century of acting styles. Pick and choose among the decades of cinema and you can see the last holdovers of declamatory stage acting; camera-oriented emoting in both flamboyant (John Gilbert) and restrained (Buster Keaton) modes; the talkie era’s celebration of the vernacular; the Group Theatre era of realistic acting and the common man (John Garfield); Strasberg and the Method; New Wave cool; newer and yet to be named styles of acting. In this piece I’ll revisit five notable performances in films, from the 20’s to the 50’s, that set high standards and mark evolutions in style.

Emil Jannings in Variety (1925)

This film is also called Variete, and imdb.com lists it as Jealousy.Jannings plays ‘Boss’ Huller, a trapeze artist, married to a younger woman (Lya de Putti). In the versions that played in Europe, she is his mistress. Her affair with another acrobat deranges Huller and leads to tragedy. Humiliation was Jannings’ defining theme; some of his best-known roles are men blistered by financial and moral calamities. In The Last Laugh (1924), The Way of All Flesh (1927), The Last Command (1928), Sins of the Fathers (1929), and The Blue Angel (1930) his characters fall from high position into poverty.In Othello (1923), Betrayal (1929), The Blue Angel, and, of course, Variety, he plays the cuckold.

Jannings is often compared to Charles Laughton. Both had been stage actors and brought a theatrical style to films. This can easily backfire, and, in fact, by the late teens there was a critical backlash against exaggerated acting in film. Jannings and Laughton played in a larger than life style, treading a line close to hamminess, while displaying a technical command of gesture, expression, timing, and, in the sound era, diction and dynamics that carried the audience with them. Jannings gave a series of powerful performances in German silents, and in his brief Hollywood career (1927-29) was hailed as the foremost actor on the screen. However, his accent was too big an obstacle for a sound career in Hollywood.

Variety is a good showcase for Jannings’ style. Without the whiskers and heavy makeup he sometimes used, we see Jannings as a contemporary bourgeois, and we can read the emotions that play on his broad face, from obsessive love for de Putti to smoldering rage when he learns the truth. He draws you to his eyes. Keeping his face largely immobile, he registers possessive, then dumbstruck, then lost, then furious with his eyes. With his hands, he is brusque, grabbing de Putti like she is a doll, slapping cards on the table in the cafe, or seizing food and drink. Contrast this with his Professor Rath in The Blue Angel, using those same muscular hands to hold a spoon and teacup with dainty attention.

Larger than life is a risky style outside of comedy. The general trend in screen acting tilts toward underplaying. To project emotion as did Jannings and Laughton requires training and a dominant will. George Arliss (in his biographical parts), Paul Muni (in The Life of Emile Zola), Orson Welles (as Kane and many others), Claude Rains (in Deception), Bette Davis (especially in All About Eve) and Albert Finney (in The Dresser) are in this tradition.

Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (1929)

Eagels is impossible to assess today. She became a Broadway legend playing Sadie Thompson in Rain. Between 1915 and 1929, the year of her death, she appeared in nine films, two of which (The World and the Woman and Fire of Youth) are preserved at Eastman House. A copy of Man, Woman and Sin (1927) circulates in collectors’ circles, but Eagels plays a conventional ‘fast woman’, and has nothing to work with.We are left with The Letter, her only surviving talkie. Here she gives a nuanced and gutsy performance and leaves us longing for more.

Playing an adulterous killer, she is repressed in the opening scene, soft-spoken, her hair combed back, making cool appraisals of her dense husband (Reginald Owen). Only her hands betray her agitation.In her one scene with Herbert Marshall, as the lover who intends to dump her, she builds the agitation to a frenzy.Later, in the courtroom and in jail, she regains her composure, but her hair is combed out and fuller.In the denouement, Eagels pulls off her shocker.With all her secrets out, and Owen at last aware of her treachery, she dispenses with appearances and harangues him with no mercy.Strident, twitching, pulling at the ends of her hair, she raises her voice to an unbearable raspy shriek.  The two of them face an awful future, because they’ll be together.

It is a commonplace to cite Bette Davis’ Mildred in Of Human Bondage (1934) as a groundbreaking role, and indeed, Davis unsparingly made Mildred a horror.  But Eagels’portrayal of Leslie in The Letter is a clear antecedent.  Had Eagels lived, she might have been considered for other adaptations of Maugham stories, reprising her Sadie Thompson in Rain (it went to Joan Crawford) or playing Mildred. We can only guess at the range of her talent.  She would have turned 40 in 1934, which would have limited her career in films.  In The Letter, she shows herself as a bold performer, confronting the audience head-on with her character’s nastiness.

Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man (1933)

Harlow’s transformation from stiff, upholstered clothes-horse to relaxed and sassy comedienne mirrors the talkies shift toward realism and the vernacular.  In almost all her pre-1932 films, she is stilted.  In The Public Enemy she is an embarrassment.  Then, in a run of terrific films (Red Headed Woman,Red Dust,Dinner at Eight), she found her voice and style.  In Hold Your Man, all the elements are in place.  The film is brisk and witty, ranging from comedy to drama as con man Eddie (Clark Gable) romances streetwise Ruby (Harlow).  Harlow’s walk is a saunter.  She fires up cigarettes and nails her lines with assured underplaying.

            EDDIE: You know all the answers, don’t you?

            RUBY: Sure, to dumb questions.

Ruby has seen it all and knows how to protect herself.  When vicious Gypsy (Dorothy Burgess) slaps her, she reacts with a left to the jaw.  Gypsy doesn’t learn.  The two meet again in women’s prison, and the same thing happens.

Harlow is direct, frank, wry, endearing.  She drops the g’s from her participles and says ‘ya’ for ‘you.’  Her humor connects strongly with the audience.  She is the perfect star for the comedies of the early 30’s.  She is in just the right key for this genre, playful, casual, never bearing down too hard on a line or a mood.  Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert, and Carole Lombard were also adept in this style.

Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Bogart’s Fred C. Dobbs is a career capstone and a major achievement in acting.  (The fact that it brought him no Oscar nomination, in a field that included Dan Dailey in When My Baby Smiles at Me, weighs heavily against the Academy’s critical judgment.)  Bogart won a succession of choice roles in the early 40’s, in High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca, which put him in the top rank of stars.  Sierra Madre did a lot more than consolidate his stardom.  It forced him to grow as an actor, to find and express his character’s descent from simple avarice to paranoia and mental collapse.

In the 40’s, clinical psychology fed into the plots of mysteries, social dramas, and even comedies and romances.  The Dobbs character was potentially much more terrifying than a stock villain, and Bogart takes us to the disturbing depths of the man.  With John Huston’s wonderful screenplay and direction, Bogart is fully engaged, and from the opening scenes, in which he is a hard-bitten scuffler down on his luck in Tampico, he puts a menacing edge on Dobbs.  He is equal to the challenge of Huston’s dialogue, which has the meandering quality of everyday speech.  A classic example is this complicated line, delivered as one long sentence:

            DOBBS: Do you believe what the old man who was doing all the talking at the

            Oso Negro said the other night about gold changin’ a man’s soul so’s he ain’t the

            same kind of a guy as he was before finding it?

Bogart delivers the line in two breaths by pausing after “about,” and makes it sound perfectly natural.   Had the movie continued in this manner, we would still be engrossed in its period detail and realistic acting.  But by the time Dobbs and his partners (Walter Huston and Tim Holt, both outstanding) have tapped into the mountain’s gold, the subplot of Dobbs’ mental deterioration has taken form.  It is developed carefully in the script and in Bogart’s acting.  Dobbs talks to himself, and he becomes as tense as a whipcord.  The first major flare up, the scene at the rock, is disturbing.  Curtin (Tim Holt) chases a gila monster under the rock where Dobbs has hidden his gold dust.  Dobbs thinks he’s being robbed.  He pulls a gun on Curtin and accuses him a voice of cold rage.  Bogart’s stare and his gut-tightened voice convince us that he’s capable of murder and that there’s no way to control him.

In Dobbs’ final scenes, Bogart’s physical appearance matches his mental collapse.  He is filthy – it is hard to think of a leading man in any film who looked this bad.  Dobbs’ eyes glitter out of a grimy, sunburned face with whiskers surrounding his mouth like an Emmett Kelly mask.  His clothes are torn and spattered in a mosaic of old sweat, grease, and dirt.  Worst of all is his hair, frazzled as if it matches his nerves, and dirty.  He looks like he would let loose a shower of trail dust if you shook him.

Bogart’s performance is not a trendsetter.  It’s an unrepeatable performance by a unique actor.  To sum up Bogart’s contributions to screen acting in his relatively brief star career (1940-1956, although he had been in films since 1928), one must credit his lead roles in gangster films, noirs, action pictures, and psychological dramas, and at that, one would still need to credit his brilliant forays into comic adventure (The African Queen) and romantic comedy (Sabrina).

James Stewart in Vertigo (1958)

James Stewart’s postwar career also led him into dark and obsessive character work, though in a direction different from Bogart’s. The pivotal film is Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which gives us both the folksy Stewart and a haunted, desperate Stewart in the extended fantasy sequence.  Stewart’s 50’s westerns, notably Winchester ’73 and The Naked Spur, were additional takes on neurotic, hard-edged anti-heroes.  Hitchcock’s Vertigo gave him his deepest look into the abyss; in fact, it’s a film about falling, and Stewart’s character is fated, we surmise, to never make it back to safety.  (For the reader who has not yet seen Vertigo, I will omit the crucial plot points.)

With Vertigo’s rise in critical estimation since its re-release in the 1980’s, Stewart’s performance as Scotty has become one of his most admired.  Hitchcock gives him many close ups, most of them shots of him gazing possessively at Kim Novak.  It’s a role of extreme emotions; rapture, obsession, agony.  A notable feature of the role is the silent bridge between the story’s halves.  Time it, and you find that Stewart does not speak for 14 minutes of screen time, from his struggle on the tower steps to the scene where he approaches Madeleine’s apartment building.  He gives a silent film performance, showing us depression and alienation with his eyes and his dejected posture.

Scotty is a strange part.  He’s an existential protagonist, detached in critical ways from everyone he meets, attempting hopelessly to patch together a new reality.  He’s wounded and defective from the start of the film, and he becomes cruel and unreasoning as the story progresses.  Hitchcock sees him as tragically unfulfilled, I think, unlike the typical lead role in the 50’s (or since), and Stewart builds this disoriented character with great care.  It is difficult to convey the complexities of Vertigo to those who haven’t seen it.  Hitchcock’s conception and Stewart’s acting continue to dazzle receptive audiences. 

One simply says of this performance, and the work of Emil Jannings, Jeanne Eagels, Jean Harlow, and Humphrey Bogart: see it.