Hollywood Madonna (11 page)

Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back
opens in fogbound London, exquisitely photographed by J. Peverell Marley, with enough cones of light filtered through the gloom to spotlight Lola (Loretta), who emerges out of the swirling mist. She seems disoriented, and after speaking incoherently to Drummond, disappears into the night. Explanations are eventually forthcoming, if not always plausible. Lola is the niece of the man whose body Drummond finds in a spectacularly appointed mansion, the home of an Asian prince (Warner Oland, a popular Charlie Chan of the 1930s), who has disposed of the body and plays dumb when Drummond and the Bobbies arrive. This is the kind of film whose plot points were recycled in the “nobody believes me” movie, wherein husbands try to drive their wives mad (
Gaslight
,
Sleep
,
My Love
), and avengers make the innocent suffer for another’s actions (
The Secret Fury
,
A Woman’s Vengeance
).

The McGuffin, as Hitchcock would say, is an encoded radiogram confirming that the furs the Prince is importing are infected with cholera, and that they could, if unloaded, precipitate an epidemic. Drummond not only trumps Scotland Yard but gets Lola, while his sidekick, Archie (Charles Butterworth), has to defer consummating his own marriage to be Drummond’s best man. The film, which declared itself a “Darryl F.
Zanuck Production,” did not stint on sets; the prince’s mansion was a museum piece that looked as if it belonged to an eccentric millionaire. Although Loretta’s wardrobe was properly British, prim and unglamorous, it does not stop Drummond from proposing to her once he discovers that Lola shares his fondness for hollyhocks. Loretta’s British accent had improved considerably since
The Devil to Pay
. But she still hoped for one more chance to show her dream lover that she was a worthy costar. She did a year later, and again in the next decade—but then it was on radio.

Zanuck had nothing to do with
Caravan
(1934), which ranks high among Hollywood’s misconceived films as Fox’s disastrous foray into operetta, a genre best left to MGM with its resident warblers, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.
Caravan’s
director was the German-born Erik Charell, whose signature scrolls across the screen before the title appears, heralding his authorial status. Although few in the industry knew who he was, Charell was hired because he had been a successful director of European operetta, particularly in Berlin; his knowledge of film, however, was rudimentary. Ernst Lubitsch might have turned
Caravan
into inexpensive champagne that at least had some fizz; in Charell’s hands,
Caravan
was
vin ordinaire.

Caravan
was a clone of Sigmund Romberg’s
The Student Prince
, the paradigm of the prince and the commoner romance that is doomed from the start because of the disparity in the lovers’ classes. In
Caravan
, the sexes are reversed. A frivolous Hungarian countess (Loretta) discovers that she can only inherit the ancestral estate, with its profitable vineyards, if she marries before her twenty-first birthday. Forced to find a husband within a day, she balks at marrying a lieutenant from a prominent family, preferring a gypsy (Charles Boyer), solely because of his music—especially one song that begins as a violin solo and then swells into a chorus of gypsies, lip synching badly and acting like last-minute recruits from a road show. In his attempt to establish himself as a Hollywood director, Charrel resorted to elaborate tracking shots, with the camera pulling back from rows of gypsies with artificial smiles. Not knowing how to deal with a script that, without music, would have been a seventy-minute feature, Charell threw in production numbers, drawing on original music and snippets of familiar classics—for example, one of Listz’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, which, instead of relieving the tedium, increased it.

The countess embraces the gypsy life, even exchanging her imperial wardrobe for a peasant blouse and skirt. Soon she realizes that she and her gypsy lover are from two different worlds and that her best bet is the lieutenant. From the way Boyer was made up, with a hairstyle that was
a combination of Julius Caesar’s and Napoleon’s, one would never know that he would inherit Valentino’s title, the Great Lover. That would not happen until
The Garden of Allah
and, especially,
Algiers
.

Perhaps a better director might have helped Loretta reveal the various stages of the countess’s maturation, as she comes to realize that she can only marry within her class. But there was no character development, only a last-minute epiphany that writers resort to when they have driven the plot into a dead end from which it needs to be towed.

Loretta’s most prestigious film during her first year at Fox was
The House of Rothschild
(1934), although it has never been associated with her, but with the great stage and screen actor, George Arliss, who played both Mayer Rothschild and his son, Nathan. Arliss had a magisterial voice that lent credence, at least vocally, to the historical figures he was so adept at portraying: Alexander Hamilton, Voltaire, Disraeli, and now the dual role of the founder of an international banking empire and his most successful son. In many ways, it was a daring film, addressing the subject of anti-Semitism, which became increasingly prevalent after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. In that same year, Jews were dismissed from universities, and anyone with Jewish grandparents was denied employment. Book burnings replaced bonfires; works by Thomas Mann and Arnold Zweig were tossed into the flames. The rise of German anti-Semitism, fruitlessly denounced by the League of Nations, was too controversial a topic for the major studios, whose heads (MGM’s Louis Mayer, the brothers Warner, Universal’s Carl Laemmle, Columbia’s Harry Cohn, Paramount’s Adolf Zukor) were Jews. They feared a backlash, particularly in view of the growing popularity of the “radio priest,” Rev. Charles Coughlin, whose broadcasts grew more anti-Semitic as the persecution of German Jews intensified.

Zanuck, on the other hand, did not shy away from controversy, tackling postwar anti-Semitism (
Gentleman’s Agreement
[1947]), racism (
Pinky
[1949],
No Way Out
[1950]), and mental illness (
The Snake Pit
[1948]); he even demythologized 7 December 1941, the “day that will live in infamy,” in
Tora! Tora! Tora!
(1970). Zanuck was not, to quote the subtitle of Neal Gabler’s
An Empire of Their Own
, one of “the Jews who invented Hollywood,” men who, despite their extraordinary inventiveness, preferred to downplay their Judaism. They wished to avoid antagonizing Christian audiences who preferred their clergymen to be white and either Catholic or Protestant, and Jews who wished to remain as anonymous as possible—as was apparent even in a movie like Columbia’s
The
Jolson Story
(1946), in which little is made of Al Jolson’s religion, with his parents behaving like a comedy team doing ethnic shtick.

At Warner’s, Zanuck produced two major films in which the main characters were Jews:
The Jazz Singer
(1927) with Al Jolson and
Disraeli
(1929) with George Arliss. Zanuck had no qualms about making
The House of Rothschild.
The film premiered in March 1934. Since Twentieth Century Films was still a year away from merging with Fox, it was distributed by United Artists; it also proved a critical and commercial success. As a historical film,
The House of Rothschild
was better documented than the typical Hollywood product depicting a straight Cole Porter in
Night and Day
(1946) and a straight Larry Hart in
Words and Music
(1948), or a Woodrow Wilson (
Wilson
[1944]) promoting his long cherished dream of a League of Nations in a film that makes no mention of the fact that the United States did not join the organization.

The House of Rothschild
opens with Frankfurt Jews being herded into “Jew Street” (actually,
Judenstadt, “Stadt”
suggesting a city, or, in this case, a ghetto) before curfew. Among the residents of the
Judenstadt
are the Rothschilds: Mayer with his wife Gudula (the great character actress, Helen Westley, who played a memorable wife and mother without resorting to caricature), and their five sons, of whom Nathan becomes the most prominent. Perhaps if there had been a stronger Jewish creative presence behind the film it might have seemed more authentic. The writer, Nunnally Johnson, director Alfred Werker, producer Darryl Zanuck, and star George Arliss were all Christians, as were some of the supporting cast, including Boris Karloff, Loretta, Robert Young, C. Aubrey Smith, and Florence Arliss. Someone might have suggested that Arliss not play Mayer as if he were Shylock in a touring production of
The Merchant of Venice
, appearing before an audience that considered Jews a colorful but alien race. Mayer’s groveling before the tax collector is understandable in view of the latter’s patent contempt for Jews, but there is a way to bow before authority and at the same time keep one’s dignity. Before Mayer dies, he instructs his sons to establish five branches of the Rothschild dynasty, with each son staking out a city: London, Paris, Vienna, Frankfurt, and Naples (which turned out to be short-lived). Since Arliss would also play Nathan, the London branch becomes the most significant in terms of plot.

Loretta, in a blonde coif with curls, was part of the subplot. Johnson knew that audiences expected a love interest, not the kind between Mayer and Gudula, or Nathan and Hannah (well played by Florence
Arliss, George’s wife), but between a nubile young woman and her suitor: Loretta as Nathan’s daughter, called Julie in the film, and another Young, Robert, as the historical Captain Henry Fitzroy, a Christian. The difference in their religions left audiences wondering, “Will they or won’t they marry?” They will, but at the end.

Historical films, like historical novels, collapse time, simplify genealogies, and romanticize the past, as if it were a myth needing to be recreated rather than an aggregate of facts awaiting fresh interpretation. To Johnson’s credit, history, for the most part, is not upended, even though three decades—roughly 1783 to 1815—are subjected to year-jumping, which is not always that easy in an eighty-eight-minute movie. Loretta’s character’s name, Julie, contrasts sharply with the preponderance of Jewish names, such as Mayer, Nathan, Gudula, Solomon, and Amschel. Nathan Rothschild’s daughter was Hannah, not Julie. Since Hannah was also the name of Nathan’s wife, Johnson probably decided that two Hannahs in one film could be confusing. Although Julie refers to herself as a “Jewess,” Loretta does not come across as one. “Julie,” a name without any ethnic or religious associations, would suit Loretta Young better than “Hannah.” Also, the historical Hannah was born in 1815. Since Loretta was almost twenty-one (but could pass for eighteen) when she was making
The House of Rothschild
, Julie must have been born at the end of the eighteenth century.

No matter. Loretta had virtually nothing do in the film, although she did appear in the final sequence, shot in Technicolor, in which Nathan is honored for averting a financial crisis in Britain. Color added nothing to the film. Zanuck probably wanted to test the new three-strip Technicolor process, a vast improvement over two-strip Technicolor, before introducing it in
Ramona
(1936), Fox’s first color feature film, with Loretta in the title role. The finale is anticlimactic;
The House of Rothschild
reaches its peak in the penultimate scene, with Nathan at the London Exchange. Since Napoleon’s victory over Wellington seems inevitable, “Sell!” becomes the buzzword. When Nathan, who has his own way of obtaining information (via carrier pigeon), learns that Wellington has actually defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, he immediately countermands with “Buy!” Apparently, there was a rumor spread by the anti-Rothschild faction that Nathan knew in advance about Wellington’s defeat, but withheld the information to fill his own coffers. The rumor has now been discredited; even if Johnson believed it, which is doubtful, adding it the screenplay would have marred his loving portrait of the Rothschilds. Still, it was the climax, not the coda, that audiences took home with them.

The historical Nathan Rothschild was an enigmatic figure, who behaved as if he had grown a carapace over his skin to deflect the slings and arrows of bigots and competitors. Arliss portrayed that aspect of Nathan’s character brilliantly. From Arliss’s strikingly angular face, one could easily see that Nathan was a man who did not wear his heart on his sleeve for daws to peck at. Rather, he cultivated an inscrutable look that discouraged those expecting a bear hug and a warm handshake and challenged others who just wanted a deal without feigning bonhomie. The latter he understood; the former, he held at arm’s length.

The House of Rothschild
was a film in which Loretta was third billed, after Arliss and Boris Karloff, who plays Nathan’s nemesis, Baron Ledrantz, and is eventually brought to his knees. If Americans responded to the film—and they did—it was not because of Loretta, but because the plot of
The House of Rothschild
epitomized the American dream: Start small, suffer persecution, triumph over your oppressors, and relax in the gilded cocoon of financial independence.

The House of Rothschild
established Loretta as Twentieth Century’s costume queen. One of her better costume dramas was
Clive of India
(1935), which chronicled the life of the so-called “conqueror of India,” who had subjugated southern, then northern India when he was twenty-six. By the time he was thirty-four, he was Lord Clive, lauded for bringing the subcontinent under British rule. As in most biopics, time is collapsed, details omitted, and historical figures reduced to walk-ons (Burgoyne) or references (George III). But most of the film was credible even when it turned hagiographic. Both Clive (Ronald Colman) and his wife Margaret (Loretta) had real character arcs to trace, Colman especially. At first, Clive is a romantic, a combination of Lord Byron and Werther. Suffering from
Weltschmertz
, which was probably clinical depression, he attempts suicide (a prefiguration of his manner of death, only hinted at in the film), but the pistol fails to discharge. All Clive has to see is a picture of his friend’s sister, Margaret, before he declares that she will be his wife. Romeo and Juliet were not the only ones whose eye contact set a plot in motion. Similarly, Margaret takes one look at Clive and succumbs. Since Colman was one of Loretta’s first crushes, she had no problem playing the love-stricken lady—even though her first scene required her to bathe a dog, which seemed like an inauspicious beginning. But Loretta, again in a blonde wig, was game, acting as if she had been bathing dogs since she was a child.