I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the best directors in Hollywood. On location and in the studio it’s always fascinating to collaborate with gifted directors and then sit back and watch as the actors breathe life into my pages.
Linda Darnell, studio portrait
I’ve worked with directors who act as Freudian psychologists to elicit the proper emotions from actors. I’ve also seen directors who are more results oriented. They tend to block the actors–deeply choreographing their movements–thus treating actors like expensive props. I’ve witnessed directors bully actors into submission in order to get what they want. And I’ve seen directors who will sit down with their actors and spend endless hours discussing, analyzing, and torturing character and back story in order to excavate the core of the character’s soul.
Getting a great performance is a mysterious process. There is a synergy at work among film craftspeople that is impossible to define or capture in a bottle.
George Stevens, an often great director, was known for shooting endless takes of a single scene, but never explaining to his actors what was wrong with the previous takes or what he was looking to get from his performers. Joan Fontaine, in her autobiography, No Bed of Roses reports Stevens saying:
“I don’t know what’s wrong. Let’s shoot it again.”
Sometimes, Stevens would stop filming and go off all by himself, walk around in circles, or just stare into space.
Fontaine informs us that it was the great Carole Lombard who solved the mystery of what the legendary director was thinking during these breaks:
“You know what that s.o.b. is thinking about when he’s in one of his trances? Not a f****ng thing!”
Which brings us to director Douglas Sirk and actress Linda Darnell .
Director Douglas Sirk.
Sirk’s cycle of lush melodramas were reviled by reviewers during his lifetime but declared masterpieces by a new generation of hip post-modern scribes. Lesson: Film reviewers are, with rare exceptions, slaves to political and cultural fashions–usually left wing. They scrawl film reviews that are, at the core, glorified fashion blurbs. Don’t trust them. Trust your eyes and your heart.
In truth, Sirk’s melodramas are not masterpieces, but they are solid movies, great entertainment, and Sirk was a talented director who was able to draw consistently powerful performances from his actors. Rock Hudson turns in the best performances of his career in three of Sirk’s films. I recommend: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, and watch Sandra Dee earn her acting chops opposite a finely tuned Lana Turner in Imitation of Life.
Sirk, a stridently anti-Nazi German emigre–his wife was Jewish– settled in Hollywood like so many other European actors, musicians, and directors.
Linda Darnell, (1923-1965) real name Monetta Darnell, a stunning small town Texas beauty, was hounded into Hollywood by a crazed, alcoholic mother who was determined that her daughter achieve what she never could.
Interpolation
There is a special place in hell for stage mothers. There is no forgiveness for these selfish and greedy parents.
End Interpolation
Darnell came to Hollywood–with a beloved pet chicken hidden in a suitcase–when she was just fifteen years old, after being spotted by a Fox talent scout. She clawed her way to the top, and when she starred opposite Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand, Darnell became a genuine Hollywood star.
But personal problems–a parasitic family, a penchant for abusive men, and, yup, booze–yanked Darnell into a stunning and ugly downward spiral.
In 1944, when Darnell was working with Sirk, she was battling a weight problem, felt underappreciated by her studio boss Darryl Zanuck, her marriage was on the rocks, and her tyrannical mother was constantly demanding money.
George Sanders and Linda Darnell in Summer Storm, 1944.
Always fragile, lacking in self-esteem, Darnell was acting in Summer Storm, an adaptation of an Ibsen play, a role she fought for. But Darnell was falling apart as the camera’s merciless gaze bore down on her.
Ronald L. Davis reports the following in his sympathetic but clear-eyed biography of the tragic actress, Hollywood Beauty: Linda Darnell and the American Dream.
Scheduled for release through United Artists, Summer Storm was directed by Douglas Sirk. Filming began in the spring of 1944, with The Wicked and the Weak as a working title. Linda got on well with Sirk, although things didn’t always progress smoothly. One particularly bad day, the director had shot sixteen takes of an important scene in a greenhouse. Linda grew tired, embarrassed, and was almost in tears.
Finally, Sirk ordered, “Everybody take a breather.”
Putting his arm around Linda’s shoulder, he said, “Now I want you to relax.”
Suddenly he yanked her across his knee and spanked her hard.
“Now you go out there and do that scene right!” he snapped.
The spanking so shocked and infuriated her that she went back on the set and made the scene one of the best in the picture. “After that, Sirk and I got along better than ever,” she said.
Sirk’s abusive behavior was, unfortunately, of his time and place, a Hollywood where actors were treated like cattle. This ugly episode is also consistent among a group of despotic directors who behaved like talented sociopaths. Michael Curtiz, real name: Manó Kertész Kaminer, on the set of the silent film Noah’s Ark, repeatedly pinched an infant in order to elicit tears on cue. Fritz Lang was famously cruel to actresses who did not yield to his every direction, Erich Von Stroheim, real name: Erich Oswald Stroheim, often drove crew and cast to physical and mental exhaustion, and Hitchcock was deeply twisted, in the grip of a series of sexual fixations towards several profoundly vulnerable leading ladies.
It would be nice to believe that such behavior, in our more enlightened–and litigious times–are a thing of the past, but knowing Hollywood as I do, I wouldn’t count on it.
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