As regular readers will know, I am a great fan of classic cinema and I do love making these posts in which I try to tell a story by linking together various films, actors and directors. My last connections post ran a lateral course linking the film Pygmalion to Star Trek; The Motion Picture. This week I’ve worked out a very roundabout connection from Greta Garbo via Frederick March, James Mason, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman, right back to Garbo again.
At first glance, Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman seem to belong to different emotional climates; Garbo, distant and enigmatic, Bergman, luminous and searching, her humanity worn closer to the surface. The threads run from the migration of talent across studios and continents and in the way both women, in very different ways, redefined what it meant to be a star of the cinema.
Greta Garbo was one of the first stars of the silver screen. She was born in Stockholm, Sweden on the 18th September 1905. She is best known for her beautiful but melancholy screen persona. In 1924 she was spotted in a Swedish film by Louis B Mayer the head of MGM and the following year he brought her over to Hollywood.
Greta Garbo
In 1930 she made the successful transition from silent pictures to the ‘talkies’ with her first sound picture Anna Christie which was promoted with the phrase ‘Garbo Talks!” The film was a great success and her career in the cinema continued until her last film in 1941, Two Faced Woman. She signed for various pictures afterwards but all the projects either never came to fruition or she dropped out for one reason or another. Billy Wilder asked her to star in Sunset Boulevard in 1949 but she declined.
In one of David Niven’s books, Bring on the Empty Horses, the author relates how he asked Garbo why she stopped making films and she thought for a moment and then replied “I had made enough faces”.
In 1935 Garbo starred in the screen version of Anna Karenina directed by Clarence Brown. Among her co-stars was Fredric March.
March began his career as an extra in silent movies. He made his stage debut in 1929 and not long afterwards signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. He made numerous films but in 1937 he played the part of drunken movie star Norman Maine in the film A Star is Born. Maine helps aspiring star Esther Blodgett, played by Janet Gaynor up the ladder to movie stardom. The film was shot in Technicolor and became one of the first colour films to be nominated for an Academy Award.
A Star is Born is a film that has been remade a number of times and all the remakes have been musicals, including the most recent one produced in 2018 which starred Lady Gaga. My favourite though was the 1954 version with James Mason and Judy Garland. Judy Garland plays the part of Esther Blodgett who is heard singing by the boozy Norman Maine, this time played by Mason. He takes her along to the studios and after introducing her singing voice to the studio boss, gets her a breakthrough role in a new film.
Esther, now known as Vicki Lester, becomes a big star and of course falls for Norman Maine. The two marry but will their marriage survive Maine’s alcoholism and failing career?
James Mason was born in Huddersfield in 1909. He became a stage actor and was later hugely successful in British films. In 1949 he moved to Hollywood and after the success of his starring role in the film The Desert Fox about German General Rommell, he was given a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox.
It was in 1954 that Mason was asked to be Judy Garland’s leading man in A Star is Born. Cary Grant had been offered the part but turned it down.
Both Cary Grant and James Mason starred in the 1959 picture North by Northwest directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Mason stars as a suave but ruthless secret agent who mistakes Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) for a man known as George Kaplan who Mason suspects is a government agent tailing him across the USA. As the film unfolds, we see that George Kaplan is actually a fake identity created as a decoy.
After a murder in which Thornhill is wrongly supposed to be the murderer, he escapes on board a train to Chicago where he meets Eve Kendall played by Eva Marie Saint who helps him get away.
North by Northwest is one of my personal favourite films. Apparently, Hitchcock had engaged screenwriter Ernest Lehman to work on a story adaption but he couldn’t work out what to do and offered to quit. Hitchcock replied that he enjoyed working with Lehman and that the two should just work out an entirely new story. North by Northwest was the result.
Cary Grant appeared in four of Hitchcock’s films. Suspicion (1941), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959) and most importantly for this post, Notorious (1946).
I’m sure I’ve seen Notorious but it’s not a film I can really remember even though when I looked it up many people say it’s one of Hitchcock’s best ever films. Cary Grant plays a government agent who is on the trail of Nazi Claude Rains. Grant enlists the help of Ingrid Bergman who plays the daughter of a war criminal. Grant and Bergman fall for each other but Ingrid Bergman’s character has to seduce Nazi Alexander Sebastian played by Rains.
Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca
Ingrid Bergman came to Hollywood in 1939. She was invited by Hollywood producer David O Selznick to star in an English language remake of one of her earlier Swedish films Intermezzo. Bergman expected to be in Hollywood for this one film and then return to Sweden but the huge success of Intermezzo made her a star and more Hollywood films followed. Her husband and daughter came to Hollywood to join her and later they both applied for American citizenship.
Ingrid made a number of classic films in Hollywood including Casablanca, Spellbound and Notorious.
In 1949 she wrote to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini telling him how much she admired his films and expressing her wish to work with him. Rossellini cast her in Stromboli and she flew to Italy to begin work. While she was there, she fell for Rossellini and began an affair with him, becoming pregnant with his child.
This caused a huge scandal back in the USA. Bergman herself thought that because she had played a nun in The Bells of St Mary and a saint in Joan of Arc these roles seemed to make what she had done appear much worse. Ingrid went through a much publicised divorce and custody battle before marrying Rossellini in 1950.
Ingrid was born in August 1915 in Stockholm which brings us back full circle to Greta Garbo who was born ten years earlier also in Stockholm. Two wonderful actresses separated by only a decade.
(All pictures reproduced via creative commons.)
Usually in these Film Connections posts, I tell a sort of circular story starting with an actor or director and then find a link to another film or personality and then another until I work back to whoever I started with. This week I decided to be a little more lateral and try and link Pygmalion, the 1938 film to the first Star Trek film from 1979. I like to be different now and again but not only that (confession alert) I struggled to find a link back to Pygmalion. (Actually I did find a very tenuous link and I’m not sure as I write this that I’m going to share it but we’ll see how things go).
Interesting fact #1: Wendy Hiller speaks a controversial line in the film – “not bloody likely” making her the first person to swear in a British film. It’s a controversy that’s almost laughable today considering the language used in modern films. Have you ever wondered who the first person to use the F word in a British film was? (Answer at the end of the post).
In March I was getting a little stuck for ideas and I had to recycle an old post, 
I’ve written many posts about books and a regular series is one in which I compare books to their filmed counterparts. In August I added a post about one of my favourite book/film series, 
Back in the 1970s my Saturday ritual involved getting the bus into town and scouring book and record shops for, yes, you’ve guessed it, books and records. One day back then I was flipping through the posters in one particular shop. The posters were the music stars of the 70s; Elton John, Mick Jagger, Suzi Quatro, David Bowie and so on but one was a picture of a really good looking guy with a fifties combed back hair style. In some pictures he was dressed like a cowboy and in others in a red jacket and denim jeans. The guy behind the counter must have seen me wondering who the guy was and he told me he was a film star called James Dean. He handed me a paperback book about the actor and I took it home and read it and very soon I was trying to find out everything I could about him.
The paperback book I bought that day in the record shop in the 1970’s was probably James Dean: A Short Life by Venable Herndon. It wasn’t a great book but an interesting introduction to Dean and who he was. It detailed his struggle for acting roles, TV work in New York, his apartment at 19 West Sixty-Eighth Street, his three films, his doomed affair with Pier Angeli and of course his death.
Another book I picked up only recently was another picture album James Dean: Portrait of Cool edited by Leith Adams and Keith Burns. It’s an album of photographs found in the Warner Bros archive and some have not been published before. Included are all sorts of documents such as casting sheets, production notes and messages. Dean’s address is listed as 3908 West Olive Avenue which I think might have been a place he shared with Dick Davalos who played his brother in East of Eden. During Rebel Without a Cause, Dean was listed as living at 1541 Sunset Plaza Drive.
I’m not sure which came first for me, the book or the film but I actually think it was the book. The Godfather was written by Mario Puzo and is the story of Don Vito Corleone, the head of one of the five mafia families of New York. The book opens with the wedding of Don Corleone’s daughter and Puzo sets the scene and introduces the various characters.
Francis Ford Coppola was the director of the film version and was also the co-writer of the screenplay along with Mario Puzo. Coppola wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Don Corleone even though Brando at the time was rather unpopular with the producers. He was expensive, his last few films had not done well and his time wasting attitude had added huge expenses to his pictures. After the director had made the producers understand how important Brando was, they set various conditions for his employment. He would have to work for a reduced salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not delay the production. Another was that he had to have a screen test. Coppola has told the story in various interviews how he and his film crew had entered Brando’s house like ninjas and quietly set up their equipment. Brando slicked down his hair with shoe polish and stuffed cotton balls into his mouth to make the transformation into the aging mafia boss.
Coppola decided that instead of finding the horse at the end of his bed like in the book, it would be better if Woltz awoke, was disturbed by something wet, pulls the bedclothes away to see blood and then uncovers the horse’s head. The head was the actual head of a horse, procured from a dog meat factory and Coppola mentions on the commentary to my DVD version that lots of animal lovers sent him hate mail about the horse, even though the horse had been condemned to its fate anyway.
As previously mentioned, the book does have some storylines which were not used in the film but one chapter was a look at the beginnings of Vito Corleone. Born Vito Andolini in the Sicilian village of Corleone, Vito’s father was murdered by a local mafia boss and the young Vito was smuggled away to America. In America he took the name of Corleone and seemed to slip quietly into the role of mafia Don by murdering Fanucci, a New York Sicilian Godfather who preyed on his fellow Italians. Although this element of the story wasn’t used, Coppola kept the storyline for use in The Godfather Part II. The follow up film was a film classic in its own way.
Ida Lupino, like Roddy MacDowell, was born in England, in fact both lived in the Herne Hill area of London. She wanted to be a writer rather than an actress but went into acting as she was part of a theatrical family and it seems that becoming an actor was expected of her. She appeared in many British films before moving to the USA in 1933.
Myrna studied dance in Los Angeles. She had small parts in many silent pictures but some stills of her appeared in Motion Picture magazine and led to a contract with Warner Bros.
What attracted me to the persona of Marilyn Monroe? Well, apart from her obvious charms as a very attractive lady it’s her death that has always interested me. I’m a sucker for a modern mystery whether it’s the assassination of JFK, the disappearance of Amelia Aerhart or Marilyn’s own strange death. The obvious solution is that Marilyn committed suicide. She had tried suicide quite a few times before and various people along the years have saved her from death, including her acting coach Natasha Lytess and her third husband playwright Arthur Miller. Suicide is the obvious answer to her death but personally, I’m not so sure.
Norman Mailer’s book about Monroe finished with a photo of Joe DiMaggio, grief stricken on the day of her funeral and he reckons we can perhaps surmise Marilyn’s true worth just by the look on Joe’s face that day. I cannot disagree.
I thought I’d start with Gone with the Wind and see where it takes me. Gone with the Wind was a major film adaptation of the book by Margaret Mitchell. The book was a huge hit and producer David O Selznick bought the film rights. Production was delayed for a long while as Selznick was determined to get Clark Gable for the part of the roguish Rhett Butler. Another delay was a distribution deal with MGM which couldn’t be finalised until Selznick’s then current deal with United Artists had expired. Selznick used the delay to begin a huge search for an actress to play the part of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoilt daughter of a plantation owner in the deep south of America. Scarlet has a crush on Ashley Wilkes played by British actor Leslie Howard in possibly his most famous role. The film was one of the major hits of 1939 and was the highest earning film up to that time.
In 1938 Leslie Howard played the part of Professor Higgins in the film production of Pygmalion based on the play by George Bernard Shaw. A musical version was a big hit on the stage in the 1960s. Julie Andrews played the part of Eliza Doolittle to great acclaim on the stage but when the time came to make a film version in 1964, the producers wanted a major star and so the part went to Audrey Hepburn.
I had a few ideas for the title of this post. I had A Piece of My Life on the brain for a long time and then substituted A Pizza My Life (A piece of my life, geddit?) I even had a graphic sorted showing a slice of pizza. The thing with that I thought is that even though it ranges from funny to faintly humorous, I reckoned I would be giving people the wrong idea and that readers might have been expecting a post about, well pizza. Just lately I’m trying to optimise my titles for SEO (search engine optimisation) and at the same time also trying to give the impression that I know something about it. Some time ago I did a few posts titled 
Letters from an Unknown Author! 