Happy St. Patrick's Day from Cinema Styles

And John Ford, who would like to remind you that...


entrances don't get much better than this.


He knew a thing or two about exits as well.

Deep Background: Building the Career-Long Character

Alan Ladd was no Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy or Fredric March. Nor was he a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman before his time. He was Alan Ladd. He was serviceable. For the most part, he got the job done and didn't ask anyone to give him an Oscar, or even a nomination, for his troubles. And no one would have anyway. It's not that he was bad because he wasn't. It's just that no one ever left an Alan Ladd movie and thought, "Wow! What a performance!" But he created characters based on his own persona that allowed for an exploration of those characters over the course of his career. Allow me to explain.

Whenever I hear someone say, "Oh (insert name of underrated actor here) just plays himself all the time" or "she's just being (insert name again) in all of her movies" I get a little annoyed. I think most people with acting experience reading this would agree that the best actors always infuse a character with their own personality, the better to establish the character as a real human being that the actor can inhabit. And more importantly, playing yourself isn't easy. When I was living at home all those years ago my mother would read through plays with me when I was memorizing lines for a part. She tried to act while doing so. She was awful (sorry Mom). She e-nun-see-ay-ted ev-vuh-ree word in some bizarre Stratford-on-Avon mock British construct. It was unnerving. She was under the false impression so many have, that anyone can act if they're just playing themselves. They can't. Reading lines and making them sound like words that you just happen to be saying doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Alan Ladd may not be Edwin Booth but he was good at his craft and knew his limitations. Like his frequent co-star Veronica Lake, he never attempted to go outside of his established low-key persona. And as I said in the opening paragraph, that allowed him to develop one character over the course of his career.

Alad Ladd became a star with his portrayal of cold and calculating Philip Raven, the hired assassin of This Gun for Hire in 1942. Eleven years later he had his biggest success with Shane and every time I see either of those movies I think of the other. To me, Shane the character is Philip Raven, older and worn down. I don't mean literally since they obviously take place in different times and Raven dies at the end of his outing but inside the psyche where the character resides. Shane is Raven, older. I can imagine Shane spending his earlier days shooting people for money and as much is implied in the film. Shane understands Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) because Shane was Jack Wilson when he was Philip Raven but now he's fighting the good fight and doing it free of charge. And the only reason I can get that character lineage from Raven to Shane is because Alan Ladd played himself in both.

When an actor creates a wholly new character for each performance, like a Marlon Brando, Paul Muni or Meryl Streep, you can't follow a character over the course of their career. But when they play themselves, you can. Take John Wayne, who excelled at placing his personality at the center of the character he was playing. Doing that makes it easy to imagine that Ethan Edwards of The Searchers is the older version of the Ringo Kid from Stagecoach. The Ringo Kid has none of the bitterness or rage of Ethan but he's young and inexperienced. Because of John Wayne's persona I can easily see him becoming Ethan over the long haul and it allows me, when watching The Searchers, to "remember" what Ethan was like when he was younger.

Another great example, this time over the course of three movies, is Paul Le Mat's characters from American Graffiti, Handle With Care and Melvin and Howard. That's the same guy at three different stages in his life. Can't you see the hot rod drag racer of American Graffiti becoming the trucker later in life before settling down to an empty, low-income existence in the Las Vegas desert? Those three movies are a way of seeing what the Graffiti character of John Milner would have become had he lived on.

Sometimes I imagine the character fell into a downward spiral somewhere along the way. Think about the Elizabeth Taylor of A Place in the Sun or Father of the Bride becoming the raging drunk of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Or what if Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara finally snaps under the pressure of constantly having to fight for everything and becomes the hollowed-out shell that is Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire? James Bond of Goldfinger is given up by the agency as a scapegoat and the CIA locks him away for decades until he's the silver-haired incarcerated secret agent of The Rock. Joan Crawford's musical star of the stage in Dancing Lady becomes the wheelchair-bound has-been dependent upon her sister in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

It's fun to imagine these character connections but also surprisingly useful in fleshing out a character beyond what the film provides (in fact, I couldn't even have made it through The Rock if I hadn't actively imagined that was James Bond after 35 years of imprisonment). Shane doesn't overtly provide background details for the title character though it is implied throughout. Fortunately, Alan Ladd made it possible to see what Shane was like before the 1953 movie came along by playing the character in an earlier incarnation in This Gun for Hire. And that was possible because Alan Ladd played himself, which may make him appear limited to some but it also made it possible for him to do what Paul Muni never could: Create a character and spend the rest of his career building a history for him.

Director's Commentary: The Princess vs The Duke

Oscar posts can take alot out of you. Unless you're content to do it all from memory (I am not) there's a voluminous amount of movie watching that takes place between each post. I'm doing the seventies this month and still have three more movies to refresh myself on for 1970-1974. I plan on watching all three this week and then finally get down to picking. I've seen almost every nominee (there are a few from the twenties and thirties I still haven't seen and a few more from the 2000's I still haven't gotten around to but other than that, I've seen 'em all) and have seen every single winner. The Oscars were kind of an obsession as a kid.

So why am I going on about this? Because while preparing the Oscar post I have little else to post and hate letting my little place here go more than a day or so without a new post, even if it's just a photo or a list. So, anyway, my brain being mush from a hellish week at work I found myself thumbing through The Book of Lists 2 (2: because the world demanded it). Yes - I'm pathetic. So I'm in the movie section (of course) and I come across the contributions of Princess Grace Kelly and John Wayne. Why these two were selected to contribute I have no idea. Some questions remain mysteries through the ages. The Princess and The Duke may be gone but we lucky little people have their neatly listed thoughts on acting and movies written in stone for all time. So let us now examine in this exceedingly lazy ...um, uh, I mean, very thought provoking post their personal choices and select a winner.

The Best Actors of All Time

The Princess picks:

1. Marie Dressler

2. Mae West

3. Greta Garbo

4. Ingrid Bergman

5. Elizabeth Taylor

The Duke picks:

1. Spencer Tracy

2. Elizabeth Taylor

3. Katharine Hepburn

4. Laurence Olivier

5. Lionel Barrymore

The Princess picked only actresses for some reason so I guess the comparison will be a little skewed. They have only one name in common: Elizabeth Taylor. I'm guessing a Nobel Prize winning physicist well versed in the minutia of Venusian Vector Calculus couldn't figure that one out so I'm not going to even try. They've got everyone from Tracy to Grant to Bergman to Hepburn to Peck to Redgrave to O'Toole to Loy to Powell to Bacall to Bogart... and Taylor they have in common. Hmmm. Maybe they had both just watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof the night before. She's pretty damn good in both of those. I'm pretty sure they hadn't just watched Butterfield 8. And it does go to show the Duke didn't let politics get in the way of his decisions as Taylor pretty much stood squarely opposite of everything he held dear.

The Princess restricts herself to actresses and puts Marie Dressler at the top. And eschewing conservative thinking places Mae West at number two. Now I love Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and certainly feel The Princess limited herself by choosing only actresses, but for having the gumption to go with Marie and Mae at the top I'm giving her the edge over The Duke.

The Best Movies of All Time:

The Princess:

1. The Quiet Man

2. The Bicycle Thief

3. Gone with the Wind

4. Grand Illusion

5. Some Like it Hot

The Duke:

1. A Man for All Seasons

2. Gone with the Wind

3. The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse

4. The Searchers

5. The Quiet Man

Wow. I mean, can I just say... wow. The Duke picks only five movies and two of them are ones he starred in. I guess you don't get a nickname like "The Duke" by being modest. This time they have two selections in common: Gone with the Wind (excuse me one second ... ... ... ... okay, I'm back. Sorry about that. I had to go throw up) and The Quiet Man. Unfortunately the scholarly Book of Lists 2 doesn't bother to list years of production or directors or anything foolish like that so we can't be sure if Duke meant the 1921 Four Horsemen or the 1962 Four Horsemen. He was John Wayne - he could have actually meant the 1962 version. But I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant the 1921 Rudolph Valentino classic. And yes, what a jolt for all you fools out there, wasting endless days and nights on garbage from Welles, Ozu, Renoir, Lang, Huston, Visconti, Pasolini and Bunuel only to find out that A Man for All Seasons is the greatest film ever made. You secretly knew it all along didn't you.

As for the Princess, with the single exception of that Civil War film they have in common (ahem) it's a pretty solid list. The Quiet Man may not be the Ford most would go with but there's no denying the greatness of The Bicycle Thief, Grand Illusion and Some Like it Hot. So the Princess gets my vote here as well. And she gets extra points for NOT listing a movie she starred in, and she starred in Rear Window for chrissakes! She truly was grace personified.

And so the battle ends. In a 2-0 knockout, the Princess comes out on top. Yeah, that's it, just two lists. The Princess and The Duke couldn't be bothered to list more than five actors/actresses and movies. They were busy people. She had lots of royal stuff to attend to and he was busy being pissed off at baby boomers. Ah, but what a worthless ... um, uh, I mean fascinating look into their mind's eye. And what a tease. I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight wondering what the Princess and the Duke would have thought were the five best tv shows of all time, or the best ice creams, or the best lawn furniture. Man, you could write a book. 2.

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