Merle Oberon on TCM
Merle Oberon, who’ll have her "Summer Under the Stars" day on Tuesday, Aug. 25, is one of those actresses I’d say unjustly suffered (and continue to suffer) from the Marion Davies Syndrome.
As I wrote in my Jennifer Jones on TCM post, I believe that many film critics and historians dismiss actresses such as Marion Davies (whose film career was a direct result of her relationship with William Randolph Hearst), Norma Shearer (MGM’s second-in-command Irving Thalberg), and Jennifer Jones (producer David O. Selznick) because they had powerful backers.
The fact that Davies and Jones could quite possibly have become even bigger stars had their sponsors been less controlling and more discerning, and that Shearer would probably have reached superstardom heights even without Thalberg, is ignored by those who refuse to accept that a person can be both talented and have an influential patron.
Merle Oberon’s relentless patron was Alexander Korda, a Hungarian émigré (rich people’s immigrant status must be spelled out in French) who also happened to be one of the biggest figures in the first two decades of British sound cinema. With a guy like that behind her, so the thinking goes, how could Merle Oberon fail to become a star?
Well, ask Maria Corda, whose film stardom didn’t go very far despite husband Korda’s connections in Europe and Hollywood.
Now, I’m not saying that Korda wasn’t influential or that he wasn’t crucial for the development and success of Oberon’s career. But even if he did everything behind the cameras to catapult his lover and protégée (and wife from 1939-1945) to film stardom, ultimately it was Oberon’s presence in front of the cameras that made her secure that position for nearly two decades.
Sometimes she was weak, e.g., That Uncertain Feeling (1941), telegraphing her (off) comic timing by means of pouts and glares; sometimes she was good, e.g., These Three (1936), conveying her small-town teacher’s feelings without having to resort to any acting tricks; sometimes she was outstanding, e.g., Wuthering Heights (1939), losing herself inside Emily Brontë’s love-struck Cathy to create one of the most indelible performances of the 1930s; and sometimes she was simply fascinating, e.g., A Song to Remember (1945), in which, as George Sand, she steals the movie from co-stars Cornel Wilde (right) and Paul Muni merely by looking more manly than them.
In fact, Merle Oberon — in pants, rococo gowns, or modern dress — was always fantastic to look at, whether pining for Leslie Howard in the aftermath of the French Revolution in the enjoyable The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934, above right); suffering as a noblewoman in love with an Irish rebel in the solid Beloved Enemy (1936); dancing onstage as a (potential) Jack the Ripper victim in the creepy The Lodger (1944); or about ready to have her head chopped off as Anne Boleyn in Korda’s enormously successful The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933).
Check her out next Tuesday, as Turner Classic Movies will be showing 14 Merle Oberon movies, including all but one of the aforementioned titles. (These Three will be presented on Miriam Hopkins day.)
There will be also two TCM premieres, both British productions: The Divorce of Lady X (1938) and The Lion Has Wings (1939). The former is a so-so color comedy co-starring Laurence Olivier, and Oberon’s first film following a near-fatal car accident while filming the unfinished I, Claudius. The latter is an anti-Nazi propaganda piece that was deemed important enough to be given a royal premiere. Ralph Richardson co-stars, while Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael Powell co-directed.
Merle Oberon received one Academy Award nomination, for the gorgeous (cinematography by Gregg Toland) but ponderous 1935 melodrama The Dark Angel (1935), co-starring Fredric March (above) and Herbert Marshall, and which will also be shown on Tuesday. (She lost to Bette Davis in Dangerous.) Oberon’s stardom petered out in the mid-1950s, but she continued to make sporadic film appearances until the early ’70s. Her last effort was the little-seen Interval in 1973.
One curious thing about Merle Oberon is that her off-screen stories were no less interesting than those she brought to life on screen. She was reportedly born Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson in Mumbai (then Bombay) to either British-Indian or British-Sri Lankan parents, but hid her background in order to evade racism at the time, claiming instead (perhaps following Korda’s advice) that she was born in Tasmania, Australia’s island state. Additionally, Oberon was to become younger and younger as time went on; in some sources, her birth date eventually moved from 1911 to 1918.
Considering the lives she led both on- and off-screen — and how much of the information about her background and private affairs remain either obscure or conflicting — Merle Oberon would be a great subject for a scholarly, non-sensationalistic biography.
Check out this piece on a 2002 documentary about Merle Oberon’s origins, The Trouble with Merle.
Pacific Time
25 Tuesday
3:00 AM Private Life Of Henry VIII, The (1933)
The famed English monarch suffers through five of his six disastrous marriages. Cast: Charles Laughton, Robert Donat, Elsa Lanchester. Dir: Alexander Korda. BW-94 mins.
4:45 AM Beloved Enemy (1936)
During an Irish uprising, a rebel leader and a British noblewoman fall in love. Cast: Merle Oberon, Brian Aherne, David Niven. Dir: H.C. Potter. BW-86 mins.
6:30 AM Dark Angel, The (1935)
Three childhood friends are torn apart by love and World War I. Cast: Fredric March, Merle Oberon, Herbert Marshall. Dir: Sidney Franklin. BW-106 mins.
8:30 AM ‘Til We Meet Again (1940)
A dying woman shares a shipboard romance with a criminal on his way to the gallows. Cast: Merle Oberon, George Brent, Frank McHugh. Dir: Edmund Goulding. BW-100 mins.
10:15 AM That Uncertain Feeling (1941)
A happily married woman sees a psychoanalyst and develops doubts about her husband. Cast: Merle Oberon, Melvyn Douglas, Burgess Meredith. Dir: Ernst Lubitsch. BW-84 mins.
11:45 AM Affectionately Yours (1941)
A foreign correspondent hurries home to stop his wife from getting a divorce. Cast: Merle Oberon, Dennis Morgan, Rita Hayworth. Dir: Lloyd Bacon. BW-88 mins.
1:30 PM Song to Remember, A (1945)
The famed composer Chopin sacrifices everything, even love, for his native Poland. Cast: Cornel Wilde, Merle Oberon, Paul Muni. Dir: Charles Vidor. C-112 mins.
3:30 PM Berlin Express (1948)
Allied agents fight an underground Nazi group in post-war Europe. Cast: Merle Oberon, Robert Ryan, Paul Lukas. Dir: Jacques Tourneur. BW-87 mins.
5:00 PM Lodger, The (1944)
The inhabitants of a boarding house fear the new lodger is Jack the Ripper. Cast: Merle Oberon, Laird Cregar, George Sanders. Dir: John Brahm. BW-84 mins.
6:30 PM Scarlet Pimpernel, The (1935)
A British aristocrat’s effete facade masks a swashbuckling hero rescuing victims of the French revolution. Cast: Leslie Howard, Merle Oberon, Raymond Massey. Dir: Harold Young. BW-98 mins.
8:30 PM Divorce Of Lady X, The (1938)
In need of a hotel room, a woman poses as a scandalous divorcee. Cast: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes. Dir: Tim Whelan. C-87 mins.
10:00 PM Lion Has Wings, The (1939)
Britishers of every class band together to repel the German Blitz. Cast: Merle Oberon, Ralph Richardson, June Duprez. Dir: Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, Michael Powell. BW-76 mins.
11:30 PM Wuthering Heights (1939)
A married noblewoman fights her lifelong attraction to a charismatic gypsy. Cast: Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon, Geraldine Fitzgerald. Dir: William Wyler. BW-104 mins.
1:30 AM First Comes Courage (1943)
A Norwegian resistance fighter seduces a Nazi officer to learn enemy secrets during World War II. Cast: Merle Oberon, Brian Aherne, Carl Esmond. Dir: Dorothy Arzner. BW-86 mins.
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Tags: A Song to Remember, Classic Movies, Merle Oberon, Summer Under the Stars, The Dark Angel, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Turner Classic Movies, Wuthering Heights
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3 Responses to “Merle Oberon on TCM”
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So beautiful in Wuthering Heights.
Indian or Tasmanian or Egyptian or whatever, Merle Oberon was gorgeous. Unlike you, I think she’s fine in “That Uncertain Feeling,” and think that “The Divorce of Lady X” is a very agreeable comedy, with Merle and Laurence Olivier in good form.
some say she was tasmanian, that her mother was chinese.
but merle doesnt look chinese. she looks indian.
im sure the indian story is the real one