Joel McCrea at LACMA
by Andre Soares
“People say I’m a one-note actor, but the way I figure it, those other guys are just looking for that one right note.” — Joel McCrea
Between October 14–November 5, 2005, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will be presenting a Centenary Tribute to Joel McCrea. The film series will feature fourteen films starring one of Hollywood’s most underrated light comedians — one who, at his best, was a very accomplished dramatic actor, too.
Born in the Los Angeles suburb of South Pasadena in 1905, Joel McCrea began his film career as an extra in the late 1920s. (He can be spotted in a crowd scene in the 1927 Marion Davies silent comedy The Fair Co-Ed.) In a mere couple of years, McCrea was already playing leading roles in a variety of films, mostly at RKO.
Those ranged from the thriller The Most Dangerous Game (1932), opposite Fay Wray, to several risqué melodramas starring Constance Bennett. (One of the Bennett-McCrea melos, The Common Law, will be screened as part of the LACMA series.)
In the late 1930s, McCrea came into his own as a top star, a position he was to hold until the late 1940s. During that period, he co-starred opposite some of the biggest female luminaries of the era, including Jean Arthur (The More the Merrier), Sylvia Sidney (Dead End), Ginger Rogers (Primrose Path), Barbara Stanwyck (Union Pacific and The Great Man’s Lady), Loretta Young (Three Blind Mice), Claudette Colbert (The Palm Beach Story), Veronica Lake (Sullivan’s Travels, Ramrod), and Maureen O’Hara and Linda Darnell (Buffalo Bill).
Additionally, McCrea worked for top-rank directors such as Cecil B. DeMille (Union Pacific), Preston Sturges (Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Great Moment), William Wyler (Come and Get It*, These Three, Dead End), George Stevens (The More the Merrier), Howard Hawks (Barbary Coast, Come and Get It*) and Alfred Hitchcock (Foreign Correspondent).
Beginning in the late 1940s, McCrea opted to appear almost invariably in Westerns, which, as the years progressed, became increasingly lower-budget. One exception was the very last of the batch, Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac Ride the High Country (1962), which paired him with another Western veteran, Randolph Scott.
Among the most interesting films to be shown at the McCrea retrospective at LACMA are:
- Girls About Town (1932), a rarely screened pre-Code comedy co-written by silent-film comedian Raymond Griffith, directed by George Cukor, and starring Kay Francis and Lilyan Tashman in the title roles.
- These Three (1936), a solid — if bowdlerized — adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play about the nasty power of a lie, with McCrea, Merle Oberon, and Miriam Hopkins forming an ill-fated love triangle (minus the lesbianism). Plus Bonita Granville as proof positive that at least some children shall not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.
- The Palm Beach Story (1942), in which McCrea and Claudette Colbert get entangled with Rudy Vallee and Mary Astor.
- Foreign Correspondent (1940), a still effective cry against dictatorial regimes — in this particular case, Nazism and Fascism.
- Ride the High Country (1962), McCrea’s fitting swan song (if one ignores two minor comebacks in the 1970s).
From 1933 until his death, at the age of 84, in October 1990, Joel McCrea was married to actress Frances Dee, with whom he co-starred in the highly successful Western Wells Fargo (1937).
* Wyler and Hawks were credited as co-directors of Come and Get It.
A Centenary Tribute to Joel McCrea
Source: LACMA
Friday, October 14, 7:30 pm
Girls About Town
(1931/b&w/83 min.)
Scr: Raymond Griffith, Brian Marlow; dir: George Cukor; w/Kay Francis, Joel McCrea, Lilyan Tashman.
The girls are in it for the gold, the furs, and the cocktails, the town is New York after dark, and the director is Cukor at his most urbane. Playwright Zoe Akins (The Greeks Had a Word for It) provided the risqué pre-Code story line, Tashman gave it snap, Francis was, to quote Cukor, “decorative,” and McCrea was “attractive as the boy.” A very funny film with lavish décor and gowns courtesy of Paramount.
The Common Law
(1931/b&w/77 min.)
Scr: John Farrow, Horace Jackson; dir: Paul L. Stein; w/Constance Bennett, Joel McCrea, Hedda Hopper.
A beguiling Bennett plays a kept woman turned nude model in Paris (“I’m really quite an old fashioned girl, well, with some modern decorations.”) and McCrea is the ex-patriot painter who falls for her in this pre-Code film that has a lot to say about the institution of marriage for women, the priggishness of the American upper class, and the advantages of sin.
Saturday, October 15, 7:30 pm
Sullivan’s Travels
(1941/b&w/90 min.)
Scr/dir: Preston Sturges; w/Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake.
McCrea is gruff but vulnerable as a successful Hollywood director, but on his way to skid row to research his new picture, pretty, down-on-her-luck Lake turns up in a diner—hungry. But he can’t afford the coffee, and then she falls in his pool. . . .The medium is the message in Sturges’s brilliantly cast comedy that is by turns light, dark, sweet, sad, satiric, sentimental, and only, sublimely, a movie.
Ramrod
(1947/b&w/95 min.)
Scr: C. Graham Baker, Cecile Kramer, Jack Moffitt; dir: André De Toth; w/Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake.
Lake cracks the whip as the strong-willed daughter of a cattle baron, but when she provokes a range war by defying daddy, she expects “Ramrod” McCrea, a recovering alcoholic, to join her in a twisted scheme to keep the land. “A stark little tragedy . . . surprisingly persuasive, and all the performances are first-rate.”—Time Out
Friday, October 21, 7:30 pm
Foreign Correspondent
(1940/b&w/120 min.)
Scr: Charles Bennett, Joan Harrison; dir: Alfred Hitchcock; w/Joel McCrea, Laraine Day.
Hitchcock reworked the chases and twists of his British hit The Thirty-Nine Steps to create a rousing spy film graced with urbane dialogue, beautiful production design, and some memorable set pieces: a fight to the death in a Dutch windmill, an assassination behind a wall of umbrellas, and a spectacular plane crash at sea. McCrea looks dashing in a trench coat and wisely backs up his hatred for the Nazis and all they stand for with a good right arm.
These Three
(1936/b&w/93 min.)
Scr: Lillian Hellman; dir: William Wyler; w/McCrea, Miriam Hopkins, Merle Oberon, Bonita Granville.
Hell mann replaced the lesbian relationship of her hit play The Children’s Hour with a heterosexual triangle but this vividly acted ensemble piece retains the power of its central theme: that a child’s lies and malicious gossip can destroy the lives of innocent people. McCrea earned critical praise in his breakout role as a decent doctor loved by two teachers, Hopkins is touching as a woman willing to sacrifice herself for her friends, and 13 year-old Granville, in a chilling, Oscar-nominated performance, virtually defined the term ‘vicious brat’. When Margaret Hamilton finally slaps her silly, it brings down the house.
Saturday, October 22, 7:30 pm
The Palm Beach Story
(1942/b&w/88 min.)
Scr/dir: Preston Sturges; w/Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee.
Pursued by head-in-the-clouds, Park Avenue hubby McCrea, penniless wife Colbert scams her way onto the Palm Beach train, and before you can say Baltimore!, has tamed the entire Ale and Quail Club, turned striped pajamas into haute couture, and snagged herself a billionaire with a yacht, a mansion, and a man-hungry sister. Astor steals the show as the “Countess,” who sees steak where other women see husbands, and the happy ending is quintessential Sturges: money and sex all around.
Primrose Path
(1940/b&w/93 min.)
Scr: Gregory La Cava, Allan Scott; dir: Gregory La Cava; w/Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea, Marjorie Rambeau.
Ambitious hamburger-stand operator McCrea swears to love and protect innocent waitress Rogers . . . until he finds out her father is an alcoholic and her mother a prostitute. La Cava was famous for comedies about serious issues (My Man Godfrey) and dramas with wisecracks (Stage Door), and this demanding material brought out the best in both actors as they follow the arc from adorable love birds to hurt, angry people.
Friday, October 28, 7:30 pm
Stars in My Crown
(1950/b&w/89 min.)
Scr: Margaret Fitts; dir: Jacques Tourneur; w/Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, Dean Stockwell.
Reputedly a labor of love for both star and director, this portrait of a preacher coping with the dual crises of typhoid and racism in post-Civil War America is told as a series of flashbacks and rendered in a succession of beautifully lit and composed images that capture the intimate dramas of small-town life while conveying timeless, moral themes. Jacques Tourneur (Cat People) is known as a great visual stylist with an attraction to the supernatural, and Stars in My Crown is one of his most perfect expressions of his belief in a higher power.
Colorado Territory
(1949/b&w/95 min)
Scr: Edmund H. North, John Twist; dir: Raoul Walsh; w/Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, Dorothy Malone.
“A classic western, this bleak remake of Walsh’s own High Sierra substitutes McCrea’s weary desperation for Bogart’s laconic interpretation of the bandit who wants to go straight but signs up for one more job. Cinematographer Sam Hickox piles on the black to give it the look of a film noir . . . and creates a fitting atmosphere of doom. The bravura treatment of landscape is particularly impressive.”—Time Out
Saturday, October 29, 7:30 pm
The More the Merrier
(1943/b&w/105 min.)
Scr: Robert Russell, Frank Ross,
Richard Flournoy, Lewis R. Foster; dir: George Stevens; w/Joel McCrea, Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn.
During an acute housing crisis in wartime Washington, Arthur sublets half her small apartment to Coburn—who sublets half his half to McCrea—putting in motion one of the most charming romantic comedies ever made. Famous for its ability to subvert the Hays office with innuendo and double entendre, the film contains one of American cinema’s cleverest love scenes and one sequence—Arthur and McCrea moving about the apartment without ever running into each other—with comic timing that has rarely been equaled. The film received six Oscar nominations, including nominations for Stevens, Arthur, and Coburn (who won), but McCrea, at the height of his powers, was overlooked.
Gambling Lady
(1934/b&w/66 min.)
Dir: Archie Mayo; w/Barbara Stanwyck, Joel McCrea, Pat O’Brien.
Barbara Stanwyck’s customary intelligence and quick wit set the tone and pace for this snappy, believable Warner’s film about a lady gambler with mob connections. McCrea is rich, naïve, and smitten in the first—and one of the best—of his five films with Stanwyck.
Saturday, November 5, 7:30 pm
Ride the High Country
(1962/color/94 min./CinemaScope)
Scr: N. B. Stone Jr.; dir: Sam Peckinpah; w/Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott, Mariette Hartley.
Cars are already scaring horses on main street when McCrea, playing an aging former lawman, rides into town to escort a gold shipment through the California mountains. But he makes a mistake when he hires cowboy-turned-sideshow sharpshooter Scott to lend him a hand. Shot amid ravishing autumnal scenery, Ride the High Country works on the physical and metaphorical level as both a western and a tribute to westerns as McCrea is challenged by a series of threatening characters and moral dilemmas. “All I want is to enter my house justified” declares McCrea, who came out of retirement to make the film. Peckinpah’s film gave him that chance.
Stranger on Horseback
(1955/color/66 min./16mm)
Scr: Louis L’Amour, Don Martin, Herb Meadow; Dir: Jacques Tourneur; w/ Joel McCrea, Miroslava Stern, Kevin McCarthy.
Circuit judge Richard Thorne arrives in the frontier town of Bannerman, which he finds to be entirely dominated by Josiah Bannerman and his clan. Thorne learns that Bannerman’s son, Tom, has killed a man, Morrison, whose wife Tom had been chasing. The force of the script lies in the conflict between the primordial law of the clan, blood, and the earth, embodied in Josiah Bannerman, and Judge Thorne’s conjunction of legal and moral authority (“Could be a preacher in that getup,” Colonel Buck Streeter, Bannerman’s legal adviser, remarks on seeing Thorne for the first time—a possible reference to McCrea’s role in Stars in My Crown).
Stranger on Horseback is a visually accomplished work giving a certain dry grandeur to the story…The prevalence of night scenes marks the film as Tourneurian, as does the quiet, intimate tone of the actors’ line readings…The scenes in the open range in the last quarter of the film are notable for the architectural rigor of the compositions.
—excerpted from The Cinema of Nightfall: Jacques Tourneur, by Chris Fujiwara
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