Deborah Kerr – Page 2 – The Magnificent 60s

Eye of the Devil / 13 (1966) ***

Shades of The Innocents (1961), The Wicker Man (1973) and The Omen (1976), but lacking the suspense of any, leading roles woefully miscast, supporting roles, conversely, brimming with inspired casting including the debut of Sharon Tate (Valley of the Dolls, 1967) and a mesmerising role for David Hemmings (Blow-Up, 1967) Any attempts at subtlety were dumped when the original more intriguing title of 13, which turns out to have more than one meaning, was dumped (except in some foreign markets) in favor of the giveaway designation of Eye of the Devil. Despite embracing a web of sinister legend, it lurches too quickly into full-on demonic horror.

French count Phillippe (David Niven) is called away unexpectedly from the Parisian high life to deal with a crisis in his vineyard. When his son Jacques (Robert Duncan) starts sleepwalking in his absence, his wife Catherine (Deborah Kerr) decamps with daughter Antoinette (Suky Appleby) to the family pile, a huge millennium-old castle. The count’s sister Estell (Flora Robson) fears her arrival. Villagers fear Phillippe, doffing caps when he passes.

Meanwhile, Catherine encounters or witnesses strange goings-on. Archer Christian (David Hemmings) shoots dead a dove which is later offered to unknown gods by his sister Odile (Sharon Tate) in a chamber filled with men in black robes. Later, Odile changes a toad into a dove and hypnotises Catherine into almost falling off a parapet. A quietly spoken priest (Donald Pleasance) offers no succor. The number thirteen could refer to the day of an annual local festival or a ceremony involving thirteen men, twelve of whom dance around the other. In a forest Catherine is trapped by men in black robes, then drugged and imprisoned.

Meanwhile, her husband remains grimly fatalistic, gripped by torpor, except when roused to whip Odile. Generation after generation, going back over a thousand years, the head of the household has come to a sticky end and without explanation it appears Phillipe expects a similar outcome. .

It doesn’t take you long to realise devilry is afoot. It’s a pagan castle, it transpires, a “fortress of heresy.” After three years of poor grape harvest, the earth demands a sacrifice. Where the victim in The Wicker Man is an innocent outsider lured to a remote island, the count accepts his destiny even as his wife struggles to prevent his death. Dramatically, the later film has the edge, the victim struggling against fate rather than a mere observer. That Catherine is powerless somehow doesn’t bring the dramatic fireworks you might expect.

What the posters conceal is that the film was made in black-and-white – the last MGM picture not to be in color – and this is a photo of Sharon Tate as she appeared in magisterial and beguiling form.

There’s a curiosity about the casting of Deborah Kerr (The Gypsy Moths, 1969). This most repressed of actors, as if a veil has been lifted, empowered to scream and batter against doors and race around, seems to drain the movie of energy. She just seems laughably bonkers rather than intense and empathetic. For someone whose performance is generally minimal, who exists in the margins, it seems almost perverse to force her to go so over-the-top.

Perhaps such unusual verbal and physical activity was deemed essential to counter the inactivity, the virtual sleepwalking, of the rest of the cast. While looking pained, David Niven (The Extraordinary Seaman (1969) can’t quite capture the intensity, the personal devastation, the role requires. David Hemmings as the silent archer and especially Sharon Tate as the trance-inducing magician, steal the show, investing their characters with little emotion, and yet, visually, as if mere costumed performers, present the most vivid incarnations.

From an audience perspective, it’s hard to root for Catherine since it’s obvious she is in no mortal danger. Like The Wicker Man, the audience is there in an observatory capacity, but unlike the Scottish policeman the victim attracts little sympathy. There’s not real

It’s a surprising backward step for director J. Lee Thompson after the superb Return of the Ashes (1965) which was chock-full of suspense and interesting characters. After an atmospheric opening, it turns uneven as he falls into the trap of following the wrong character. Screenwriters Dennis Murphy (The Sergeant, 1968) and Robin Estridge (Escape from Zahrain, 1962) adapted the latter’s acclaimed novel Day of the Arrow, written under the pseudonym Philip Loraine. So perhaps he can be blamed for shifting the investigative focus from Catherine’s ex-lover to Catherine herself.

I was surprised to see Deborah Kerr take on such a role and that is a story in itself which I’ll address tomorrow.

The Gypsy Moths (1969) *****

Unsung masterpiece. In the same year, director Jphn Frankenheimer went from the career nadir of The Extraordinary Seaman to an absolute gem. Beautifully paced, exquisitely observed, with five heart-wrenching performances of naked repression. For star Burt Lancaster a companion piece to The Swimmer (1968), for leading lady Deborah Kerr better work than even The Arrangement (1969), for supporting actor Gene Hackman (Downhill Racer, 1969) a wake-up call to Hollywood. Sparked by thrilling aerial sequences. And like Easy Rider (1969) interprets transience as freedom.

And in the most stunning piece of directorial bravura since Alfred Hitchcock despatched Janet Leigh halfway through Psycho (1960), here John Frankenheimer, four-fifths of the way through, leaves the others to pick up the pieces after the star’s apparent suicide.

A trio of sky divers – Mike (Burt Lancaster), Joe (Gene Hackman) and Malcolm (Scott Wilson) – on a barnstorming tour of small town USA board with Malcolm’s estranged Aunt Elizabeth (Deborah Kerr) and Uncle John (William Windom) in the small Kansas town where he was born and orphaned at age ten. John clearly resents the intrusion, Elizabeth finds it impossible to even hug her nephew, but a single glance between Mike and Elizabeth says it all. She is the bored housewife, he the conqueror.

But for all the subsequent revelations that would be melodramatic meat-and-drink to the likes of Elia Kazan’s The Arrangement, the entire tone is low-key. While fuelled on regret, this is not a movie that feasts on it.

And quite astonishingly, there is a whole pile of information dumps that serve to add tension to the tale. The stars of the show are all involved in the nitty-gritty, penning dates and times on posters, sewing their kit, the bombastic Joe acting as marketing guru and cheerleader. In a talk to women’s group, while purportedly explaining how a parachute works, Mike gives his audience a whiff of danger. For the whole enterprise depends on coming close to death. The longer a sky diver takes to open his parachute, hurtling to the ground at 200 mph, the more the crowd soaks it up.

The sky divers are long past the days of thrill-seeking, this is just a job, they are itinerants with nobody meaningful in their lives. Sky diving is “not only a way to live but also a way to die as few things are.”

Except when the performer, Mike is so reserved he might almost have disappeared into a void except silence seems to fill out his personality. He embarks on an affair with Elizabeth with scarcely a word spoken.

The screenplay has an amazing structure, each character exposed in novel fashion. The extremely realistic Mike finds himself in the deep waters of imagination. The overly-confident Joe speaks of his fears to the topless dancer (Sheree North) he has picked up but only when she’s safely asleep. He beats his chest in Church as he recites the “I am not worthy” section of the old Catholic Mass. Even the dancer gets a couple of great lines, confiding in a friend that Mike would have been her first choice to bed but Joe proved a decent substitute.

And there’s just a wonderful, initially mystifying, set of scenes, that could easily have been cut, but left in display the director’s utter mastery. A cranky conductor is rehearsing a marching band for, we learn later, the Fourth of July parade, picking, as is the way of cranky conductors, on some innocent in the band. Come The Fourth of July the marching band turns into main street – and finds it empty. The entire town, in a demonstration of ghoul-ness, has decamped to watch Malcolm attempt the stunt that cost Mike his life.

Returning home, Malcolm finds no homecoming despite his childless aunt desperate for a surrogate son. If she was any more buttoned-up she would explode. “I just wasn’t very observant,” she observes, explaining how her sister stole away her lover. And when that couple died in a car accident, John, who married Elizabeth on the rebound, forbade his wife to adopt Malcolm because he didn’t want to be daily faced with the son of her true love.

So many scenes are wordless observation. We focus on the dead eyes of John, pretending to be asleep, when his adulterous wife returns. Elizabeth watches her husband in a mirror. Virtually every shot of Elizabeth reveals the torment of a woman desperately clinging on to sanity. Every shot of Malcom reveals rejection.

Characters are viewed in long-shot, through doors, or from the sky, and then in bold extreme close-up, but not in a kind of experimental fusion of style, but through careful directorial consideration. You feel that every shot is just the correct shot for the moment.

For once, Frankenheimer has no conspiracy theory to peddle, but oddly enough this bears similarity to the car crash of The Extraordinary Seaman in that it is riddled with ghosts, of choices not taken, of regrets taken root.

And there is something quite remarkable in the character construction. Both Mike and Malcolm are melancholic, sapped of energy. Into this gap bursts Joe, a vibrant personality, the one gets every party going and always ends up with a bottle in one hand and a girl in the other. It’s quite a stunning performance from an, at this point in his career, a scene-stealer of some style.

In previous films Gene Hackman was always doing something, the hallmark chuckle still in embryo, but his performance often got in the way. Here, the screenplay by William Hanley – based on the novel by James Drought – effectively places him center stage, taking up the slack from the other pair and Hackman responds by proving how he could carry a picture if he was in fact the star.

Scott Wilson (In Cold Blood, 1967) takes the opposite approach, drawing us in with his soulful eyes and a demeanor calling out for affection. He dominates the final section as he, too, contemplates suicide, a pretty tall order given at this point he is in the sky and his eyes are masked by goggles.

When Deborah Kerr asks Burt Lancaster, “Why are we so contemptible to you?” it’s the question she’s asking of herself and that self-loathing guides her repressed performance, occasional bouts of adultery her only release, but unable, as with her early lover, to charge headfirst into happiness.

Lancaster’s role is central but not over-dominant in the way of The Swimmer. While seemingly the picture’s anchor, Frankenheimer is duping the audience in the manner of Hitchcock. Lancaster is not the unshakeable monolith he appears, but a fragile heart.

Critics, possibly still confounded by The Extraordinary Seaman and feeling Frankenheimer had shot his bolt, were pretty dismissive of this at the time. It doesn’t score highly on any of the current critical aggregate charts.

But I find that simply astonishing. If ever there was a movie demanding reappraisal, it’s this.

Just stunning.

Go see.

The Naked Edge (1961) ***

What a potential cinematic coup. Upstanding Gary Cooper (High Noon, 1952) a villain? That’s the entire premise and a bold one at that.

Businessman George (Gary Cooper) is the key witness in the trial of alcoholic colleague Donald Heath (Ray McAnally) on charges of murder and theft of £60,000. But after Heath is convicted, George’s wife Martha (Deborah Kerr) begins to suspect the wrong man has been found guilty. Her husband has suddenly come into a large sum of money from, he claims, playing the stock market and at the trial’s conclusion is accosted by a stranger, Jeremy Clay (Eric Portman).

*The “red danger warning flashing light.”*

Several years a later blackmail letter comes to light, increasing Martha’s doubts. After all this time, George can’t quite lay his hands on the documents regarding his stock market claims. He is spotted in London when he should be abroad.

Martha is so convinced something is wrong that she writes a cheque to Heath’s wife (Diane Cilento) not realizing how shady this would look if the case was revisited. Alarming incidents mount up – her husband’s razor, an invitation to walk along a clifftop. Much of the pressure is self-generated. She has put so much faith in her husband that she would be destroyed if he was guilty, so he must be innocent. Except she can’t quite get rid of the nagging voice.

For his part, George behaves so oddly, being caught out in lies about his whereabouts, and except, conversely, on his insistence that for the sake of their love she must trust him, he does little to shake the doubts especially when Clay pops up again reasserting his misgivings. Since there is no sign of a police investigation, Martha is solely responsible for creating the tension. And, with her out of the way, life might be a lot easier all-round.

The much-vaunted “final 13 minutes” – as promoted in the poster – certainly justifies the tension but outside of whatever’s going on in Martha’s head much of that has been created by bursts of melodramatic music, sudden close-ups and continued emphasis on her point-of-view.

This was Gary Cooper’s final film and it wasn’t the kind of triumphant send-off achieved by Clark Gable (The Misfits, 1961) or Spencer Tracy (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967). It might even have been a surprise choice, audiences more accustomed to find him in westerns – add Vera Cruz (1954) and Friendly Persuasion (1957) to his star turns in that genre. But although he had made nine westerns in the previous decade, he also starred in six non-westerns, including a politician-businessman in Ten North Frederick (1958), and wasn’t averse to playing less than straitlaced characters.

That grim determination that become a hallmark when upholding law and order easily transitioned into just grim determination against whatever threatened his well-being. Of course, the whole enterprise relies on sleight-of-hand but that’s par for the course.

Deborah Kerr had ended the 1950s as a strong-minded female but now seemed to be hell-bent on exploring her fragility and this role seems a direct line to characters played in The Innocents (1961), The Chalk Garden (1964) and The Night of the Iguana (1965).

Audiences were used, by now, to being told when they could enter a theatre. Remember, this was in the glory days of the continuous performance when customers could take their seats at any time during a screening not, as now, before the picture started. You might think it odd that people were barred from entry during the final 13 minutes, as if anyone would consider this a good time to enter, but it was very common for people to take their seats at any odd time. Just in case people didn’t have watches to hand, cinemas were instructed to install a red light and have it flashing in the lobby to prevent interlopers entering. Alfred Hitchcock, of course, invented this clever marketing ploy of annoying the customers for Psycho (1960) but it was still going on as late as Return from the Ashes (1965).

Not Cooper’s greatest film but a decent two-hander that might have worked better if there had been more of a sense of gaslighting Kerr. That it works at all is down to the actors, not a bad achievement when you consider the director was asking the audience to go completely against type in accepting Cooper as a potential killer.

British director Michael Anderson (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) had the sense to ignore the attractions of tourist London and concentrate on suspense. Joseph Stefano (Psycho) based the screenplay on a novel by Max Ehrlich.

The Chalk Garden (1964) ***

You couldn’t make a movie like this now because (plot spoiler, I’m afraid) even the dottiest of old ladies would make at least a better attempt at collecting a reference from a prospective employee for fear she might be hiring someone disreputable. Though I doubt if many employers would expect a governess to turn out to be a murderess.

That this movie chimes with a contemporary trope – the criminal wanting to prevent others from following in their footsteps – makes it far ahead of its time. Made today, of course, the unruly child rather than merely threatening to unleash her arson impulses would probably have burned the house down.

So it’s more a drama of manners, if you like. Very presentable but clearly down-on-her-luck Miss Madrigal (Deborah Kerr) is taken on by Mrs St Maugham (Edith Evans) as governess for her grandchild Laurel (Hayley Mills) because nobody else wants the job. Laurel’s outrageous behavior has sent a score perfectly well qualified ladies scurrying. Madrigal is hardly fazed by anything Laurel can get up to.

But the child is clearly suffering abandonment issues, her beautiful mother Olivia (Elizabeth Sellars) having gone off with another man. Grandmother incites grandchild to hate the mother. But Olivia’s maternal instincts have kicked in and she wants her child back. While Madrigal can deal with Laurel’s tantrums she is less fortified against the child’s inveterate snooping. Finding a mysterious suitcase leads Laurel to fantasize about Madrigal’s past.

Mostly the film is a four-hander, butler Maitland (John Mills) playing a significant role in proceedings, not least in his effortless management of the wild child. Quite why a such a pragmatic and assured gentleman should end up in this remote mansion is another mystery and thankfully there is no attempt made at playing up the cliff-top location in a suspenseful manner.

Mrs St Maugham is imperious but not entirely practical, either in setting child against mother or in trying to grow flowers in such chalky soil, though Madrigal appears to have sufficient horticultural knowledge to set her straight on the latter and attempt to intervene on the former.

There’s a deadline of sorts. Olivia is coming to remove the child. Whether she goes willingly or not doesn’t matter. Madrigal sees her role as trying to prepare a child to love her mother and be more grown-up than the adults around her and forgive her.

Madrigal’s guilt unnecessarily causes her to reveal that she had been jailed for murdering her stepsister, having been as resentful and jealous of the girl as Laurel currently is of her mother. Mrs St Maugham had called on old acquaintance Judge (Felix Aylmer ) for legal advice on how to prevent Olivia getting the child. He was the presiding judge in Madrigal’s case. Imagining he had not forgotten the trial – which of course he has – she feels duty bound to blurt out the truth before she is humiliated. The confession helps Laurel realise how dangerous a path she is on and pushes her towards reconciliation rather than revenge.

It has all the making of a well-made play which is hardly surprising since it is based on Enid Bagnold’s Broadway success, at one time mooted as a film to star Joanne Woodward and Sandra Dee. So it moves along in the traditional three-act manner, plenty space given to establishing characters, introducing the undercurrents and leading to revelation and resolution.

So, mostly, it depends on the acting. Luckily, it is excellent. This was Hayley Mills in transition, far removed from Disney saccharine of The Parent Trap (1961) and about the same distance from the full-blown adult bottom-baring of The Family Way (1966). She projects a great deal more torment than in either of those films and comes across as believable, not exactly a young hoodlum but left to her own devices and starved of parental love only a matter of time before she would commit a crime of some kind.

Deborah Kerr hadn’t made a film in three years but her screen persona had shifted from the passionate – From Here to Eternity (1953), An Affair to Remember (1957), The Sundowners (1960) – to the repressed. Her spinster introduced in The Innocents (1961) had a great deal in common with her spinster of The Night of the Iguana (1965). But this is a different kettle of fish. Here, she exudes capability but with a self-awareness that undercuts such confidence, trying to keep a lid of emotions she struggles to handle.

John Mills (Tunes of Glory, 1960) casts a sardonic eye on the household while Edith Evans (The Whisperers) portrays a sorely wounded matriarch. Director Ronald Neame (Gambit, 1966) cleverly opens up the play, using the cliffs, gardens and rocky beach to considerable effect, but keeps the drama taut. John Michael Hayes (Nevada Smith, 1966) produced a workable screenplay.

Apologies for giving away the story, a good watch more for the acting than the twist.

The Night of the Iguana (1964) ****

The eponymous reptile is a rather obvious metaphor for characters trapped by quixotic decisions. Regardless of the Rev Dr. T Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton) being a defrocked priest, he was always going to lead a dissolute life, alcohol the least of his temptations. This heady drama begins with comedy about a man with ideas above his station ending up as an incompetent tourist guide.

And if his behaviour is not scandalous enough for current coach party, middle-aged Baptist ladies, he leads them to a hotel in Mexico run by former lover Maxine (Ava Gardner) who has two younger lovers on the go. And as is the way with author Tennessee Williams there’s a posse of fascinating characters, led by spinster Hannah (Deborah Kerr) who ekes out an itinerant living selling paintings while her aged grandfather (Cyril Devalanti) recites poetry. Raising the moral stakes is under-age Charlotte (Sue Lyon) who has taken a fancy to Shannon, partly in rebellion against her frosty chaperone Judith (Grayson Hall).

For a movie with no great narrative drive, there’s no shortage of drama, whether it’s the Reverend under constant attack from his charges, Charlotte making advances, Shannon succumbing or trying to fight his addictions, Maxine succumbing then rejecting his advances, and Hannah on the sidelines trying to work out why her entire life has been lived in the shadows.

A simple dramatic fuse has been lit, disparate group with secrets set to explode, and you just sit back and enjoy the ride. Exceptionally daring, even if in discreet fashion, for the time, not just the Lolita-style Charlotte, but the middle-aged Maxine cavorting with not one but two men young enough to be her sons, so effectively a Cougar (before the term was invented) in a threesome, a woman in full command on her sex life not at the whim of a male. There’s as overt a gay woman as you would find in this era. And that’s before we come to Hannah, one of whose two sexual experiences involved averting her eyes while her male companion masturbated on a piece of her clothing. That was taking it way beyond the limits of acceptable on-screen behaviour of the day.

Characters are either engulfed by their passions or weaknesses or trying to come to terms with them, sometimes both. Over everything hangs poignancy at the self-deception practised, redemption scarcely a possibility, communication a minefield, acceptance the best anyone can hope for. Quality acting prevents this disappearing down a sinkhole of self-pity.

Richard Burton (Becket, 1964) was on a roll, one brilliant performance after another either with or without Elizabeth Taylor, essaying a wide range of characters. This is one of his best. You should despise the sham he has become, relying on charm to dig himself out of a hole, relying far too much on the kindness of strangers whose sympathy is exhausted. Yet the loss of the only position, a clergyman, for which he was possibly suited, thrown out for committing unforgiveable sin while preaching sanctity, makes him a very relatable human being. This isn’t Days of Wine and Roses reborn, but someone trying to win the pinch of oxygen required to keep his soul alive, and stir the energy inside. And he would be furious if you ever made the mistake of feeling sorry for him.

Ava Gardner (Mayerling, 1968) is superb, staring age in the face, unrepentant, sex an acceptable substitute for love, underlying sadness admirably restrained. But Deborah Kerr (The Chalk Garden, 1964), brings a refreshing dash to her introspective character, a woman with practical solutions except to her own emotional emptiness. Sue Lyon (Lolita, 1962) is only briefly scandalous and the movie’s conclusion suggests she is capable of settling down and not giving into the base desires that afflict all the others.

Just as with The Misfits (1961), director John Huston allows his characters to breathe. It would have been very easy to allow Shannon to have a more heroic or stoic stature, instead of someone stumbling around. Tinges of comedy and wit lighten the load. Huston and Anthony Veiller (The List of Adrian Messenger, 1963) wrote the screenplay from the Tennessee Williams play.

Behind the Scenes: “The Grass Is Greener” (1960)

Cary Grant was coming off a commercial career peak, comedy Houseboat (1958) with Sophia Loren, Hitchcock thriller North by Northwest (1959) and war comedy Operation Petticoat (1959) all among the top box office hits of their years. He was in enormous demand. In 1960 Jerry Wald wooed him for Tender Is the Night, eventually made in 1962 with Jason Robards. He went so far along considering Can-Can (1960) that he began working with a voice coach and passed on Let’s Make Love (1960).

The prospect of Lawrence of Arabia – he had been lined up to play the lead over two decades before – reared his head with producer Sam Spiegel eyeing him up for Allenby (played in the 1962 picture by Jack Hawkins). He turned down Lolita and a remake of The Letter. The biggest letdown was John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King which would have teamed him with Clark Gable. Of the screenplay, Grant commented: “I’ve read it twice and am still uncertain whether it’s fair, good, or perhaps, even excellent.” (It would not be filmed until 1975.)

Also in the pipeline was an intriguing original screenplay in which he and Ingrid Bergman would essay dual roles and his alternative company, Granart, also purchased The Day They Robbed the Bank. (Neither project was made.)

In the face of such indecision it’s not surprising he decided to play safe. The Grass Is Greener would be made by his own company, Grandon, a production outfit set up with director Stanley Donen – they had previously made Indiscreet (1957) – at that point still best known for musicals including Singin’ in the Rain (1951), though he had also directed Grant in the comedy Kiss Them for Me (1957).

Initially Grant cast himself as the American, with Rex Harrison (The Honey Pot, 1967) and his real-life wife Kay Kendall (Once More with Feeling, 1960, also directed by Donen) the titled British couple. Harrison would certainly have brought more natural acidity to the part but he pulled out after his wife died prematurely. Deborah Kerr, the most English of actresses, was ideal for the Earl’s wife.

Robert Mitchum, with whom Kerr had just appeared in The Sundowners (1960), was a late addition as the Yank even though it meant him dropping to third billing for the first time in over a decade. For The Sundowners he had ceded top billing to Kerr on the basis it would be better for the poster, not realizing he would be viewed as the male lead rather than the acknowledged star (not quite as subtle a difference as you might imagine in the cut-throat credits business). Kerr was at an artistic peak, winning her sixth Oscar nomination for The Sundowners. Mitchum, by contrast, nominated in a supporting role for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) had nary a sniff of peer recognition since.

Jean Simmons (Spartacus, 1960) was a surprise choice for Grant’s character’s ex-lover but was willing to accept lower billing because she was desperate to extend her range by doing comedy. The foursome already had considerable experience working with each other, Mitchum paired with Simmons for Angel Face (1952) and She Couldn’t Say No (1953) while Kerr and Grant had dallied in Dream Wife (1953) and An Affair to Remember (1957). To round things off Kerr had played opposite Mitchum in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) and, as mentioned, The Sundowners.

Although the picture was financed by Universal, director Donen was more of a Columbia favorite. On top of Once More with Feeling and Surprise Package for the latter studio, he was contracted to make another four, all to be filmed abroad, the director having set up home in London. Deborah Kerr was involved in Cakes and Ale, based on the Somerset Maugham novel, with George Cukor and was announced as starring in Behind the Mirror (neither film made). Mitchum was also diversifying, the first of a three-picture deal between United Artists and his company being North from Rome (never made), based on the Helen MacInnes thriller.

Shooting began at Shepperton in London on April 4, 1860, but this time round, the personalities did not quite gel. Simmons complained that Grant was “a fuss-budget, everything must be just so.” Although she did admit that his preparation worked wonders. “He’d come forth with the most amusing, polished take, everything so effortless.” Mitchum complained Grant lacked a sense of humor. “He’s very light and pleasant but his humor is sort of old music-hall jokes.”

Despite the high-class cast, Grant had very definite ideas about his star status. In one scene that called for both actresses to be bedecked in expensive jewelry, he instructed the jewels be removed in case the audience was distracted from him.

Grant and Mitchum had one thing in common, a liking for experimenting with drugs. Mitchum’s preference for marijuana was well-known. Although he had been previously jailed for his “addiction,” Mitchum still grew his own. Grant’s drug of choice, on the other hand, was LSD. He had been on a course of LSD treatment since 1958 and was in the middle of coming off the drug. “He was a little weird,” noted Mitchum.

Fittingly, their personality clash was very English, “a mild, undeclared, rivalry.” The battleground was costume, Grant perturbed that Mitchum’s laid-back style was making him look over-dressed while Mitchum complained that he was a glorified feed, employed simply to make non-committal comments in the middle of a Grant monologue.

Grant’s parsimony was also a bit extreme. As part of his invoice for doing publicity on the picture, “not only did he turn in his hotel bills and meal receipts for those four extra days but also the costs of the suits” he had had made in Hong Kong. In other words, he billed his own company. Money paid for these expenses would be deducted from any potential profit he would receive.

Kerr, however, had no complaints. “Between Cary’s superb timing and Bob’s instinctive awareness of what you’re trying to do, this was a very happy film.” But there was one other source of contention. The British media were barred from the set on by Stanley Donen on the grounds that journalists of the more sensation-seeking newspaper were apt to needle actors. Grant softened the blow by arranging to be interviewed once filming was complete.

However, Variety was able to give the picture a publicity boost by hailing stately home tourism as “a new type of British show business,” reckoning the 400 operations raked in $4 million a year. Average admission prices of 35 cents meant over 10 million visitors a year.

Ironically, the infidelity theme cost The Grass Is Greener a lucrative Xmas launch at the prestigious Radio City Music Hall in New York. The cinema felt the content was not in keeping with Yuletide and opted for The Sundowners instead, the Donen picture shifting to the much smaller and semi-arthouse Astor. Just how important the Hall was to a movie’s public reception could be judged by the takings the previous year for Operation Petticoat (a Granart release), a whopping $175,000 opener. The point was made when The Sundowners grossed $200,000 in its first week, three times as much as The Grass Is Greener.

SOURCES: Scott Eyman, Cary Grant, A Brilliant Disguise (Simon & Schuster, 2020) p339-343,363-368; Lee Server, Robert Mitchum, Baby I Don’t Care (Faber and Faber, 2002) p204-207, 429; Eric Braun, Deborah Kerr (WH Allen, 1977) p176-177; “Deborah’s Cakes & Ale,” Variety, July 15, 1959, p3; “Grant in Original, with Himself and Bergman in Dual Roles,” Variety, September 30, 1959, p10; “Nativity and Grant Combo at Hall,” Variety, December 9, 1959, p9; “Maugham-Hurst Film Location in Tangier,” Variety, January 6, 1960, p167; “Col Extending Donen,” Variety, May 25, 1960, p20; “400 Stately Homes of England,” Variety, June 1, 1960, p2; “Needling and Smartalec British Interviewers Not Allowed In By Donen,” Variety, June 22, 1960, p2; “Infidelity Theme Cancels Grant’s Comedy at Hall,” Variety, September 21, 1960, p7; “Cary Grant’s,” Variety, November 9, 1960, p20; “B’Way soars,” Variety, December 28, 1960, p9.

The Arrangement (1969) ***

It might have been better if director Elia Kazan had handed over the screenwriting chores for this adaptation of his bestseller about the midlife crisis of advertising man Eddie Anderson (Kirk Douglas). Anderson’s attempts to juggle wife Florence (Deborah Kerr) and mistress Gwen (Faye Dunaway) coupled with growing disgust at selling a new brand of cigarettes, Zephyr (“The Clean One”), in a way that pointedly avoids their cancer potential, leads to a suicide attempt.

During convalescence he determines to quit the advertising world and go back to his first love, writing, but in fact he ends up sabotaging his career. Florence represents impossible seduction and conscience. Slinky, in dark glasses, hot-tempered rather than submissive or demure, she accuses him of self-deception in his job. The picture flits back and forth between his various choices – different job, return to wife, settle down with mistress, or what seems his ideal world, cossetted by both Gwen and Florence.

Gwen is an excellent study of the modern woman (of that fast-changing period, I hasten to add), who needs a man for sex but not necessarily love, and can use the opposite gender as ruthlessly as any man. What she actually requires in her real life is quite different to what she seeks in the fantasy love she enjoyed with Anderson, sex on the beach, the buzz of controlling a high-powered man. Florence could be seen as an old-fashioned portrait of the adoring wife except for capturing so well the bewilderment of betrayal.

Kazan conjures up some wonderful images: the tension before the suicide attempt as Anderson plays chicken between two trucks, Gwen emerging wet from the pool to eat dangling grapes or with her legs up on Anderson’s desk, Anderson’s mother lighting votive candles in her house before using the same match for her cigarette, Kerr’s futile attempts to win back her fallen husband, Anderson flying solo.

In parts well-observed and directorially savvy, quick cuts between the present and the past, however it sinks beneath its own self-indulgence. My guess is that author Kazan could not bear to kill off a single one of the characters he had created for his acclaimed novel and the upshot is a vastly over-populated picture, few of whom cast any real light on Anderson’s predicament. So we are not only introduced to mother, dying father, brother, sister-in-law and analyst but priest and a bucket of clients and guys from the office. And there are some plot oddities – Anderson gets time off apparently to write journalistic pieces – and what is clearly intended as hard-hitting satire of the advertising world does not come off.

Dunaway (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967) is the standout as Gwen, living life according to her own rules, and with an unexpected vision of domesticity but Deborah Kerr (Prudence and the Pill, 1968) does pain like nobody else and is extremely convincing. Strangely enough, I didn’t go much for Douglas (Seven Days in May, 1964). He could have been leading a cavalry charge for all the range of emotions he exhibited. Douglas is no Montgomery Clift (Wild River, 1960), James Dean (East of Eden, 1955) or Marlon Brando (On the Waterfront, 1954) who was Kazan’s first choice. Kazan had not made a picture in six years and it had been eight years since his last hit Splendor in the Grass (1961). Not quite out-of-touch in concept and delivery, nonetheless it was shunned by the Oscar fraternity.