Edmund Goulding Reaches for the Moon
A Review by Dan Callahan
11/20/2004
Edmund Goulding, a wildly hedonistic yet gentle-spirited Englishman, made some of old Hollywood's best-loved movies (as well as some of its more neglected sleepers). He helped Joan Crawford find herself in Sally, Irene and Mary (1926), ensured that Greta Garbo and John Gilbert scorched the screen in Love (1927), wrote and directed Gloria Swanson's first talkie, The Trespasser (1929), made the archetypal all-star film, Grand Hotel (1932), guided Bette Davis in four of her key movies, and garnered career-best performances from Joan Fontaine in The Constant Nymph (1943) and Tyrone Power in the unforgettable and unforgotten Nightmare Alley (1947).
Aside from all these accomplishments, Goulding had himself a helluva good time off the screen: the intricate orgies at his home were famous. Louise Brooks wrote, "(Goulding's) name evokes a vision of sex without sin that paralyzes the guilty mind of Hollywood. All for love he directed his sexual events with the same attention he gave the directing of films. His clients might be the British aristocracy, bankers, or corporate executives. His call girls might be waitresses or movie stars."
Matthew Kennedy, a film critic and teacher based in San Francisco who has previously published a book on the great actress Marie Dressler, just came out with the first biography of this director, Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory. "I had heard of Goulding's name, but had never strung together all of his credits as being from one man," says Kennedy, from Frisco. "When I did, I was intrigued, impressed, and seduced."
Kennedy traces Goulding's history all the way back to his beginnings as a boy actor on stage in England, filling in any necessary gaps in the narrative with thoughtful insights (as he did in his invaluable Dressler book). We follow Goulding's evolution from actor to endlessly inventive Hollywood screenwriter and pitchman, on to his first triumphs at MGM in the late twenties and thirties, and then into the period of his real artistic flowering, at Warner Brothers. "Goulding grew as an artist," says Kennedy. "His artistic peak was 1939. Dark Victory, The Old Maid and We Are Not Alone were all produced that year."
Kennedy delivers the goods on Goulding's sexual delights, ("if there was anything he hadn't tried, it was because it hadn't occurred to him," said William Dufty) but draws a firm line between the director's life and his work. "He spoke of movies in almost sacred terms," insists Kennedy. "He loved their romanticism, how they drew out deep emotions, how they could drain an audience of tears." Like any true romantic, Goulding was never satisfied with one partner for long. It speaks to his rare generosity, though, that when he married, at least partly to cover his sexual tracks, he chose Marjorie Moss, a dancer who was dying. Brooks revered Goulding for the way he "filled the last three years of her life with beauty and the loving attendance of friends."
Goulding emerges as a man both sensitive and sensual, and Kennedy makes a very convincing case for him as a film director, as well. At first, Goulding seems dangerously close to hackdom, as he churns out screenplays during the twenties. But even during this apprenticeship he was capable of writing something as fine as Tol'able David (1921), a timeless tribute to innocence. His early star vehicles for Crawford, Garbo, Swanson and Marion Davies show how he could bring out the best in his varied players (like Ernst Lubitsch, he acted out all the scenes for his actors beforehand). By the late thirties, Goulding's talents had deepened and he was capable of producing masterpieces: Dark Victory, a profoundly spiritual look at early death featuring Bette Davis' most touching, most unguarded performance, The Constant Nymph, a startlingly pure paean to romantic devotion between a child and a composer, and Nightmare Alley, a noir portrait of circus life so suggestively grisly that it has remained in our sub-conscious for almost sixty years. They may not know its name, or that Goulding directed it, but everyone of a certain generation speaks in hushed tones about "that movie where Tyrone Power bites the heads off chickens."
There might be some outside reasons for Goulding's obscurity. "Some folks," says Kennedy, "including Joan Fontaine and Louise Brooks, have suggested that he was blackballed in Hollywood, so that honors and tributes never came his way. He also had no children, and no one to champion his memory." Then there's his eclecticism, which also doesn't help place him where he should be. "He worked so well in so many genres that 'an Edmund Goulding movie' doesn't offer the instant recognition of 'an Alfred Hitchcock movie' or 'a John Ford movie,'" says Kennedy. "Sexism may play a part. Goulding's great legacy is the performances he got from women...Crawford, Garbo, Davis, Mary Astor, Joan Fontaine, Dorothy McGuire, Eleanor Parker, Joan Blondell. Fame after death is a delicate thing."
Dark Victory is shown often, but has received little serious critical attention. Nightmare Alley remains a cult movie. And, tragically, The Constant Nymph is held back from showing on TV. "The original novelist of The Constant Nymph, Margaret Kennedy, stated in her will that all showings of the movie after its first run must be held at museums and universities," reports Kennedy. "Turner Classic Movies has a print in their vaults, but they're hamstrung. Perhaps with a bit of public outcry they might secure the rights to televise it. It's such a shame that the movie sits in limbo."
If Goulding himself still sits in limbo, Kennedy's book has done a feelingful, precise and lyrical job of placing him where he belongs in film history. It's a perfect meeting of writer and subject. Next for Kennedy is another neglected figure, Joan Blondell, that big-eyed workhorse from the thirties who was always fresh no matter what her material, a survivor who wound up, bizarrely, in a Cassavettes movie, Opening Night (1978). "Blondell's family is wonderfully generous with their memories," says Kennedy. "And there is amazing drama, humor, and inspiration to her life." One can only hope that Kennedy keeps on going to George Sanders, Helen Chandler, Frank Borzage or Claude Rains, lighting beacons to illuminate many more of the glittering, hidden worthies of Hollywood history.
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 11/20/2004
