23 results in Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
The Contributors
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8 - Prospero Unbound: John Barrymore's Theatrical Transformations of Cinema Reality
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- By George Toles, Professor of Literature and Film at the University of Manitoba.
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Summary
John Barrymore is the supreme embodiment of theater on film. No matter what roles he plays, the aura of theater inescapably and (so often) magically defines his relation to the camera and to his fellow performers. Theater for him offers the potential to burst the boundaries of an assigned role at any moment, to annul the threat of confinement to a tediously fixed disposition. Barrymore seems always a visitor to the land of film from another country. He carries the burden of exile though in an antic fashion. We feel his true home and deepest commitments lie elsewhere. Like his character the Baron in Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel (1932), he is drawn to shadow spaces on the periphery of the main action. He emerges for brief intervals as a half-spirit, half-charlatan, seeking a kind of connection and fulfillment that are unattainable. One feels he prefers the elusive or impossible goal, and secretly craves to have his aims thwarted.
His roles frequently seem designed to test the distinctions between film's sense of the real and theater's. He is a creature of this borderland, and many of his most famous characterizations highlight division and the necessity of repeated transformation. Film offers the possibility of direct human revelation. The camera desires to discover who the man Barrymore is without the protections of disguise. Barrymore resists exposure of the self behind the theater personage yet so many of his characterizations are precisely about masks gradually torn away and a subjection to merciless social scrutiny. Perhaps the role in which Barrymore is most caught up in theatrical flummery and, at the same time, most painfully probed by the camera is Larry Renault in George Cukor's Dinner at Eight (1933), a figure who is lethally entrapped on the illusion-shredding stage of his hotel room. Interestingly, Barrymore's conception of this ham actor stresses that his destruction results in large part from insufficient belief in theatrical transformation and in theatrical means for approaching truth. Renault cannot hide behind a mask and, as a result, he is prey to almost everyone. The elements of Renault's failure to believe in theatrical metamorphosis, until the role of a literal dead man presents itself to him as a way out of his difficulties, will be my primary focus in this chapter.
Acknowledgments
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6 - From Rome to Berlin: Barrymore as Romantic Lover
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- By Douglas McFarland, Professor of English and Classical Studies at Flagler College, Saint Augustine, Florida
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Summary
After his final performance of Hamlet in London in 1925, John Barrymore abruptly left the stage for films. His portrayal of the Danish prince had proven to be a huge success in New York as well as in London. But, upon returning from England to New York in 1925, Barrymore immediately left for Hollywood, enticed by money and what must have seemed to him the less strenuous demands of film acting. After all, Barrymore had given over a hundred performances of Hamlet, first in New York and then the following year in London. He might very well have been both physically and mentally exhausted. He had earlier starred in several silent films, one of which, Beau Brummel (1924), cast him as a dandy with a proclivity for seducing women. The film ends with the aged lover on his deathbed, visited by the one woman he had loved. With a romantically melodramatic flourish, the two die together in each others’ arms. The persona of the great onscreen romantic lover will carry over into four films he made from 1926 to 1932: Don Juan (1926), Eternal Love (1929), Arsène Lupin (1932), and Grand Hotel (1932). In these films Barrymore proved himself adept at playing a host of onscreen lovers: a psychologically damaged lothario; an overly passionate outsider; a stylish thief; and an insolvent aristocrat reduced to gambling and burglary. Ostensibly, these roles and their contexts differ from one another but they are linked not only by Barrymore the actor but by a set of thematic approaches to romantic love.
DON JUAN
Barrymore's first film upon his return to Hollywood was an adaptation of Melville's Moby-Dick (The Sea Beast, 1925). Because of audience demand orperhaps because of Barrymore's own persona, a romantic subplot was added to the script. In his second film, Alan Crosland's Don Juan, Barrymore established himself more fully as a great onscreen lover. An attractive physique and acrobatic skills served him well in a film genre that had been established by the dashing Douglas Fairbanks in a series of costume dramas that included such successful projects as The Mark of Zorro (1920), Robin Hood (1922), and, in the same year Don Juan was released, The Black Pirate (1926).
Frontmatter
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12 - “Planes, Motors, Schedules”: Night Flight and the Modernity of John Barrymore
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- By Will Scheibel, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University.
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Summary
All you care about is planes, motors, schedules,” cries Simone Fabian in Night Flight (1933), reproving the managing director of the Trans-Andean European Air Mail for his lack of compassion towards his pilots. “When they land, when they take off,” she continues, waving at the map of South America behind him in his office, “just a map with a lot of lights on it!” Simone's husband Jules is one of those airmail pilots, en route from Punta Arenas, Chile to the airline's headquarters in Buenos Aires. After flying off course in a blinding rainstorm and with only minutes of fuel left, he and his wireless operator jump from the plane to their oceanic grave below. John Barrymore plays Rivière, the authoritarian director of the fictional airline, who has just informed Simone that her husband is lost. “We're doing everything that can be done,” he assures her sternly. “Unfortunately, we don't know just where to look. In the last message we picked up, he said he couldn't land. He was still over the sea, but he didn't know how far from shore.” When Simone reminds Rivière, desperately, that she is Jules's wife and loves him, Rivière replies, “Can't you see that's of no importance … when there's work to do?” Cold and mechanical, resistant to “tears and hysterics,” Rivière is Barrymore at his most ruthlessly antiromantic. Positioned opposite Simone, whose sentiment, he informs her, “is only in the way now,” Barrymore's Rivière represents the masculine gendering of an industrial and managerial modernity.
Barrymore, “The Great Profile,” was one of the preeminent actors of Hollywood cinema during the 1920s and early 1930s. There is much to be said of the techniques and traditions with which he created his roles, not only in films such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), Don Juan (1926), Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), and Twentieth Century (1934) but also on stage—his Hamlet, which ran on Broadway from 1922 to 1923, was regarded as the greatest of his day (see Fowler and Morrison for earlier work that deals with some of this material). This chapter views a different face of Barrymore that, given his reputation as an actor, may come from a less likely perspective but it provides an opportunity for us to look closely at his film performances within a uniquely cinematic frame.
7 - The Power of Stillness: John Barrymore's Performance in Svengali
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- By Diane Carson, Professor Emerita, St. Louis Community College
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Summary
Expert actors masterfully control their performances throughout their diverse roles, and John Barrymore proves equal to the multifaceted demands on the title character in Svengali (1931). With art direction strongly influenced by German expressionism, set against a backdrop of limited locations, Barrymore effectively guides and anchors the film through a commanding presentation of highly stylized, dramatic choices. With what appears to be minimal effort, Barrymore's restrained physical movements and modulated verbal delivery dominate the flurry of activity and concern swirling around his sinister Svengali. In effect, in director Archie Mayo's version of George du Maurier's novel, throughout Svengali's hypnotic manipulation of the chanteuse Trilby, Barrymore relies on limited verbal and constrained nonverbal choices to wield his devastating power.
Svengali (John Barrymore) tells the story of a supernaturally powerful voice teacher and pianist who hypnotizes women in person and controls them from afar. He carries on an affair with Honori (Carmel Myers) who, leaving her husband and his wealth, is driven to suicide by Svengali. He falls in love with, and dominates, a model, Trilby (Marian Marsh). She and artist Billee (Bramwell Fletcher) plan on marrying but Svengali, exercising hypnotic control over Trilby, whisks her away to tour European concert halls after deceiving Billee into thinking she has killed herself. Billee, discovering that Trilby is alive, pursues them to Cairo. During a concert there, Svengali slumps at the podium, his life force exhausted, praying for Trilby's love. She faints, whispers Svengali's name and, in Billee's arms, dies moments before a happy Svengali also expires.
Critics at the time and in the decades since have appreciated Barrymore's presentation of this devious, destructive character. Praising Barrymore'sperformance, Mordaunt Hall writes, “This production, which bears the title of Svengali, may have lost some of the romantic charm of the author's tale, but it compensates for this by Mr. Barrymore's imaginative and forceful portrayal, and also by Archie Mayo's knowledgeable supervision of the camera work.” Hall adds, “Mr. Barrymore's fine performance … surpasses anything he has done for the screen, including his masterful acting in the motion pictures of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Clyde Fitch's Beau Brummell” (“A Lesson in Golf. A Fashionable Rogue,” New York Times [May 1, 1931], 34, online at nytimes.com).
5 - “Keep Back your Pity”: The Wounded Barrymore of The Sea Beast and Moby Dick
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- By Dominic Lennard, Associate Lecturer in the Pre-degree Programs at the University of Tasmania.
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Summary
A performer noted for his striking beauty, John Barrymore was nevertheless familiar with contorting his appearance to attract equally the dreadful fascination of his viewers, having done so most remarkably playing the lead in John S. Robertson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920). A similar transformation also characterizes his starring roles in dual adaptations of Moby-Dick: the silent production The Sea Beast (1926) and its sound remake Moby Dick (1930). Released amid the novel's critical reappraisal, yet prior to its accumulation of unsurpassed prestige in the American literary canon, both films renovate Melville's tale considerably for the screen, focusing on a romantic union thrown into crisis when one of the couple, young harpooner Ahab Ceeley (Barrymore), is wounded by the white whale during the course of the narrative. The metamorphosis of Barrymore's Ahab after his injury is most stunning in The Sea Beast: initially a sprightly young sailor, Ahab transforms into a haggard ghoul, with eyes both sunken and penetrating as he pursues his hated prey. The Ahab of Lloyd Bacon's later Moby Dick, while not quite the Gothic spectacle presented in The Sea Beast, still grimly snarls in marked contrast to the dashing man we see at the start of the film. In both films, the wounding of Ahab effects a deep reconfiguration of both his appearance and his character. The sailor eventually seeks retribution from the whale, yet it is his romantic rejection that lingers most centrally and spurs his vengeful quest. This chapter focuses on both of these roles and on the narratives that articulate and augment them, emphasizing Barrymore's Ahab as the possessor of a confident, desirable masculinity radically compromised by injury. Additionally, I suggest that these narratives of stigma and disability had particular resonance for the postwar period of the films’ production and reception in which numerous wounded men, formerly healthy and whole, struggled, with wounds anddisfigurements, to be reintegrated into society and the prevailing definitions of masculinity.
“MY DARLING! HOW HORRIBLE, HOW PITIFUL!” THE INJURED AHAB
Both The Sea Beast and Moby Dick institute any number of changes to gall Melville purists, and a series of modifications further distinguish one adaptation from the other. Nevertheless, both emphasize the stymied (and finally revived) union of sailor Ahab Ceeley and the daughter of a local preacher, in The Sea Beast Esther (Dolores Costello), renamed Faith (Joan Bennett) in Bacon's remake.
3 - The Curious Case of Sherlock Holmes
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- By Colin Williamson, Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Pace University (New York City)
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Summary
He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in BohemiaIf, in this line from Conan Doyle's 1891 short story, Watson's description of Sherlock Holmes resembles a camera, it is because both the fictional detective and that other “observing machine” share an affinity as emblems of a distinctly modern way of seeing. Holmes is “perfect” because nothing escapes his gaze. His eyes constantly detect and collect visual evidence that others do not and in ways that others cannot. His visual acuity is matched by the speed of his reasoning which allows him to decipher a person at a glance and, in turn, masterfully to navigate a world of deceptive appearances.
The photographic apparatus is not a “reasoning machine” but, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, its powers of detection were preeminent. At the time that Conan Doyle was writing, the mechanical “eyes” of cameras employed for still and motion photography were radically transforming visuality and the experience of modern life. With innovations in chronophotography and early cinematic uses of techniques such as time lapse and slow motion, the camera developed an identity as a detective that could reveal secret realities in the hitherto undisclosed zone beneath the appearances of things, that which Walter Benjamin called the domain of the “optical unconscious” (510–12). The avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Germaine Dulac described the cinema along these lines as “an eye wide open on life, an eye more powerful than our own and which sees things we cannot see” (39).
In the early twentieth century the resemblance between Holmes and the camera evolved considerably into a cinematic phenomenon. Throughout the silent era Conan Doyle's detective stories were adapted into short and feature-length films by a wide range of studios, including Biograph, Vitagraph, Universal, Essanay, Goldwyn Pictures, Éclair, and several smaller companies in Britain and Germany. The international popularity and pervasiveness of Holmes are quite remarkable. Between 1908 and 1911, Nordisk Film in Denmark produced a series of at least twelve short films featuring Holmes; Éclair in France produced eight in 1912 alone; and, from 1921 to 1923, Stoll Pictures in England produced a total of forty-five shorts and two feature-length films. The vogue, which included Buster Keaton's celebrated Sherlock, Jr.
List of Figures
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Contents
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11 - John Barrymore's Sparkling Topaze
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- By Steven Rybin, Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the English department at Minnesota State University, Mankato
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Summary
In Topaze (1933), principled schoolteacher Auguste A. Topaze, played by John Barrymore, suddenly finds himself in need of a job because, after giving poor marks to a malingering student with politically influential parents, he has lost his teaching position and with it his dreams of attaining an academy medal. An offer shortly comes along from the unscrupulous businessman and politician Baron Philippe de la Tour-La Tour (Reginald Mason)—the father of the disruptive schoolboy whose behavior led to Topaze's dismissal. The Baron promises Topaze that, in exchange for the use of his name in the marketing of a new health beverage, he will receive funding for his scientific researches as well as the academy medal he prizes. The drink, with Topaze's blessing, is to be christened “The Sparkling Topaze.” Innocently assured that it will be his research that guides the formula for the beverage, Topaze agrees to the Baron's plan. He will use his research to create a health drink of benefit to the public and it will bear his name. But the viewer knows something Topaze initially does not: the drink possesses no health benefits whatsoever and is designed only to cheat the public of their money. After he learns of the ruse, Topaze receives a real-world lesson in ethics that challenges his schoolroom ideals.
Topaze is adapted from a French play by Marcel Pagnol who directed his own film version in 1951 (with the popular comedian Fernandel in the title role). The original French play is a satire and a moral tale, critical of unwavering ideals in the face of a contingent social world. In the hands of director Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast and actor John Barrymore, the 1933 American film version becomes something of a comedy of manners, focusing its attention on Topaze's behavior and reactions as he finds his understanding of human ethics challenged by the administrative bureaucratic class that manipulates him throughout the film.
Central to this film version of the story, of course, is the casting of Barrymore whose star persona and biographical legend inscribe at least two playful ironies into the role. The first is that the dutifully sober Topaze, who becomes dizzy at even the slightest drop of drink and who endorses a beverage with ostensible health benefits, should be played by one of film history's most notorious and passionate drinkers (whose health derived very little benefit from his frequent inebriation).
1 - The Pre-Bard Stage Career of John Barrymore
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- By Philip Carli, musicologist, silent-film accompanist, and conductor based in Rochester, New York
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Early in the sound film revolution, the major American studios decided to emulate a current Broadway trend by creating revues—films that featured discrete musical and dramatic sequences designed to dazzle all the senses and show off the various talents of their major stars. These often exposed stars’ less attractive attributes as well as exploiting what they were good at, Paramount on Parade (1930) proving, for example, that Clara Bow's singing voice was not strong. Warner Bros.'s contribution to the genre was one of the earliest and most commercially successful: Show of Shows, released in April 1929. It was as variable in entertainment, artistic merit, and technical sophistication as any of its competitors’ efforts, and was certainly as long (clocking in at well over two hours in its initial screenings) but among the musical and comic acts was an anomaly: the studio's most celebrated “serious” star, John Barrymore, famous as both a stage and screen actor and personality, making his sound film debut by delivering the Duke of Gloucester's soliloquy from William Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part One, on an impressive set featuring a menacing barren mountain, the whole affair introduced and concluded by spare but suitably ominous sound effects. Before his performance, Barrymore, clad in evening dress, steps in front of a stage curtain; the camera cuts to a medium close-up and he delivers the following introduction with an air of charm and almost diffidence. I include his pauses and emphases, particularly in the first part of the address, to convey Barrymore's informality and indeed intimacy with the audience:
Ladies and gentlemen: The, uh, soliloquy you are about to hear is from the, uh, First Part of Henry the Sixth, when Richard the Third was, uh, Duke of Gloucester and before he became King. In it, he, uh, not only discloses his own … piquant psychology, but he also infers that he Although it is not clearly indicated in this particular soliloquy whether he does so or not … permit me to assure you that he eliminates them all … with the, uh … graceful impartiality … of Al Capone [which Barrymore pronounces in the correct Italian manner “Caponeh”].
9 - A Star is Dead: Barrymore's Anti-Christian Metaperformance
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- By Kyle Stevens, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Appalachian State University.
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Summary
Silent Hollywood stars who continued to play leading roles in the sound era were often said to have survived the industrial transition. Yet, in a way, every silent star died, for audiovisual performance is a different métier. We might more accurately say that those actors who persisted, such as John Barrymore, were resurrected for, and through, sound. In Barrymore's case, the studios could thank the heavens. The voice fitted the famous profile. He would not go the way of some of his peers, such as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., or that other romantic leading John, John Gilbert (on Barrymore's transition to sound see Fowler 324). This may have seemed predictable at the time, given Barrymore's fame onstage, in a period when actors’ voices were highly trained, and because he had even recorded Shakespearean soliloquies for Famous Records and RCA Victor. Nevertheless, there is no face more silent than a profile. Mouths are shut in profiles. We gaze at a profile; we do not expect it to speak. In fact, it is because of his history as respected Shakespearean stage actor, silent screen star, and sound movie star that Barrymore presents a unique case for thinking about the relation of stage to screen acting—and of silent acting to audiovisual acting—as Hollywood learned to speak. To do this, I shall focus on Barrymore's work with George Cukor, a director known for his keen interest in the institution of stardom, in such films as What Price Hollywood? (1932), A Double Life (1947), The Actress (1953), and A Star is Born (1954) (see Pomerance and Palmer; Phillips). Cukor's work with Barrymore is, I shall show, particular to Barrymore; yet, in that specificity, it critiques the way that foundational myths of Hollywood stardom comport with Christian attitudes toward the births and deaths of celestial beings.
Barrymore's legendary theatrical family was central to the proliferation of what “legitimate” stage actors ought to sound like as the New York theater scene developed into what we now think of as “Broadway”—meaning that middle classes began to have access to it in industrialized New York. In the 1920s, Barrymore made the transition from being the most celebrated American Shakespearean actor to the Hollywood screen where he became a household name as a dashing leading man. Then, as the 1930s inhaled and began to yawn, both Barrymore and the country entered a depression.
2 - Dangerously Modern: Shakespeare, Voice, and the “New Psychology” in John Barrymore's “Unstable” Characters
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- By Michael Hammond, Associate Professor in Film at the University of Southampton UK.
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Summary
On October 27, 1963, a late-night discussion of Hamlet with Peter O'Toole and Orson Welles was chaired by Huw Weldon for the BBC television program Monitor (online at wwwyoutube.com/watch?v=x2jWx4IqgEM). Weldon asks Welles who was the best Hamlet he had ever seen, “Is there such a thing?” Without hesitation, Welles replies, “Yes, Barrymore.” Barrymore, Welles insists, played Hamlet as “a man of genius … who happened to be a prince.” In a slow cadence that emphasizes each adjective, he goes on to say that Barrymore's Hamlet was “tender … and virile … and witty … and … [even more emphasis] … dangerous.” In proclaiming Barrymore's Hamlet as dangerous, Welles implies that this quality was distinct, that the actor had brought something out of the Danish prince that in previous incarnations lay dormant. Michael Morrison, in his detailed study of Barrymore's Shakespeare roles, demonstrates that Barrymore had, indeed, been distinct from the Victorian Hamlets of Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Henry Irving in that he brought a naturalism in his cadence of speech and an emphasis on Hamlet's psychological motivation that rendered Shakespeare accessible and “modern” (Morrison 253–4). Morrison points to Barrymore's influences on John Gielgud and Lawrence Olivier. Having seen Barrymore's Hamlet in the 1925 London performances, Gielgud praised his range: “He had tremendous drive and power, and a romantic sensibility which was very rare” (253). Olivier commented that the Victorian Hamlets of the likes of Irving had “descended into arias and false inflections … castrated. Barrymore put back the balls.” While it may be that, along with Welles, each actor's comment says as much about his own approach to the role, they all underscore a masculinism as one of the distinctive modern forces in Barrymore's performance: danger, power, and balls. This quality in his work was put into service to convey Richard III'srage against his twisted body and to render Hamlet's uncertainty devastating, which became the basis for the monstrous and/or aberrant masculinity that Barrymore carried into his sound film work at Warner's in the early 1930s.
This dangerous quality is evident in the only filmed recording of his soliloquy as Richard III, that featured in the Warner Bros. 1929 variety film Show of Shows.
Introduction
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- By Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato, Murray Pomerance, Department of Sociology at Ryerson University
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Summary
When at 10.20 p.m., May 29, 1942, he died at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in the company of his brother Lionel, his lifelong friend Gene Fowler, John Decker, and the actor Alan Mowbray, John Barrymore was only sixty years old. His liver and kidneys ravaged by alcoholism, he had been partially comatose for seventy-two hours. The Los Angeles Times saw fit to mount him to its topmost headline, “John Barrymore Taken by Death,” an elevation that allowed him posthumously to supersede George Marshall's planned invasion of France. That he was imagined to have been “taken by Death” rather than, less Olympically, dying as mortals do, signals the monumental quality of the regard in which he was held by those who admired him. This was not merely a “great performer,” not merely an onstage and onscreen presence shining with all the brilliance of astute training and preparation for an august craft; it was an almost superhuman being who, in the end, had to be reached out for and seized away, so tenaciously did his spirit and courage hold on to his wounded living force. In “taking” Barrymore, Death was stealing from us all.
He picked up the nickname “The Great Profile” (around the time of Beau Brummel), a tag with resonance. After all, any part of a body might gain prominence in imagery: Georgia O'Keefe's hands in the photography of Alfred Stieglitz; Fred Astaire's feet. And, as to faces, any screen actor might choose to suggest or request that the cameraman bias his view to one side: no one's face has two identical sides, and it is to the actor's career benefit that he take steps to ensure, as much as possible, an appealing view for potential ticket buyers’ ongoing fascination. But other actors, turning only one side to the camera (a celebrated case was Claudette Colbert), did not (and do not) get named a “great profile,” they are merely seen in profile, and to better effect. Barrymore was being coined. In the deep thoughts of his viewers, he was receiving the respect and adoration that had also bathed the identity of the Roman emperors, and that for Barrymore was iconized even while he lived on coinage of his own country. Barrymore, of course, lived far from Rome, to be categorically correct in Benedict Canyon, that is, Beverly Hills, not Hollywood.
13 - Barrymore and the Scene of Acting: Gesture, Speech, and the Repression of Cinematic Performance
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- By Barry Langford, Professor of Film Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.
- Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
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Summary
Over a twelve-month period beginning in August 1926, three star vehicles for John Barrymore, all costume melodramas directed by Alan Crosland and set in highly romanticized studio-fabricated versions of medieval or early modern Europe, were released on to the United States market: two productions under Barrymore's munificent contract at Warner Bros., Don Juan (1926) and When a Man Loves (1927), and the first in his new three-picture deal at United Artists, The Beloved Rogue (1927), a fanciful account of the career of medieval balladeer and cutpurse François Villon and remake of the 1920 Fox film If I Were King.
Don Juan—which was a considerable box-office success—has a significant place in cinema history as the first film released with a synchronized recorded score and sound effects, and the film's critical reception was predictably dominated by commentary on the novelty of the Vitaphone process rather than on Barrymore's performance as the legendary lover. The two subsequent films are, by contrast, both far less remembered2 and, upon their original release, also fared less well either at the box office or critically, meeting with decidedly lukewarm reviews. A particularly notable contribution to the chorus of critical disapprobation was Stark Young's near-eulogy for Barrymore's serious acting career, published in September 1927 in The New Republic:
Since the Hamlet we have had the sex appeal movies … Of these moving pictures of Mr. Barrymore's last years, these puzzled people, looking at them and wondering afterward, can only observe that they are rotten, vulgar, empty, in bad taste, dishonest, noisome with a silly and unwholesome exhibitionism, and odious with a kind of stale and degenerate studio adolescence. Their appeal is cheap, cynical and specious. The only possible virtue in Mr. Barrymore's progress, as these films show him, is a certain advance in athletics; he is more agile, he leaps, rides and hops to a better showing, an advance encouraged no doubt by the competition with Mr. Douglas Fairbanks’ appeal … Artistically, the only thing we could say about Mr. Barrymore's performances is that he brings to them remnants of his tricks and mannerisms that stiffen them slightly and perhaps convey the sense of acting to a public that has seen but little of it …
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- Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
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- Book:
- Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 June 2018
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- 08 September 2017, pp 200-203
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4 - John Barrymore's Introspective Performance in Beau Brummel
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- By Martin Shingler, Senior Lecturer in Radio & Film Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK.
- Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
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- Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 June 2018
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- 08 September 2017, pp 47-58
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Summary
In her essay “The Great Profile: How Do We Know the Actor from the Acting?” Marian Keane analyzes a scene in Harry Beaumont's Beau Brummel (1924) in which John Barrymore performs before a full-length mirror, employing a set of gestures to announce “his thought and the fact of his thinking” (187). This is the moment that Barrymore's character George Brummel practices his poses and gestures in order to acquire a more charming and elegant persona which, in turn, marks the beginnings of his public persona: that is, his “Beau” identity.
Gazing at his reflection, Barrymore realizes he can make anything of his appearance. Part of him is always on display, while part of him, his inner self, remains concealed. He gazes here upon his reflection with eyes of an author or a creator, or an actor, who examines the unmolded stuff of a character. (Keane 193)
Here Keane describes not Brummel's realization that he can make anything of his appearance but rather Barrymore's. This (perhaps unintentional) slippage between character and actor/star suggests that the image of Barrymore and the character of Brummel are fused here (that is, Brummel is Barrymore and Barrymore is Brummel). It suggests further that, in this instance, Barrymore was able to disclose to his audience the processes of image-making central to stardom: namely, the revelation of some parts of his self and the concealment of others, as well as the transformation of a personality into a persona capable of circulating publicly to enhance the value of the actor. It is the way in whichBeau Brummel provided John Barrymore with an opportunity both to reflect upon and disclose to his audience some key aspects of image-making and star construction that I shall pursue here, building chiefly upon Marian Keane's work as well as Gaylyn Studlar's chapter on Barrymore in her book This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. I shall also consider how Beau Brummel functioned as the perfect star vehicle for Barrymore in 1924, capitalizing on his fame and achievements at that time. Furthermore, taking my cue from Keane, I shall explore more precisely what John Barrymore appears to be thinking during a critical moment of introspection.
10 - Handling Time: The Passing of Tradition in A Bill of Divorcement
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- By Daniel Varndell, University of Winchester, UK
- Edited by Murray Pomerance, Steven Rybin, Minnesota State University, Mankato
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- Hamlet Lives in Hollywood
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- Edinburgh University Press
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- 23 June 2018
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- 08 September 2017, pp 123-134
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Summary
Certainly I believe that ghosts communicate with those who stay on earth. And when I come back, don't stand and gape. Be hospitable to my shade.
John BarrymoreSetting down words to explain Jack Barrymore,” his brother Lionel pointed out, “is like seeking the mystery of Hamlet himself in the monosyllables of basic English” (Kobler, x). Erik Erikson sees the temptation to solve the riddle of Hamlet's “inscrutable nature” as a pointless endeavor if for no other reason than because Hamlet's inscrutability is his nature. Far from explaining his “condition,” Erikson stages the riddle of identity crisis in the play as one that hinges on Hamlet's always being “on the verge of slipping into the state [of madness] he pretends” (Identity 236–7). Unlike the foolish critic, an actor would never attempt to “explain.” Rather, there is, writes Steven Berkoff, a sense that every actor who plays him must take the conundrum of Hamlet “within his own breast,” where “to touch these words is to set alight a small flame within himself,” such that “when you play Hamlet, you play yourself and play the instrument which is you” (vii–viii).
As an “instrument,” John “Jack” Barrymore communicated something vital in his Hamlet. While most contemporary reviews were positive, the overwhelming feeling was that—irrespective of the shortcomings of these nascent performances—his was not just a Hamlet for the new generation but one heralding a historic “turn” in theatrical performance. As Ludwig Lewisohn noted in 1922, Barrymore spoke to his generation in a way they had not been spoken to before. “His bearing and gestures have the restrained but intense expres-siveness of the bearing of modern men who live with their nerves and woes in narrow rooms” (Mills 190). Barrymore, Stark Young remarked (also about the 1922 performance), “seemed to gather together in himself all the Hamlets of his generation, to simplify and direct everyone's theory of the part. To me his Hamlet was the most satisfying that I have ever seen, not yet as a finished creation, but a foundation, a continuous outline.” At its best, Young said, it was like “a fundamental pattern so simple and so revealing that it appeared to be mystical; and so direct and strong that it restored to the dramatic scene its primary truth and magnificence” (Wells 195, 200).