Double Take

Jack Carson Agonistes

I’ve always loved a good double take, the head seeming to almost involuntarily whip again toward the direction it was just pointing, the direction the eyes were just looking, as though it needed, they needed, to really register what had just been seen or heard, to take in what had been passed over. Usually, what hadn’t been registered was something slightly shocking, but muted, a strange juxtaposition unexpected in its context: a woman half-dressed in a store window—not a mannequin; a goat in the back seat of a cab; an insult dressed as a compliment: “I’m sure no one would ever make the mistake of overestimating your intelligence.” “The senses cannot decide . . . being themselves full of uncertainty,” Montaigne writes in “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” “To judge the appearances of things, we need a judicatory instrument,” he writes, a secondary response, which he posits as reason. Maybe it’s the little click of reason that causes the double take, like an inner Rube Goldberg mechanism: our protagonist half smiles as if the world is in its natural order, as if nothing is amiss, then wrenches his head in the direction of the deception, the distortion, the uncanny image, usually with a grimace or a look of stark perplexity.

What I love about these second looks, these doubled takes on what has just happened—which if you pay attention you’re apt to really catch from time to time—is that they capture the distilled sense that the world isn’t what it seems. Kant writes that “all appearances are real and negatio; sophistical: all reality must be sensation.” “Real and negatio” (denied or refused): so when we become aware of the anomaly, we look again, we double look.

Actors who rely frequently on the double take—Jack Carson, Groucho Marx, Oliver Hardy, Edward Everett Horton, Lucille Ball, Marty Feldman, and so on—stand in for our sense of the world’s cracks and fissures, its uncanniness. The uncanniness, to go back to Freud’s sense of heimlich and unheimlich, at home or disoriented, is frequently, in language, the actor’s (standing in for our own) sense of being at home or alienated in language itself; language being the world we live in that is full of appearance and sophistry, text and subtext. Yes, the brilliance of the double take is that it can summarize the uncanny in a second-long gesture. What had at first seemed familiar or safe, is not. The unexpected, the wildly coincidental, the unheimlich jolts us: we move from order to disorder, looking again where we just looked, where everything seemed, just moments ago, reasonable. The double take is frequently a subcategory of the surreal: think of Groucho telling Chico he wants to add a “sanity clause” to the contract, turning again to Chico after he hears him say, “There’s no such thing as Sanity Clause.”

The term “double take” is indelibly cinematic and dates from silent film, where actors from Charlie Chaplin to Ben Turpin to James Finlayson to Harry Langdon did a second look, or “take” in movie terms. A related though less well-known term is the “spit take,” where an actor takes a drink that seems normal and realizes he has gotten something awful in his mouth and spits it out. The comic premise, in any case, is that things aren’t what they seem, sound, taste, and walking by, paying scant attention, not really looking and hearing, we miss the strange, and interesting even if unsettling paradoxes and performances, tableaux and testimonies the world is constantly gracing and threatening us with.

It’s in this way that I think of Jack Carson, who was a great master of the double take, a kind of working-class representative of Bergson in cinema, reminding us to look again, to really listen. Bergson warns us against the dulled out senses of living in the modern world—we aren’t really seeing and hearing; that’s the first look. The second look or take is the revival, the coming to life of the senses really registering that goat, that woman. “Sanity Claus?”—what? Jack Carson was known as “king of the double take.”

Agonistes comes from the ancient Greek ἀγωνιστής, a contestant in the public games, and from ἀγών or agṓn, a contest or struggle. In Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Samson has an overt, an external, struggle against the Philistines, but more interestingly to Milton, an inner struggle, his blindness combined with power, his betrayal by his wife Dalila, his overarching feelings of vengeance.

My man here (not Godfrey), Jack Carson, also shows inner struggles, splits, in most of the characters he plays, though more often than not they’re rendered comically. He, like Samson, is bigger than most men—six feet two and hefty—and often his trouble, his actions, his divisions revolve around women. Frequently, he’s both reasonably nice, wisecracking, worldly wise as the allegory says, but also, as character acting roles demand and the comic second lead requires: an absurd character, ridiculous in his white lying, opportunism, self-promotion. Nevertheless, we like him, at least I do. Why? Perhaps because of his struggle; his division; his constant double takes, attempts at corrective vision: to see better is to be better. To be clear, even for an instant (did you ever go clear) is to have a plenitude of possibilities, since we’re refusing to be deceived by our bland acceptance of false appearances, and it perhaps even opens the possibility of change, though this is always an optimistic idea. In other words, certain kinds of division are dynamic, are interesting, even if (especially when?) some of the parts are absurd, unadmirable, even disreputable, shady. The better self hears what the weaker self would rather not, sees what one wishes one wouldn’t. The double take can be a symbol of the struggle, as the parts of a character try to reconcile inner and outer worlds—he can’t quite trust what he sees and hears because he can’t completely trust himself: he has to look again; what did I hear? What did I see? His own divisions are externalized.

The agon, the public games, are the movies, and the struggle you could say is acting, or that it is present in Jack Carson’s acting—even in his roles in light or romantic comedy.

Terms related to agon are “antagonist” and “protagonist,” and these are relevant since Jack Carson wore the mantle of protagonist with difficulty, most often with comical anxiety.

Carson worked in films from 1910 to 1963. He was born in Canada, but he moved to Milwaukee as a boy, and this hometown identification stayed with him (see Two Guys from Milwaukee with his best friend, Dennis Morgan—his better-looking buddy in several films, also from Milwaukee) and became part of his unpretentious appeal. His characters, whether genial or slightly dyspeptic, tended to be working class, and part of Carson’s arsenal of quizzical looks centered on a class-based sense that others were speaking a language he wasn’t privy to, that he was missing out. This, I think, makes him sympathetic even when he (which is to say the character of his character) was not completely appealing, if that makes sense.

Despite his appearance in any number of B movies, Carson also appeared in four Oscar-nominated films: Stage Door, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mildred Pierce, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but he was also in many other “prestige” films such as Bringing Up Baby, Arsenic and Old Lace, Blues in the Night, and Bright Leaf. His voice was distinctive, slightly nasal, midwestern blue collar—he sounds like the apotheosis of “guy in a bar.” Because of this easy identification, he did lots of radio work: plays, variety, announcing, and he had a brief TV variety show in the mid-’50s. But importantly, Carson got his start in vaudeville, on the infamous Orpheum circuit, doing a double act with a friend (he was always a perfect foil) with lots of slapstick and one-liners, his training ground. At six feet two inches tall and between 220 and 240 pounds, he knew how to take a fall, making it look painful and somewhat graceful at the same time, in the way of Oliver Hardy. (Perhaps we forget about the apprenticeships of character actors, thinking they wander on to the set with perfect timing and crafted personae.) By the time of Carson’s first appearance (Bringing Up Baby [1938]) he had been acting in college, vaudeville, and radio for almost twenty years.

In general, Jack Carson carries with him a kind of cocky wince. He walks into a room as though he’s looking to be congratulated and killed simultaneously—as though a surprise party were waiting to recognize his wonderfulness or a dead reckoning to call him on his perfidy. How can it, he, be both? He carries an expression that curdles as it emerges, that involuntarily turns on itself, and that’s a large part of his attraction as a performer; despite his vanity, his vainglory, his duplicity in a given role, he generally looks as though he’s about to pay for it in a moment’s notice, which, I suppose, is a way of saying that his mien is frequently trying to conceal the guilty self-knowledge that he’s a heel. This is a partial saving grace: that he telegraphs his original sin. And it creates a comedy of self, an internal battle externalized.

Carson’s best-known role is probably Wally Fay in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce. Carson worked with Curtiz several times in the ’40s, in Roughly Speaking, Mildred Pierce (both 1945), Romance on the High Seas (1948), and My Dream Is Yours (1949). The latter two films co-star Doris Day in two of her earliest roles, and Carson is the leading man, so it’s safe to say that Curtiz thought highly of him. It’s easy to see why after watching Mildred Pierce.

In Mildred Pierce Carson plays Wally Fay, a business partner of Mildred’s (Joan Crawford’s) husband, and Mildred’s partner to be; he ends up buying them both out in pragmatic and self-preserving business deals when the Pierce’s fail. These are not quite unethical, merely opportunistic, which is how Carson presents Fay through much of the film. But Carson is arguably the most complex and unstable character in the film and, I would argue, is a large part of what makes Mildred Pierce more interesting than an overheated film noir, despite Joan Crawford’s calibrated performance, Eve Arden’s small but as predictably brilliant sardonic line deliveries, and Zachary Scott’s memorable turn as a sleazy bankrupt roué. I’ve always found Ann Blyth’s turn as Mildred’s daughter from hell predictable and repetitive.

Carson, on the other hand, is not predictable. He’s so full of unclaimed thoughts registered from scene to scene and contradictions in his Fay’s relationship to Mildred that it’s hard to know which side of his character will play from scene to scene. In Mildred Pierce, Carson has plenty of comic business, his forte, though mostly in the form of sarcastic line deliveries. He’s a man on the make: from the beginning he’s openly making sexual moves on Mildred with a kind of cavalier confidence that seems brazenly misplaced. Joan Crawford bats him away and Carson, the supposedly confident ladies’ man, seems both undeterred (as in wait until next time) and slightly wounded (as in what’s wrong with me). He can’t quite understand why she’s not interested, that she wouldn’t be interested simply because she’s not. That’s his dull side, the side that can’t seem to see past his ego, his self-interest. But this narrowness makes him vulnerable (this is true of many of the characters Carson plays, though many are less worldly than Wally Fay) and balances out the power between Mildred and him, his economic advantage. Carson has business savvy, Joan Crawford has sexual allure and wild aspirations, and between them a kind of pas de deux emerges, one or the other seeming to be leading—this hardly a new gender dynamic. But one of the central ironies about Mildred Pierce is that the fatal flaw of each character (with the exception of Vida, Mildred’s daughter, played by Ann Blyth—Vida, life as unredeemable) reveals one of their best qualities, a light at the end of the hamartia. Joan Crawford’s Mildred is a guilty mother who gives much too much to her daughter because she feels responsible for the death of her younger daughter: her flaw is based on her maternal love and responsibility. Zachary Scott’s Beragon, the bankrupt society heel, can’t allow his actual feelings for Mildred to violate the purity of his parasitic use of her as a bankroll, and it is these actual feelings, revealed to Mildred’s daughter backhandedly when he tells her that he won’t marry her, and to only us when he murmurs Mildred’s name as he falls to the floor after Vida shoots him, that ultimately lead to his death.

Carson cares for Mildred, too, and he is, in fact, the character who, other than Mildred, embodies the most complicated divisions in the film. He is ironically named Fay, since Carson is at first rather conventionally manly in Mildred Pierce, a straight guy on the make. If you don’t know Carson well: large, broad shoulders, big head—there are jokes about his forehead in a couple of films. And as he aged he put on weight, so the sense of a man who is just, well, big (though not fat), something closer to paunchy, comes to mind. It’s no wonder he was typecast as second lead or did so much comedy. But his vaudevillian physical dexterity—pratfalls, turnarounds, he has mobility—works against the size that in another man might seem stolid or clumsy. Here, in 1945, when Carson was just thirty-five, he still seems well built, solid.

When we first see him, he’s under a sign for cocktails in a bar he owns, and Mildred has just been talked out of suicide on a bridge by a cop. He seems actually solicitous after noticing she’s in trouble and then, as a fundamental opportunist, he comes on to her. Mildred—and this is the fascinating part of Joan Crawford’s performance—is ultimately indomitable (which softens Carson’s moves on her—she can handle anything), and she invites Wally to her place where she tries to set him up for the murder of her feckless second husband, Beragon. So right from the beginning of the film we get a complicated sense of who may or may not be in control, who is vulnerable, and we wonder about the sources and nature of betrayal, the depths and nature of character that led to such calumny, a classic film noir flashback structure.

“You can talk your way out of anything,” Mildred says to Wally, and he does talk his way out of the murder rap she’s tried to frame him with—but that isn’t difficult. More difficult is talking his way into Mildred’s sexual and romantic affections. One characteristic of Carson’s character, here, and elsewhere, is that he talks and talks, frequently trying to convince someone of something dubious. From role to role it’s one of the most identifiable of his characteristics: he’s a man of words—strung together, his characters seem to have an inexhaustible faith in his ability to sell his own sincerity, even when it seems stale or overripe. When his arguments are punctured, when his logic is skewered, when he’s rebuffed, he usually pouts a bit, frequently acknowledges the justness of his exposure, and moves on to his next argument, sometimes more pragmatically sincere, as though flippancy and low-grade guile didn’t work so he might as well try to be honest. He’s a very American character, a used car salesman of the self, wrapped around a kind of innocent: he knows he’s deceitful, but he means no harm, a version of the flimflam man. The fact that he’s so transparent is what makes him likeable, possible to be liked. People, women especially, are always looking at him cross-eyed, as the saying goes, because he’s such an easy call. In a contemporary character/actor this might be seen as a second layer of deception, a trap used to bring defenses down, but Carson, a creature, a character of the ’40s and ’50s, is manifestly untrustworthy, not a manipulator. And half the time, or more in the comedies, he ends up the victim of his own misplayed machinations.

Such is the case in Phffft, a 1954 comedy directed by Mark Robson, starring Judy Holliday and Jack Lemon as a married couple who errantly divorce. Jack Carson plays the friend of the husband/new bachelor, Jack Lemon, who is going to liberate him into the pleasures of his singleness, show him the ropes and pleasures of bachelorhood, including a night with the ever-available Kim Novak (talk about unrestrained male fantasy; only in the movies would Kim Novak be good naturedly waiting around for an over-sexed, ridiculous lotharios and his protégé). A familiar and stereotypical role for Carson to step into, but as he preaches the role of sexual liberation (Holliday, too, is attempting her version of let’s see what’s out there and how this goes) Carson manages to make it interesting by performing his usual agon. Which is to say the life that he’s trying to sell to Jack Lemmon never seems convincingly appealing: we think this car must have something wrong with it. In other words, Carson oversells, he’s a tad desperate in pushing Jack Lemon toward la dolce vita. A lovely way of living, after all, sells itself; it doesn’t really need desperate apostles with sweat on their upper lips and secret plans of when to dim the lights.

Carson comically reminds us that when we see and hear divisions, even when they make us laugh, they’re usually because one part of the self isn’t self-convinced. It’s funny to watch a kind of double discourse in motion, and we’re also reminded, lest we push him too far away as a model of perfect contradiction, that we too are contradictory. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself,” Montaigne writes in “On Repentance,” capturing the wavering self. And unlike the stolid leading actors of so many films, unlike the heroic models of consistency of so many protagonists, Jack Carson, that pragmatic self-server, serves up the self as contradictory: the self as double, in his motives, never quite convinced, and therefore all the more convincing, and never completely whole, and therefore wholly believable.

Here, after this discussion of divisions in the self, I must stop and tell you something that I find disarming and completely charming. In the 1940s, Carson would disappear for weeks at a time. No one knew where he went, other than his then wife, Kay St. Germain Wells (whose name I may elope with in my dreams tonight—it has pretty possibilities for character development). There was speculation, of course: benders, a woman somewhere—the other side of this life. Actually, and completely improbably, Carson would escape back to the Midwest and perform for weeks at a time with the Clyde Beatty circus. He put on his makeup and performed anonymously, for scale, as a clown. Apparently the jig was up at some point when word seeped out and the thing could no longer be done in the only way he desired it: completely undercover. The only recorded comment of Carson’s about this time is: “They loved me and my routines.” Actors escape into characters, and character actors apparently need escape from their characters, as well; in Carson’s case into an archetype of another kind of character. The frequently clownish character actor would become one of the clowns. The self is mysterious, as any essayist or actor can avow—and personae are sticky and seductive. How must it have felt to become a character that is completely devoted to the essence of fool, those strange creatures that developed from the commedia dell’arte and the harlequinade? The modern circus clown, inspired by Joseph Grimaldi in the early 1800s, was based on Tom Belling’s Auguste, or red clown, in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Here, a player could act wide swaths of emotions, torrents of sudden happiness or sadness—maybe that was part it, how large and uncomplicated the emotional register as opposed to the more calibrated performances of film. But the clown itself, for many of us, is itself an uncanny figure, a figure begging for our own take, to make sure we’ve read him right, caught the register. Then again, as a character actor who had made it, was in constant demand, perhaps the answer is as simple as: escape from Hollywood and fame.

To return to Mildred Pierce: part of the reason Jack Carson’s performance in MP remains his most well known, or perhaps is considered his most quintessential, is that it distills most distinctly the element of self-loathing that is latent in the mix of wiseacre and know-it-all, of self-promoting, worldly but working-class guy on the make, and third wheel who is more acted upon than is potent in the world—the classic schlemiel in protestant midwestern form—with a noirish, sexually hungry edge. “There’s something about the sound of my own voice that fascinates me,” he tells Mildred, and then, “With me being smart’s a disease,” both delivered with just the right amount of curdle—too much and he’d seem like the film’s existential hero, a kind of supporting Phillip Marlowe without the gun; but Carson speaks his line with a light disdain, as though he’s appreciating the bitter irony that he’s the only audience for his own uniqueness with a glib nonchalance. It’s a line delivery perfected by Eve Arden, who is, of course, also in Mildred Pierce, and with whom Carson has some scenes in passing. They seem almost like gender-opposite twins who don’t recognize each other, perhaps too much alike, but forlornly, it’s hard to not feel, watching the two of them, that the verbal repartee creates a spark that would be fun to see really lit. Eve Arden, as Ida Corwin, seems to know this, but as happens with so many of Eve Arden’s characters, as has happened to so many women, her wit and intelligence become desexualizing to the men around her (if not to us). She says after one encounter with Wally Fay (Jack Carson): “I’m getting tired of men talking to me man to man.” But as if to match the gender inversion of the film’s wittiest characters, Jack Carson becomes strangely feminized and infantilized; dressed in an apron at Mildred’s restaurant, wanting an evening with Mildred, he comments, to Eve Arden no less, that all he was getting was “dish pan hands and a date with a Girl Scout [Mildred’s daughter Vida, ironically the film’s femme fatale].”

Jack Carson and Eve Arden were matched and again missed each other in the Carson-Doris Day vehicle, My Dream Is Yours (1949). My Dream Is Yours is much less than the sum of its parts: directed by Michael Curtiz, with songs by Harry Warren, Jack Carson has top billing among a cast of stellar character actors (Day, who was just beginning and whom Carson by all accounts mentored graciously throughout a two-year affair during which they made two of Day’s first films, was to outshine her mentor’s career immediately); the supporting cast includes Eve Arden, S. Z. Sakall, Edgar Kennedy in his last film, Franklin Pangborn (of whom more later), Adolphe Menjou, and Sheldon Leonard. A character-actors feast! The film is tolerable if one views it as a skipping stone from character actor to character actor bit. But it’s a rather tired plot with Carson as a small time PR guy trying to get Doris Day noticed. What interests me is that here, again, there is that spark between Arden and Carson, both of whom know their way around a wisecrack, both of whom present as clearly secondary to Day, despite Carson’s technical status as leading man; both Carson and Arden are characters who are too sexually denatured by their humor (yes, this happens to men, too, though male comic leads in other films sometimes “get the girl”—you need only look at the absurdly attractive wives of Laurel and Hardy in some of their films). But what’s dreadful here is that Carson and Arden (their names sound good together—that sweet assonance) have an implied romance, but Carson and Day end up soaking Arden financially so Carson can promote Day, all while he’s mooning after her, having apparently forgotten the romantic link to Arden. Can you say Nina Foch? You know I can. Arden, in short, gets used, and Carson gets the girl, completely unconvincingly, by a last-minute plot twist, in a kind of gesture of thanks for his devotion. Arden, we assume, gets paid back and invited to the wedding, having been made a fool of. Carson’s character, like Arden’s, is punished enough romantically in the film that we don’t really resent him completely. It is Jack Carson, after all—there’s some masochism built in. He’s a nice, mostly transparent opportunist. And Doris Day is a sweet taker of everything that comes her way seems, well, just creepy. Perhaps she should have been paired with Gene Kelly’s Jerry Mulligan in a kind of trans-filmic romance: An American on the High Seas. What bothers me most, as I said in the earlier essay, is that I associate Arden here with my pantheon of witty, sexual women who are absurdly, abjectly, and memorably discarded in favor of younger, usually blonder, and blander women: Eleanor Parker, Nina Foch, and Celeste Holm.

My Dream Is Yours is a disappointing failure because everything that happens that is at all interesting is on the margins, and the margins are marginalized by the dull story. It’s like sitting around a dinner table with a group of wacky people and having the dull host remind you over and over of the occasion for the evening—his birthday. Carson isn’t dull, but he’s too earnestly yoked to plot; his role isn’t to create disorder, which would suit his divisions and his sly sotto voce subversions, but order: get the girl (Doris Day) accepted by the world, which is a forgone conclusion.

Character actors who play leading roles usually only work with material refined for their specific talents and, even so, it can be thin gruel. A character actor, at her or his best, distills qualities fiercely, frequently taking her or his personae from film to film, with variations. But this distillation can also mean a somewhat narrower range and may work best in leading roles with characters who are robustly comic: Red Skelton or Danny Kaye, where there’s shtick that can be elaborated to threaten real chaos. We recognize the Franklin Pangborn of Franklin Pangborn immediately, his proper, stuck up daffiness. Watching it for ninety minutes would be interminable. Enough Pangborn, we’d be driven to say, though it might be worth it just for the saying, as much as I love saying “Franklin Pangborn.” “Cuddles” Sakall was charming in Casablanca, tending to Rick. But his Eastern European malaprops are amusing for about five minutes. Jack Carson only worked as the lead in light comedies like Two Guys from Milwaukee, the first of his films with pal Dennis Morgan, their lower-cost version of Hope-Crosby. In other films, Arsenic and Old Lace, John Loves Mary, Love Crazy, The Strawberry Blonde, and so on, he provided the comic relief of the funny second lead, or as a competing lover with the leading man. Jack Carson as a leading man who is too nice, not quite venal enough—for ninety minutes—falls headlong toward dull earnestness.

What makes Carson interesting elsewhere though, and is unusual for a character actor, is his unusual range and that touch of darkness in the soul, as he demonstrates in Mildred Pierce: the extension of his funny venality. Thelma Ritter, certainly in everyone’s pantheon of character actors, was on the other side of this gravitas, having a light streak that tempered her moodiness. Some of the best character actors were extraordinary in their one-dimensionality: think about Mike Mazurki’s big unforgettable brutes in films noirs, or Patsy’s Kelly’s great early sardonic maids. But some, like Carson and Ritter, pulled out surprising performances that stretched their essential screen personae, or even occasionally abandoned them. They were the rare character actors who performed both versions of possibility: they brought recognized personae from film to film frequently, and they also broke out to play well-defined and differentiated roles.

Carson did a couple of his strongest roles late: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Star Is Born. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Peter Brooks and starring, of course, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Burl Ives recreating his role from Tennessee Williams’s Broadway play, Jack Carson plays Gooper Pollitt, Newman’s brother. Gooper is the older brother, the one who’s played it, well, straight: stayed home, married and procreated, went to law school, and has bided his time for his daddy’s inheritance. He thinks he’s played by the rules, and he wants his payoff. Jack Carson abandons his double takes for a character who is split emotionally: he wants his due, but he can’t abandon his emotional sympathies for his younger brother. As played by Carson, who always brought a guilty mien to his more lighthearted guile, Gooper constantly sweats his double consciousness, his desire to inherit and his desire to do the right thing: to surpass his narrow interests. But unlike many of his earlier roles, Gooper is a conformist, and a man of intensely repressed feeling.

Jack Carson’s performance as Matt Libby in the 1954 A Star Is Born, starring Judy Garland and James Mason (Carson had an impressive third billing), is one of my favorites of his and perhaps the best remembered after Mildred Pierce. Here, he demonstrates one of the virtues of a strong character: the ability to make an enduring impression with limited screen time. (Beatrice Straight is in everyone’s Hall of Fame for having won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, playing William Holden’s wife in Network with five minutes and two seconds of screen time, dominated by one stirring scene in which she defines the pathos and fury of a betrayed spouse.) Carson has several scenes in the three-hour A Star Is Born, and he complicates the film in a way that I have always found necessary and manages to counterbalance James Mason’s strongly unappealing performance as a bathetic, fame-benighted, alcoholic Pygmalion to Judy Garland’s Galatea. Well, as they say, it’s complicated. Mason urges Garland toward the fame he despises in a form that resists artificial makeovers (though this is in itself his pitch to sculpting her). In this way the film tries to keep him just this side of sympathetic, though I must say, as much I like James Mason and admire his performance, I have never found Norman Main, his character, sympathetic. In this, I am in agreement with Jack Carson’s Libby, who despises him, and perhaps some credit is due to Carson’s performance in convincing me of this opinion.

Libby is a flak hack, the studio press agent who represents Norman Main and tries to keep his reputation clean, despite his penchant for bad behavior, self-indulgent, whiskey-soaked, embarrassing escapades. In one symbolic episode early in the film, Main (Mason) accidentally throws Libby (Carson) through a mirror as Libby tries to prevent him from making a public jerk of himself at a movie premiere. Libby, the press agent, the stand-in for the studio’s galaxy of stars, has a clear-eyed and cynical view of Main from the start. Carson says, in his best sarcastic delivery, “Mr. Main’s charm escapes me. Always has.” If Norman Main is the handsome romantic shell, Carson’s Libby provides the alternative: big, bland looking, cynically realistic. And for my money, Carson makes the cynical realism seem much more appealing than Norman Main’s self-destructive and narcissistic idealism, despite, as usual, a Carson-fissure, a note of slightly distasteful schadenfreude that seeps from Libby’s pores during Main’s downfall: he likes seeing the star he’s had to cover and shill for go down the drain. But for me this makes Carson’s Libby all the more believable and a truer counterbalance to the hollow romanticism of James Mason’s Main. Judy Garland is the sacre coeur poised between the two, romantically somehow real and unembittered.

When Libby says he’s been, too many times, “double-crossed by a cruddy actor,” Moss Hart and Dorothy Parker—screenwriters separated by a generation—have found the right voice for a brilliant inside joke: it’s bad enough to be betrayed, double-crossed in noir terms, but by a “cruddy actor” is comedy, a Hollywood punchline. And Jack Carson, a note of slight pain in his furrowed brow signifying what he’s not gotten or what he’s gotten wrong, what he hasn’t solved or resolved in himself that would allow the world to make sense, makes this line bitter and funny in a way that few other actors could.

He was forty-four and would live nine more years. His last line in A Star Is Born, alluding to Norman Main’s sacrificial suicide (the self-involved starfisher king?), is from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”: “That’s the way the world ends/Not with a bang, but with a whimper.” Cosmological comedy—sardonic and funny—poetry as existential wisecrack. The end of character.