RAINS WAS SHOCKED TO LEARN that Beatrix, in Britain, was accusing him of bigamy, challenging the legality of his American divorce and remarriage. In London, on July 16, 1935, she filed a countersuit to his New Jersey divorce action, naming Frances as codefendant. Although Beatrix may have had reason to want to clarify her marital status under British law, a jealous, vindictive streak soon proved to be her true motivation.
Beatrix felt that her ex-husband owed his success to her. Rains, after all, would never have gone to America without her. In her mind, he used her celebrity as a professional stepping-stone, though it was clear to everyone else which of them had the real acting talent. Beatrix's career had never sustained the brief footing she had secured with The Constant Nymph in America—and, of course, nobody in England even saw her in the play. She would later appear only sporadically in films.
Through her wealthy family, Beatrix retained expensive legal representation, and soon Rains was embroiled in lengthy and gratuitous cross-Atlantic legal filings, all to prove the obvious: she had deserted him without cause, and he had been steadily and gainfully employed in America under a valid resident permit and was a property owner in the United States, therefore making him subject to American jurisdiction.
Beatrix, however, was not willing to let him off easily. The story had the potential to get her name in the papers, and she saw that it did. And it certainly didn't hurt at all that one of the London plays in which she appeared during the legal proceedings, Wisdom Teeth, had a divorce theme. “AM I MARRIED?” ASKS ACTRESS, read a banner headline in the Daily Sketch. DIVORCED IN AMERICA BY FILM-STAR HUSBAND BUT STILL “MRS.”
“Here is a real-life drama of tangled loves,” the article began, “the eternal triangle; a man, newly married in America, a woman at home in England who does not know whether she is still a wife or not: anxiety, unhappiness—and, for her, a waiting that seems like eternity.” In a subsequent, boldface paragraph, the actress begged the reader, “Am I a free woman—free to live my own life, and perhaps make a home for myself?” Obviously, Beatrix had answered the question to her own satisfaction when she left Rains for another man in the first place. But readers of the Daily Sketch would find no mention of that in the article.
In the midst of this tumultuous year, Harold Freedman secured Rains a role in Paramount's The Last Outpost opposite Cary Grant. The result was professional turmoil, made all the more unbearable because the film's production coincided with Rains's epic battle with Beatrix. As the actor later wrote his agent, “The script I was presented with on arriving was a good romantic yarn, which with the proper handling could have been a successful picture of the Bengal Lancer type.” He felt that Outpost “had a good chance to be exciting and colourful and it had no other pretensions.” But he became wary when he met the director, Charles Barton, “a man who had grown up in the studio. And had by slow degrees advanced from office boy to Westerns so you can easily understand his fear of the office and his lack of independence and authority.”
Rains was quickly offended when he learned, secondhand, that Barton hadn't been happy with one of his scenes but was too intimidated to ask for a retake. “It was evident immediately that Mr. Barton knew nothing about directing actors, and Cary Grant knew nothing about acting or behaving decently,” Rains wrote. Barton was assigned three advisors, including a dialog director from New York, Henry C. Potter, who had never worked in film. But even with the on-set difficulties, “we still thought this glorified Western had a chance.” The reports on the daily rushes were positive. “And I came in for my share of the praise. Then we got back to the studio and Miss Gertrude Michael was added to the cast. She and Mr. Grant loathe each other, which didn't help their love scenes, and besides being no actress she insists on being cute.”
Rains was promised a viewing of the rough cut. “I waited for three weeks and heard not a word from anybody and needless to say I was beginning to suspect something.” When he was finally summoned to the studio, he was told that Barton had been taken off the film, his advisors had been let go, and the film was being half-rewritten, with Louis Gasnier now at the helm and Max Marcin directing dialog for the retakes. The internecine backstabbing escalated. According to Rains, the final indignity came when the producer, E. Lloyd Sheldon, attempted to scapegoat him for ruining the first version of the film. Rains wrote that Sheldon had let it be known that Rains was “too strong” for Barton and that Rains had personally demanded the inexperienced New York dialog director—and, Rains added, Sheldon was relating “many other unpleasant and untrue stories.”
Rains insisted on a screening, and upon finally viewing The Last Outpost, he wrote, “I was sick. It is very bad and I don't think it has a chance in the world…it shows only too clearly I had no direction.” Rains was particularly appalled by the insertion of undercranked (that is, silent-era) stock footage “taken years ago and when put in the picture moved to a different tempo and the people scurry around.” He met with Paramount production manager Ernst Lubitsch to dispel the finger-pointing and give his side of events. Paramount had an option for a second picture and “unofficially” scheduled him opposite Carole Lombard in the comedy Hands across the Table, a role that eventually went to Fred MacMurray.
“Harold,” Rains wrote Freedman, “I have a fear that this picture [that is, The Last Outpost] will give my film career a bad setback.” He asked his agent to convince Paramount to drop their option clause. They did. And Rains dropped Freedman as his film agent.
Despite his apprehensions, Rains's performance received no brickbats, and no less an arbiter than Graham Greene, writing in The Spectator, lauded the actor's technical performance, if not the script. “Mr. Rains’ low, husky voice, his power in investing even commonplace dialogue with smoldering conviction, is remarkable. He never rants, but one is always aware of what a superb ranter he could be in a part that did not call for modern restraint but only for superb diction.”
By the time The Last Outpost opened, Rains was in the hands of a new and effective Beverly Hills agent, William Hawks of the Hawks-Volp Corporation, and it was only a matter of a few months before Warner Bros. made an impressive long-term contract offer for his services. An initial, four-picture guarantee would give Rains $4,000 a week for the first two films, with a four-week guarantee with extra pro-rated compensation “for so long as may be necessary.” The second two pictures would pay him a flat $4,500 a week with a four-week compensation cap on each film. A one-year extension option provided $5,000 a week, with four pictures guaranteed at four weeks each. A second extension would increase his salary to $6,000 a week on the same four-picture basis. A third would pay him $5,400 weekly, but guarantee a flat five weeks’ pay on each project. A fourth extension would restore his base weekly pay to $6,000, a fifth to $6,800, and a sixth to $7,600. He would be perpetually guaranteed “not less than second featured billing, in type at least equal in size to first featured player.” Warners would, additionally, pay any British income taxes, and would reserve the right to loan him out to other studios. In short, should all the options be exercised, Warners was willing to pay him approximately $750,000 over seven years.
Rains was understandably suspicious of option clauses, which too often had all the substance of paper props. He was also skeptical about the first assignment the studio was proposing: the role of Napoleon Bonaparte in Hearts Divided, a strange semi-musical confection in which Dick Powell would play Napoleon's singing younger brother, sent to America incognito to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase and falling in love along the way with a character played by Marion Davies, the real-life mistress of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who was bankrolling the production. Rains had played Napoleon three times on stage: in Shaw's Man of Destiny, in a one-act comedy called Napoleon's Barber, and as the delusional alter ego of an elevator operator in the Theatre Guild production of He. Reviewers of these performances invariably made comments about his height, or the lack of it, and Rains was well aware of the limitations his stature imposed on his career.
The contract also included a potentially troubling morals clause, in light of his still-unresolved legal issues with Beatrix Thomson and her public accusation of bigamy: “The Artist agrees to conduct himself with due regard to public convention, and agrees that he will not do or commit any act or thing that will tend to degrade him in society or bring him into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, or that will tend to shock, insult or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency or prejudice the producer or the motion picture industry in general.”
Moreover, once Rains signed the contract, he, like other studio contract players, would have no control over casting. Was Hearts Divided, and whatever fevered studio concoctions that might follow, really the best career move for him?
His agent was not alone in being aghast that Rains had any hesitation about appearing in a Hearst picture.
Why, Rains asked, is everyone so surprised by his reluctance?
“Louella Parsons—you need her” was the reply.
“And why is that?” he asked. Rains never read his own reviews, much less the writing of Hollywood columnists, and he was genuinely unaware of Parsons's powerful position as the lead entertainment journalist in the Hearst newspaper empire. He had very few contacts in the film colony outside of his immediate studio coworkers and often joked about his hermitlike existence with interviewers.
Rains signed the Warner Bros. contract on November 27, 1935, and commenced work on Hearts Divided in Burbank on December 2. In spite of generally mixed reviews, Rains garnered such critical kudos for his Napoleon that the studio intimated in press squibs that it was planning a full-scale biographical film with Rains in the role. (This proved illusory.) Louella Parsons praised both his performance and the film: “In addition to being a tender romance, Hearts Divided takes on the dignity of an important historical production with Claude Rains probably the best Napoleon who has ever been seen on the screen or stage. One of the most delightful scenes in which he figures is the bathroom episode, where he issues commands in the midst of his ablutions.” (For true Rains fans, this would, sadly, remain one of the only bathtub or seminude appearances in the actor's film career.) Rains's role was well written, with one especially wry theatrical aside. One of the characters asks if Napoleon's success in convincing the Marion Davies character to give up Dick Powell for the greater glory of France was a matter of strategy. No, he replies, it was simply a matter of dramaturgy: “An amazingly good actor met an amazingly receptive audience.”
Rains made an even showier costume-picture splash as the lascivious Don Luis in Anthony Adverse (1936), based on Hervey Allen's best-selling novel. Early in the movie, Don Luis discovers that his wife has been having an affair while he has been receiving treatment for gout. The treatment successful, Don Luis kills the lover and firmly reasserts his conjugal rights. The scene in which he makes his intentions clear raised obvious censorship flags, and director Mervyn LeRoy was willing to cut it. But Rains provided a reading of the scene perfectly tailored to both industry propriety and spectator prurience. As British writer W. H. Mooring noted in Film Weekly, “In the hands of an actor who was anything less than a genius, the whole scene might have been transformed into a most disgusting spectacle of senile passion gone riot.…Rains carried the scene right to the very edge of that narrow border which divides good drama from bad taste…not one actor in a thousand could have suggested it without a suggestiveness which would have turned our stomachs.”
Rains's next film, Stolen Holiday (1937), saw Rains once again playing a mustached scoundrel, this time Stefan Orloff, an unscrupulous Russian financier in the world of Parisian high fashion, loosely based on the career of Serge Alexander Stavisky (a role later essayed by Jean Paul Belmondo in Alain Resnais's Stavisky). Stolen Holiday did not make many waves, although it marked Rains's first collaboration with director Michael Curtiz, with whom he was destined to do much more celebrated work. Although leading lady Kay Francis and Rains made an attractive screen couple, he found her to be a “hoity-toity” actress and, at one point, oblivious to his professional needs. During the shooting of cutaways (inserted, individual close-ups that aid the editing of a previous take involving more than one person), it is considered good form for the off-screen performer to feed lines to the on-camera actor in order to maintain continuity. When Francis repeatedly failed to make eye contact, Rains finally asked, “Miss Francis, could you please look at me?” She did, but only after making her umbrage and annoyance perfectly clear. It was the kind of petty disregard that rankled Rains professionally, and always would. About Stolen Holiday, the New York Times said only, “If the picture is at all distinguished, it is because Claude Rains does a superb job with the character.”
Beatrix Thomson's divorce complaint was still unresolved at the time Stolen Holiday was released in early 1937, and Rains had been advised by his attorney that she would likely sue for legal costs and damages. “She didn't need the money,” Rains recalled. “She was rich as Croesus. It was all spite.” He began work on Warners’ The Prince and the Pauper not knowing how much of a pauper he was likely to be by the time the film wrapped.
Based on Mark Twain's perennially popular novel, The Prince and the Pauper had been twice produced for the silent screen. In this classic tale of dual identity, Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII, has a (completely unexplained) identical twin named Tom Canty, born to London beggars. The boys meet by accident and agree to exchange identities. Rains played the Earl of Hertford, who discovers the boys’ scheme and exploits it for his own political advantage, forcing the false prince to be his pawn: “You don't want that pretty head of yours chopped off, do you? Nor to have your mother see the crows tearing tufts from a skull on London Bridge and know that it's her son's hair in which they will nest? Then never forget that you are Edward the Sixth of England and that to ever again become Tom Canty is to die!” The film was a star vehicle for Errol Flynn, who overshadowed everyone involved as Miles Hendon, a soldier of fortune and protector of Prince Edward. In an unusual twist, the film cast real-life identical twins Bobby and Billy Mauch in the title roles, giving their scenes together a naturalism not attainable with the standard split-screen camera tricks of the time.
Rains's next assignment, in They Won't Forget (1937), was a virtual reversal of his stage role in They Shall Not Die. Based on a true case of racial injustice and lynching in the deep South by way of a novel by Ward Greene, They Won't Forget featured Rains as a politically ambitious prosecutor instead of a heroic defense attorney. Despite his vocal gifts, Rains never managed to master a credible Southern accent and played the part with his usual mid-Atlantic locutions. They Won't Forget was Rains's second outing with Mervyn LeRoy as director and was a bigger critical and box office success than Anthony Adverse. It was named one of the year's top ten films by the New York Times and the National Board of Review. The Times’s Frank Nugent wrote of the film: “For its perfection, chief credit must go to Mr. LeRoy for his remarkably skillful direction—there are a few touches as fine as anything the screen has done…and to all the cast, but notably to Mr. Rains, for his savage characterization.”
Beatrix Thomson was finally granted a divorce by the British courts on July 26, 1937. Rains reluctantly made a settlement of $25,000—virtually all of his cash assets. No copy of the specific settlement terms has survived, but the divorce was treated quietly by the press (fortunately for Rains, the word “bigamist” never appeared in print). After the divorce, Beatrix never made a public statement of any kind about Rains again. She died in 1986, after a long, if not especially distinguished, stage career and after making a handful of forgettable motion pictures in the 1930s and 1940s.
Despite Rains's steady employment at Warner Bros., the divorce settlement put a severe strain on his finances. His nonstop work in Hollywood required that he obtain a California residence in addition to his Pennsylvania farm, so he mortgaged a modest, country-style home on Evanston Street in the fashionable Brentwood district of West Los Angeles. He and Frances were anxious to start a family, but they were having difficulty conceiving. Rains, approaching fifty, underwent fertility tests, which revealed no abnormalities. Ever since his adolescence, Rains had been eager to have children, and now, on the verge of finally having the resources to comfortably support a family, the fertility problem was especially frustrating.
Rains's next picture, Gold Is Where You Find It, was his first in Technicolor, and it provided him with a sympathetic part after his having portrayed several villains. Rains plays a California farmer battling industrial miners who are destroying agricultural land through their hydraulic blasting for gold. The New York Times found an uncomfortable disconnect between the story and its glitzy production values. Reviewer Frank Nugent called it “a story of ugliness—of greed and mud, exploitation and destruction…Technicolor's roseate approach is as indecorous as a May-pole dance at a funeral.”
His next film was one far more appropriate to Technicolor. With a hefty budget ($2 million), The Adventures of Robin Hood starred Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Basil Rathbone, and Rains as the scheming Prince John. At first, Rains didn't know how to approach the part; it seemed from the script to be just another standard costume villain without much depth. He told the press that he had a major epiphany when he learned the part would include an eye-catching red wig and beard. But he later told his daughter privately that all the henna, ermine, and brocade gave him a cue to play the prince as tacitly homosexual. Roddy McDowall was always convinced that Rains based his performance on the stylized voice and mannerisms of another Warners contract performer, Bette Davis. McDowall, in fact, asked Rains years later if this was the case, but Rains's only answer was an enigmatic smile.
Rains's next two pictures did little to further his career, though they were lucrative. In White Banners he took a back seat to Fay Bainter, who received a best supporting actress Academy Award nomination for the film (one of two that year for Bainter; she won for Jezebel). Rains played the befuddled head of a midwestern family, a science teacher–inventor whose disorganized home is benevolently colonized by a housekeeper (Bainter), who manages the household mess and dispenses inspirational advice and assistance to everyone in sight, despite her own clouded past. In Four Daughters—another collaboration with director Michael Curtiz, based on a story by Fannie Hurst—Rains played a music professor overseeing the emotional entanglements of his single-parent female quartet. The film earned an Academy Award nomination for best picture, as did John Garfield for best supporting actor, and Four Daughters made the New York Times ten-best list.
By the second half of 1938, Rains and his agent were growing increasingly concerned about Warners’ living up to its contractual obligations. Rains was maintaining residences on two coasts. He had committed a sizable amount of his annual studio income to Beatrix Thomson in their divorce settlement. His wife, Frances, had just given birth to the baby they had longed for, a daughter they named Jennifer. But the studio was not giving Rains the four yearly assignments stipulated in his contract. Nor was Warners lending him out to other studios, despite its financial incentive to do so. (Studios frequently negotiated higher fees for loan-outs than they were contractually obligated to pay their contract players.)
Moreover, Rains's latest assignment, the role of a hardboiled New York detective in They Made Me a Criminal, was particularly not to the actor's liking. Rains sent a telegram to Jack Warner on August 31, 1938:
Dear Jack. Having thoroughly enjoyed my association with the studio and toed the line to cooperate to the best of my ability, I feel you should know of my inability to understand being cast for the part of Phelan in “They Made Me a Criminal.” Frankly, I feel I am so poorly cast that it would be harmful to your picture. You have done such a good job in building me up that it seems a pity to tear that down with such a part as this, and I am confident that your good judgment will recognize this. Dogs delight to bark and bite and I think I have been a good dog for three years, so perhaps you will give me five minutes to talk it over.
In the end, Rains was forced to be a good dog once more, and They Made Me a Criminal indeed proved to be one of his least successful parts.
In an interoffice communication on November 7, 1938, Warners general counsel Roy Orbinger noted, “Under our contract with Claude Rains we were to have produced four pictures during the year ending Dec. 1, 1938. To date, we have only produced two.” In order not to breach the contract with Rains, Orbinger stated that he got the studio “out of this embarrassing situation” by agreeing to advance the full $48,000 for Rains's next two pictures by the end of December 1938. Surviving correspondence suggests that this offer was later significantly modified: a $24,000 advance would be paid to Rains on January 6, 1939, for services for 1939, plus a special fee of $7,500 for one week's work on the film Juarez, the movie being considered an “outside” production. On December 9, Orbinger wrote, “We have received considerable concessions from Claude Rains, inasmuch as he really had us over a barrel for 2 unproduced pictures.…The billing clause of Rains was quite an issue, and Rains only made the above concessions with the understanding that he would get the billing which I outlined to you…it would be useless to try to ask Rains for any further concessions, as I know that he would definitely not grant them.”
In what seems to be another concession by the studio, Rains received star billing in the Technicolor short Sons of Liberty, playing Haym Salomon, the Jewish patriot of revolutionary America. Another “outside” project, directed by Michael Curtiz, Sons of Liberty won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject.
For Juarez, despite his relatively small screen time, Rains received second featured billing, below headliners Bette Davis and Paul Muni, and following Brian Aherne. Rains played Napoleon III, who schemed to retain France's grasp on Mexico. Muni and Davis played Benito Juarez, the elected Mexican president, and his wife, Carlotta, who urges him to declare himself king of Mexico rather than abdicate to the French.
Although Rains could have tossed off the role like the side project it was, he did his usual careful preparation and was fully in character for his first scene with Davis, his character's detested nemesis. The ferocious stare he conjured so unsettled Davis that she stopped the scene. “His performance was so real I thought he found me an inferior actress. He scared me to death,” Davis recalled. “That was our initial contact, and that I got through it at all was a miracle. When Claude played a character, he was the consummate actor. It was always monumental theatre with him.”
As filming progressed, however, Davis found looking at Rains easier and easier. “Thank God you're married,” she told him, only half jokingly. He responded by bringing his baby daughter to the set the next day as a protective prop. When his daughter was older, Rains told her that Davis alarmed him “because she devoured men the way she devoured cigarettes.” “Every now and then, I would kid Claude,” Davis recalled. “I would say to him, you marry all these women, why do you never marry me? He would just smile, and that was that. I think he was basically enormously sexy. It reeked! He had that in any role he played.”
The Warners front office did not, evidently, find Rains sexy; at least, they certainly did not see him as a leading man. In addition to an ongoing dearth of films (including a planned loan-out to Goldwyn for a Gary Cooper film in 1938, which failed to materialize), Rains and his agent continued to squabble with the studio over billing. “It has come to my attention that you have expressed dissatisfaction with respect to the billing which has been accorded you in connection with some of your recent pictures,” Jack Warner wrote to Rains on February 24, 1939. “While I am satisfied that there has been no intentional disregard by any of our departments as to our contractual obligations with respect to billing, it is possible that some inadvertencies may have been committed. Therefore, I am again impressing upon the minds of all of the officials of this studio who play any part in setting up the billings in our various pictures to adhere strictly to the obligations established in our contracts, and have every confidence that if there has been any cause for complaint in the past, such conditions will be corrected and not occur hereafter.”
Warner Bros. continued to cast around half-heartedly for loan-out contracts, and made a press announcement that Rains might portray Edgar Allan Poe in a biographical feature that—again—never materialized. William Dieterle, who had directed Juarez, wanted Rains to play the role of the villainous Archdeacon Frollo in RKO's lavish production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Charles Laughton as Quasimodo. But before the deal was completed, Rains recalled later, “I met [Laughton] by accident on the Universal lot. I recalled the old relationship fondly at the sight of him.”
Rains walked up to him to say hello, but the much taller Laughton just looked down and said with a sneer, “Hello, you little shit.”
For Rains, it was too much. “He was condescending to me,” he later said—an understatement if there ever was. Rains refused the part in Hunchback; Cedric Hardwicke ultimately played it. Rains and Laughton never spoke again. “I didn't want to have any trouble with him,” Rains said. “It was the end of our relationship.”
Rains also passed on the title role in Universal's Son of Frankenstein opposite Boris Karloff. Peter Lorre had also refused it, and the part was finally taken by Basil Rathbone. Rains's decision probably had less to do with his reluctance to appear in a monster movie than the virtually unfilmable mishmash of a script Universal was offering. (Rathbone, despite a bravura performance, didn't even mention the film in his memoirs.)
In 1938, the nightmare of Beatrix Thomson behind him, Rains became a naturalized American citizen, and he traded his small Pennsylvania farm for a much larger property in nearby Chester County called Stock Grange. It was the working farm he had always dreamed of—a bucolic place that would ultimately comprise 600 acres, with an eighteenth-century stone farmhouse that he and Frances filled with antiques. “Stock Grange was one of the greatest prides of my father's life,” Rains's daughter remembered. “He just couldn't wait to get back to it after he had competed a film. It was beautiful Pennsylvania land and resembled the English countryside.”
After Juarez, Warners cast Rains in Daughters Courageous, a Michael Curtiz film cast in the mold of Four Daughters. Rains, who was given second billing after John Garfield, played Jim Masters, a smooth-talking father attempting to ingratiate himself to the family he abandoned twenty years earlier. It was a plum of a role, excellently written by Julius and Philip Epstein, but, despite Jack Warner's earlier assurances, there were more problems with Rains's billing: large billboards displayed Rains's name at only 20 percent the size of John Garfield's and buried it at the bottom of the poster.
Hawks, Rains's agent, fired off an angry message to the studio on August 2, 1939: “I do not believe that Mr. Enfield or the New York office mean any of the promises that have heretofore been made to me or Claude, and in this particular instance, they have deliberately broken the contract. This is a very serious breach of contract, coupled with the previous breaches, and very frankly Warner is in a serious position.” He continued, “I believe that not only is there apology due me for this deliberate slap in the face, but unless there is satisfactory change, I am really going to enjoy a good fight. Please remember that Claude has been paid for his next picture in advance.”
The money covered a loan-out to Columbia for Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Rains was to play Senator Joseph Paine, a silver-haired, silver-tongued, and ultimately corrupt politician who ensnares a political naïf, Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), in a high-level land fraud scheme. The part was not specifically tailored for Rains. As Capra recalled,
We leafed and leafed through the Players Directory, pored over names in the lists of clients agents sent us. None raised blood pressure until one of my henchmen casually remarked, “I just thought of an actor that'd look like a senator—Claude Rains.” Boing! Not only could that distinguished British actor add grace and luster to any nation's Upper House; he had the artistry, power and depth to play the soul-tortured idealist whose feet had turned to clay.
Warners’ Steve Trilling memoed Hal Wallis on March 23, 1939: “Bill Hawks ’phoned they had been over to see Frank Capra, and the part in ‘MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON’ was the best thing that CLAUDE RAINS has ever been offered since he has been in pictures—equally as important as James Stewart's and Jean Arthur's roles and they were therefore loath to pass it up.” Hawks's and Rains's attitude was actually more that Warners would prefer Rains doing the movie to add to his prestige and name value for the studio's own future benefit.
Capra's screenwriter, Sidney Buchman, created a showpiece role for Rains, even though the part was not specifically conceived for him. Rains's role, the corrupt Senator Paine, was an ambiguous character—once idealistic, now cynical, ever scheming, yet supremely guilt-ridden—and Rains gave it his all. After working in motion pictures for just a little over five years, he had mastered a subtler technique, acting with his eyes and reining in the declamatory stage techniques on which he had been raised. Never again would he feel the need to back an actress into the camera. Unlike the many mediocre scripts he had elevated with his presence, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington his talents were placed in the service of a genuinely fine piece of screenwriting.
Perhaps Rains's most impressive speech in the film is the one he delivers to James Stewart as the young senator, Jefferson Smith, who has begun to ask inconvenient questions about the propriety and legality of the federal appropriation of land in his home state. Rains summons Stewart for a meeting and proceeds to deliver one of the longest monologues in the film:
Listen, Jeff—you—you don't understand these things—you mustn't condemn me for my part in this—for my part in this without—you have no experience—you see things as black and white—and a man as angel or devil. That's the young idealist in you. And that isn't how the world runs, Jeff—certainly not Government and politics. It's a question of give and take—you have to play by the rules—compromise—you have to leave your ideals outside the door, with your rubbers. I feel I'm the right man for the Senate. And there are certain powers—influence. To stay there, I must respect them. And now and—for the sake of that power—a dam has to be built—and one must shut his eyes. It's—it's a small compromise. The best men have had to make them. Do you understand?
Jeff is silent, and the senator continues, in desperation:
I know how you feel, Jeff. Thirty years ago—I had those ideals, too. I was you. I had to make the decision you were asked to make today. And I compromised, yes! So that all these years I could stay in that Senate—and serve the people in a thousand different ways!
Rains rivets the viewer by beginning his speech in a quiet, avuncular manner, then building slowly into a full-scale Faustian confession. The senator is trying to convince himself of his personal virtue as he attempts to persuade the young idealist to sell his soul for political expedience. Mr. Smith refuses to go along, and Senator Paine denounces him on the floor of the Senate as corrupt and unworthy of his office. Jeff responds with a marathon filibuster—perhaps the most memorable scene in James Stewart's career, and one of the most memorable in Rains's—which leads to Paine's attempted suicide in the Senate cloakroom. There follows an extraordinary, if not quite believable, scene in which Paine recants his trumped-up accusations against Jefferson Smith. “Expel me! Not him! Me!” the senator cries. “Every word that boy said is the truth! I'm not fit for office! I'm not fit for any place of honor or trust in this land! Expel me—!”
Screenwriter Buchman hated the suicide attempt and the confession, which Capra insisted upon. Although the sequence stretches credulity, it does serve to bring the audience back to the more reassuring territory the director had staked out in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and so many other films. In real life, the senator would never have confessed, but Capra knew his audience and sent them out of the theatre smiling.
Mr. Smith proved both prestigious and controversial, actually drawing fire from the Senate floor. Both Capra and Columbia's publicity department were no doubt delighted when the film was denounced by Republican senator Alben B. Barkley of Kentucky, who spewed his venom for the Christian Science Monitor. The film, he said, was a “grotesque distortion” of the congressional process. “It was so grotesque it was funny. It showed the Senate made up of crooks, led by crooks, listening to a crook.…It was so vicious an idea it was a source of disgust and hilarity to every member of congress who saw it.” Barkley's comments set in motion even more vociferous criticism. Democratic senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina stated that Mr. Smith promulgated an outrageous image of legislative corruption that was exactly what “dictators of totalitarian governments would like to have their subjects believe exists in a democracy.” According to Capra, even the American ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, wired Columbia's head honcho Harry Cohn in protest.
At the time of the film's release, newspapers all around the country editorialized at length about the film, mostly positively. The media attention did nothing but drive more audiences into theatres. In addition to the film's technical merits, superior script, and direction, Claude Rains's understated performance hit a home run. (One can only imagine how a lesser actor, playing the part like a standard Hollywood bad guy, would have damaged the film's impact.)
Jean Arthur played the secretary, one of those hardboiled-with-a-heart-of-gold roles that she performed to perfection, at least as far as audiences were concerned. But on the set she was almost pathologically insecure, literally cowering in her dressing room between takes. As Frank Capra observed, “Those weren't butterflies in her stomach. They were wasps.” Capra recalled that she often vomited before or after shooting a scene. Fortunately for Rains, “We only had one or two scenes together.” He never understood “this pain that was gnawing at her inside.” Once, during a publicity photo session, he was shocked when Arthur, annoyed with a minor delay in the lighting set-up, abruptly announced, “I don't see why I have to be here,” and walked out. Rains maintained his professional distance throughout the production: “I never called her ‘Jean,’” he recalled.
Mr. Smith garnered Academy Award nominations for best picture, as well as for James Stewart (best actor) and Rains (best supporting actor). None won, but Warners was effectively on notice that other studios were ready to make better use of Claude Rains than the one to whom he was under contract.
Four Wives, at Warners, was Rains's final assignment for 1939. This film, a sequel to Four Daughters, with Rains once more in the father role, gave Rains an amiable enough part, but it was certainly no Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Rains began renegotiating his Warner Bros. contract in early 1940. This time, he agreed to two films a year, at $6,000 a week for the first two years, $6,800 for the third year, and $7,600 a week for a fourth year. All films would have five-week guarantees. But unlike his earlier contract, the new one would give him the right to do two freelance pictures per year. And, unlike a headline star like Bette Davis (who was in no sense a “good dog” and battled endlessly and obsessively with studio brass over her assignments, culminating in a disastrously unsuccessful lawsuit filed in England to break her American contract), Rains, according to his daughter, was given limited right of script refusal—he could pass on two films, but was expected to take the third, if offered. (It is remarkable that this clause doesn't actually appear in the contract; according to Rains's daughter, the actor used his personal charm and consummate professional reliability to obtain extra-contractual concessions to his advantage.) Warners recognized Rains as a valuable and nontemperamental studio asset.
After signing the new agreement, Rains dropped Bill Hawks as his representative and hired Hollywood agent M. C. “Mike” Levee as his business manager. No record exists of Rains's specific dissatisfaction with Hawks, who continued to collect his commission for Warners projects. Levee concentrated on outside assignments until the Hawks contract finally lapsed in 1945.
Warners kept its original bargain with Rains for the balance of 1940, casting him in Saturday's Children, The Sea Hawk, Lady with Red Hair, and Four Mothers (completed in 1940, released in 1941). Saturday's Children marked his professional reunion with Theatre Guild alumnus Vincent Sherman, who had recently broken into directing with Warners’ The Return of Doctor X (1938), Humphrey Bogart's single foray into the horror genre. Saturday's Children was based on a Pulitzer Prize–winning play by Maxwell Anderson that had already been twice adapted for the screen; Rains gave an unusually downbeat performance in yet another father role. “Do you know when I stopped living?” Rains, the beleaguered bookkeeper, asks his daughter. “When I was forty-three. I realized then what the end of my life would be—exactly what it had been up to then: repetitious, dull, and completely worthless to anyone.” The line was ironic, since Rains had made his memorable screen debut when he was forty-three.
In Lady with Red Hair Rains had a plum role that drew upon his personal experience with turn-of-the-century theatrical impresarios. As producer David Belasco, he played opposite Miriam Hopkins, who starred as Chicago socialite Caroline Carter, a real-life character who bulldozed her way into the New York theatre world despite her lack of formal training. The film has a decidedly Pygmalion-like flavor and remains one of the most delicious backstage comedy-dramas Hollywood has ever produced.
Warners next cast him in the title role of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, as a heavenly administrator who oversees the reincarnation of Robert Montgomery. Rains is wry, impish, and ironic in this original screen version of the play by Harry Segall, Heaven Can Wait.
Rains's new agent, Mike Levee, arranged for his client to receive top billing in Universal's The Wolf Man, in the supporting, but pivotal, role of Sir John Talbot, a Welsh aristocrat-astronomer. Talbot, improbably, has an American-raised telescope technician son twice his size named Larry (played by Lon Chaney, Jr., with no trace whatsoever of English breeding), who is bitten by a cursed gypsy (Bela Lugosi) and subsequently turns into a rampaging werewolf.
The screenwriter, Curt Siodmak, acceded to the familial conceit despite the absurdity of the studio's request. He had originally written Chaney's part as a visiting American. Siodmak was a gifted but practical scenarist who knew how to choose his fights. “I targeted the screenplay to be delivered as late as possible,” he wrote. “That gave the front office no time to engage another writer, who could mess up my screenplay. Universal was stingy and didn't like to spend money for rewrites. That was the secret of getting a ‘classic.’”
Siodmak's script was significantly retooled in other ways as well to accommodate Rains's star billing. In Siodmak's first draft, the Wolf Man is killed by the dashing, up-and-coming contract player Patric Knowles; but the shooting script gave the honors to the top-billed Rains, who bashes in the lycanthrope's brain with a silver wolf's-head cane in a ferocious struggle.
Rains returned to Warner Bros. for a difficult part in Kings Row, based on the best-selling novel by Henry Bellamann. Set in turn-of-the-century America, the book was the Peyton Place of its time, with a strong dose of Winesburg, Ohio thrown over the flames—a lurid melodrama of small-town secrets that immediately raised the ire of both the press and the film censors. Los Angeles Daily News columnist Ted Le Berthon wondered “how anybody could possibly clean up ‘Kings Row,’ and why anyone outside of a booby hatch could have regarded it as screen material.” He continued:
In this book, spiced with harlots, idiots, nymphomaniacs, and homosexuals, there are three fathers who become sexually enamored of their daughters, one hangman who derives erotic pleasure from hanging people by the neck until they are dead, a sadistic doctor who performs unnecessary operations for the gloating pleasure of seeing his patients suffer to the human breaking point, and a whole horde of half-witted creatures preoccupied with sex. And the scene of all this is a Missouri town of some 5,000 population which seems to take on some of the dark mood of a state mental asylum…
Rains played Dr. Alexander Tower, portrayed in the original book as a reclusive physician who no longer has patients, having retired to a gloomy house with a mad wife and a beautiful daughter, Cassie, with whom he is incestuously involved and whom he kills before committing suicide. Joseph Breen informed Jack Warner in April 1941 that the script—which had already removed the incest (instead making Cassie a nymphomaniac), as well as harlots, idiots, the hangman, and any suggestion of homosexuality—was still “definitely unacceptable under the provisions of the Production Code and cannot be approved.” The production of Kings Row, said Breen, “may well be a definite disservice to the motion picture industry for, no matter how well the screenplay is done, the fact that it stems from so thoroughly questionable a novel is likely to bring down upon the industry, as a whole, the condemnation of decent people everywhere.” Nonetheless, the very next day, a meeting between Breen, executive producer Hal Wallis, screenwriter Casey Robinson, and associate producer David Lewis resulted in a compromise: all suggestions of incest and nymphomania would be replaced with the theme of hereditary schizophrenia.
Rains was not the original actor chosen for the role of Dr. Tower. When British actor James Stephenson, who was scheduled to play the part, suffered a heart attack, Hal Wallis called Rains—who, Wallis said, “declined instantly. But we tried again, rushed him the book, and he finally agreed to break off his much-needed vacation and make the long train journey west.” According to Wallis, Rains's “refusal to fly meant a considerable delay in our schedule.”
Casting Dr. Tower's doomed daughter presented difficulties. Hal Wallis wanted Ida Lupino, but the actress proved difficult, objecting to the relative smallness of the role. Bette Davis wanted the part and briefly was a shaky front runner, but was eventually passed over. Olivia de Havilland was also approached, and at one point the script was even sent to Ginger Rogers. Betty Field, a contract player from Paramount, was finally cast.
Most of Rains's scenes were opposite Robert Cummings as Parris Mitchell, an aspiring psychiatrist whom Dr. Tower takes under his tutelage and who falls in love with Cassie. (An interwoven story line had Ronald Reagan in an even worse fix with another disturbed doctor- father—a surgeon who unnecessarily amputates Reagan's legs after an accident, just to settle a score involving the doctor's daughter, played by Ann Sheridan.) Rains's scenes all have a melancholy intensity, accentuated by James Wong Howe's moody cinematography. Dr. Tower often seems to be engulfed by the shadows of his house as the nightmare of his wife and daughter's mental instability closes in. He foreshadows his own demise with fatalistic observations shared with the idealistic young doctor- to-be, almost as if warning him of the tragic limitations of the healing arts. “In this modern, complicated world,” the turn-of-the-century doctor says, “man breaks down under the strain, the bewilderment, the disappointment, disillusionment; gets lost, goes crazy, commits suicide.” And, as if anticipating the tragic arc of the twentieth century, “Mankind's building up the biggest psychic bellyache in history.”
Indeed: Pearl Harbor had already been bombed.