HOLLYWOOD’s supply of players has been affected in two ways by the war: a large number of familiar and experienced performers have been taken out of the studios and put somewhere in the armed forces; and an equally large number of new players have been replacing them. The following people strike me as being notable additions.
Gene Kelly, Keenan Wynn and Percy Kilbride were all recruited from the theatre. Kelly, whose most recent picture is “Cover Girl,” has been cast either as the smart, tough young hero or as the unfortunate half of the song and dance team, but his progress and accomplishment have been far more unusual than the stock characters he has played. No other young player to my knowledge gets over a particular attitude and response with as much clarity and sharp effect, or with as much uncorrupted feeling, and I have seen him do a variety of characterizations with equal success. He plays up the smaller responses of his part without killing the character they are part of. The two things he does least well—singing and dancing—are what he is given most consistently to do.
Wynn and Kilbride are both supporting comic performers who invariably make the parts of the picture they are in very bright and exciting. The former is the son of a fine influence, Ed Wynn, and provided two corrupt, cynical notes for two otherwise completely sweet shows—“See Here, Private Hargrove,” and “The Lost Angel.” In the latter he helped Margaret O’Brien, who is also good, and new, and only seven years old, relieve a basically terrible moment where she is supposed to teach him better than to be a gangster, by doing a bored, enigmatic kind of gangsterism, and by his virtuosity in capping and explaining situations with some business with his hands or face. In the sophomoric “See Here, Private Hargrove” he has a more unusual screen character to play, the young man (found in every college dormitory) with a passion for promoting small business on the side as he goes through basic training. He fills the role well, with the necessary amount of sinister, thick-skinned greediness that responds with a mildly disfavoring blankness to anything except the success or failure of one of his business deals. Kilbride is the character with the Buster Keaton kind of face and the absurd caricature of a New England farmer’s voice, who is usually inserted into films to whip them up somewhere and does it in a clear, wonderful manner. It turns out that along with the comic quality of Kilbride’s face and voice, he is one of the most subtle and inventive comic spirits to hit Hollywood in years. It seems to me that Kilbride is capable of becoming a great movie comic, directly in the great line of Keaton and Chaplin, if he is given the necessary featuring and freedom.
I also recommend any performance by Roman Bohnen, Henry Morgan or Alexander Granach, William Eythe’s in “The Song of Bernadette” and Bill Phillips’ in “See Here, Private Hargrove.”
By far the most unusual phenomenon in the advent of new players is the type of heroine being introduced simultaneously by most of the studios—girls with a spectacular amount of breeding, intelligence and acting ambition. Some of their names are Jean Sullivan, Jean Heather, Eleanor Parker, Susan Peters and Mary Anderson. I think the idea is for rival studios to cash in on the success of the styles of Ingrid Bergman and Teresa Wright, and to show soldiers the kind of girl they should wait for, look for or expect when they get back. To be a good fit as this soldier ideal these young film heroines have something from all the former Lady categories. This includes the ambition of the great acting ladies like Bette Davis, the body of the bathing beauty, the face and wholesomeness of the girl who plays Sister in family movies, and the free-swinging, sexual lustiness of the vampire women. But they have also the added jigger of sensitivity. For that jigger they are indebted to Bergman; also they use her worst cutenesses, and that eager kind of acting intelligence which in some of the actresses makes you feel that they read and understood the script and then hid the hero’s before he could read his. I think they have also been influenced by Teresa Wright, the kind of face she has and the respectable clothes she wears, which are sold in Junior Miss departments. They are also usually hung in that troublesome state between girlhood and womanhood that Miss Wright plays so well. There is no denying their interest in acting, their intelligence about what they are supposed to be doing and their desire to be better than anything.
There are other new heroines, fashioned along more traditional lines, including Ella Raines, K. T. Stevens, Donna Reed and Marsha Hunt. Miss Hunt has a good amount of talent, drive and sincerity, and has decided to follow the Davis-Lupino road, which is founded on the basic realization that life is hard, severe and bitter. As a result she shows little in the way of softness or relaxation, even when there is no great demand for her tense, belligerent manner.
Perhaps Paramount’s Gail Russell, who was introduced in “The Uninvited,” has the greatest effectiveness of the new crop of heroines, because of her unusual kind of screen beauty—that which gets lost in fairy tales, or is saved by a Knight of the Round Table—but she has carefully turned all of her mannerisms into a pure demonstration of that beauty.
May 15, 1944