Chemistry 101

What is meant when people talk about actors having chemistry? I'll start off by telling you what I DON'T mean by chemistry. The phrase has become a kind of lazy shorthand to describe either acting quality or likability of an actor. If two actors are not managing to convey that they are in love when they are supposed to be, it is not because of a "lack of chemistry" but generally a lack of acting. Take for example The Proposal. Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds utterly failed to convince me that they were in love by the end of the movie. Part of the problem was a script which substituted movie cliche's for any kind of original take on romance. Even with a cliched script, I've seen plenty of romantic movies that still managed to convince me of the underlying conceit that the two main characters are in love. About half the story lines in Love Actually would serve as an example. We believe the couple is in love because the actors have conveyed that to us in some way either through body language, their ease and rapport with one another or through good timing in the pacing of their dialog. The way people use words in a romantic movie should be like the way Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers use bodily movement in their films.

How do you convey love? Well, I think it starts by portraying physical attraction. In many cases it is enough to portray lust. And this is where it gets tricky and the viewer's own feelings get tangled up in their assessment. Many female viewers have a hard time buying Scarlett's preference for Ashley Wilkes over Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Maybe it's just that we're not Victorian Ladies, but modern women, trained by year of viewing movies in which the "bad boy" is redeemed to be the ultimate catch. It doesn't help that Clark Gable was the prototype bad boy. This is a tricky one for me as well, and I have had to put aside my personal indifference to the charms of Leslie Howard on numerous occasions. When it comes to same sex assessment (and I do apologize for the hetro normative bias here, people) I think we have a tendency to like those actors whom we can imagine portray some facet of ourselves or whom we would like to be. I can't exactly relate to Ingrid Bergman because well, she is a Goddess, but I can relate to the insecurity that she frequently hides beneath a barrier of coolness or deflective humor. Cause, like I totally do that too! I love Bette Davis because she conveys qualities such as strength, courage and self-sufficiency that I wish I had in greater quantities.

So when I see an actress whom I like (Ingrid Bergman) paired with an actor whom I don't find particularly attractive (Humphrey Bogart) what is the result? Well if they are good actors, the result is Casablanca. It should still be a fantastic movie if all the other pieces are in place. Bogart and Lauren Becall had great chemistry together on screen. They should. They were sleeping together in real life. But Bogart has equally convincing chemistry with Ingrid Bergman. You really believe that they were lovers once and that they have been greatly effected by their brief affair and that the whole thing is about to come to an explosive conclusion at Rick's Cafe American. And yet, I find Paul Henreid more attractive and think that Ingrid's fate of returning to him would be a no-brainer for me. It doesn't matter what I think though, because good acting can overcome taste.

Sometimes though, good acting is not enough and neither is personal attraction. Take the example of Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh in Fire Over England. This is a screen couple who should have incendiary chemistry on screen. They were married in real life. Olivier is beautiful and Vivian Leigh is an actress I've always admired for her ability to maintain her dignity in undignified situations. And yet, Olivier and Leigh are completely blah together on screen. Olivier does better in scenes with May Robson and Tamara Desni. What the...? I think it is because Leigh and Olivier are both such big actors that they weren't giving the other person enough space on screen. And that is really the only logical explanation because in That Hamilton Woman, a later performance, they are terrific.

This brings up an important thing that I've observed over the years, that chemistry, whatever it is, is not necessarily created instantly, but is often the product of years of working together. Cary Grant and Irene Dunne are wonderful together in The Awful Truth. And yet, by their third film together, their comic timing and their ease with one another was so great that in comparison they seem a bit awkward in the earlier performance. They hide it well with lots of hostility, which is in the language of screwball comedy, a byword for love and attraction. But their love scenes together are flat in comparison to Penny Serenade, or My Favorite Wife, both of which are far more effective at convincing the audience that this is a married couple. Though these later films are vastly inferior to The Awful Truth in many respects I still enjoy watching them because of the chemistry between Dunne and Grant.

Sometimes dislike photographs as "like" and accounts for chemistry. In Wuthering Heights Olivier and his co-star Merle Oberon famously hated one another. They fought on set and Oberon told people that Olivier was repulsive with bad breath and a habit of spitting when he spoke. This fed perfectly into the underlying theme of movie which is the blurring of the lines between love and hate. After the Production Code came into force in 1934, sex became sublimated as hostility. It is to the point now that when we see a couple who argues or dislikes each other in the first five minutes of the movie, we are perfectly correct in guessing that they will wind up together. Now this is an old trope, that goes back to Much Ado About Nothing (and probably further-- if I were any student of the Classics at all, I could think of a decent pre-Shakespeare example), but it has come to so dominate the genre of Romantic Comedy that there is almost no other pattern of putting people together in contemporary American Movies. And you know what? I'm totally fine with that. I loved Bridget Jones Diary and I'm looking forward to seeing that new movie with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin. Opposites still attract, and chemistry, whatever it is, is still king.

The stuff dreams are made of: maltese Falcon Boxed set

What's better than a boxed set of the Maltese Falcon (1941) with extras, a commentary and a documentary? That same boxed set with all three film versions of Dashiell Hammet's novel included. While I mostly blame Tonto for the recent influx of expensive DVDs into my house, I can't deny I do love the extras. This is a rare case in which the extras might be something I actually watch as much if not more than the 1941 version of the film.

The documentary is average, although I did learn that I've pronouncing "Dashiell" wrong all these years. (It should be "da sheel" not "Dash-el") For some reason Henry Rollins is a commentator in it. That guy must have made a deal with devil or something. Never before has a little talent in the arena of punk rock and spoken word been a qualification to comment as to whether Humphrey Bogart's portrayal of Sam Spade was the first anti-hero put on film. (He wasn't by the way. See the first two film versions of this story, if you don't believe me.) The commentary too is mind-numbingly pedestrian. Bogart biographer Eric Lax talks in a monotone throughout giving dry facts about the actors on screen. He adds a few nice pieces of trivia, that I wouldn't have known about otherwise such as a poster for an obscure Bogart movie that's in the background when Miles is shot, but otherwise I had to force myself to get through it.

Having been raised on the '41 film, the Maltese Falcon (1931) was really a surprise and a pleasant one at that. With its focus on Sam Spade's sex life, it's naughty and funny as well as gritty. I can't picture Bogart ever being as breezy or as flippant as Ricardo Cortez is as he tidies his office after an afternoon rendezvous with a client, flirts with his secretary, takes a call from one of his girlfriends who happens to be married to his partner and makes goo goo eyes at Ruth Wonderly (Bebe Daniels) all before lunch. Daniels is a more street-wise, earthy femme fatale than Mary Astor. I've always respected Astor's acting, but Daniels is the kind of woman that seems like she could lead two or three guys to their doom and still make it to her lunch date without having to retouch her lipstick. Mary Astor projects a far more polished and high-class image, and when she says "I haven't lived a good life; I've been bad" you wonder if it isn't something to do with not matching her china pattern to the table cloth.

At the very least the sleeping arrangement make a lot more sense in the pre-code version. The famous detective wastes no time in shacking up with his client which gives him ample opportunity to search through her stuff to find the falcon as well as protecting her from Gutman's thug, Wilmer. In the '41 version we are expected to believe that Spade's faithful and sharp as a tack assistant, has a blind spot for Miss Wonderly and offers to put her up at her place as a favor to her boss. It's interesting to me that the adultery in all three of the film versions is toned down from the novel. The 31 version makes Iva Archer out to be tremendously unappealing and Sam is clearly regretful of his involvement with her. When Wonderly realizes that the negligee she found in her new lover's apartment belonged to the wife of the man she just murdered, she tears it off and takes a bath, scrubbing herself vigorously with a stiff brush. The film's producers made sure we understood that Ms. Wonderley had a conscience after all, and of course who were they to miss an opportunity to titillate the audience . In Satan Met a Lady, the affair happened before the Archers were married and in the '41 version Bogart breaks things off completely with Iva as soon as Miles is killed. In the novel, Spade is revolted by the his involvement but it is strongly implied that he will go back to her at the end. That was a conclusion that was too brutal even for the Pre-code era. The '31 film ends with Spade visiting Wonderly in jail, asking the prison matron to go easy on her and to send the bill for any little expenses she might incur to him at the DA's office. There is no famous line "the stuff that dreams are made of" and Sam Spade gets made assistant DA!

Satan Met a Lady (1936) is best known to film fans as the movie that precipitated Bette Davis breaking her contract with Warner Brothers. The film's reviews were colored by the chivalric feeling that critics had for Davis who they felt was above the material at hand. And perhaps she was, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the heck out of this quirky comedy. I am probably too big of a fan of screwball comedy, if such a thing is possible. I may be the only person who thinks a screwball bowlderization of The Maltese Falcon is a good idea. Critics, audiences and most of the people involved thought it was a disaster, but I couldn't help but admire the fact that this even got made. On top of that, it's actually quite funny.

The original New York Times review of Satan Met a Lady said that actors behave as if they expect the men in white coats to burst any moment and lock them up for attempting such a travesty. And really is that so different than the subtext of any screwball comedy? Is My Man Godfrey to be faulted for having the brass neck to put the homeless over the rich at a time when the country was nearly at war with itself? So what if a great book is made to look silly and liberties are taken with the plot? It is all in the service of comedy, which is not a noble sacrifice if you ask me. The question is then, is Satan Met a Lady any good as a comedy? I think it is. Warren William plays the Sam Spade stand-in Ted Shayne, the Satan of the title. He is far less tortured than the famous detective and inexplicably eccentric and even bizarre at times. He behaves like a person in a screwball comedy. Perhaps it is this knowing consciousness that they are in a comedy which put audiences off. I suppose the best comedies are those in which people play things straight in screwball situations. That holds to a point. Sooner or later things just get weird. Men in negligees stomp on dowagers' feet. It's bound to happen. Just as its bound to happen that a hard boiled detective will suddenly jump in the air grab onto the door frame and imitate King Kong.