A Dreadful Man

I have officially joined the cult of Sanders. I put it off as along as I could, but midway through Brian Aherne's breezy book "A Dreadful Man" I realized I was completely mesmerized by this eccentric, misanthropic actor and nothing less than full-on obsession would do for it. While the book is mostly about Sanders surpisingly few of the letters in this epistolary biography were written by him. Sanders married actress Benita Hume, in a scandalously short time after the death of her first husband Ronald Colman. Benita actually turns out to be the main correspondent and her letters make up the bulk of "A Dreadful Man." What letters of Sanders' do appear are treasures as they capture the full force of his curmudgeonly style. Benita's correspondence is light and chatty and occasionally catty. She describes Grace Kelly's acting as "an atomic age thundering bore," an assessment which made me laugh out loud even as I disagreed with it.

What I enjoyed most from her correspondence was the emergence of a snapshot of her relationship with George Sanders. Though most suspected he married her for the fortune he imagined she'd inherited from her first husband, he seems to have been completely devoted to her all along, despite the fact that he found out rather quickly that most of her money was hopelessly locked into trust funds for her children. Even his best friends found him to be eccentric to an extreme degree, thoughtless and probably unmarriagable. And yet, this odd pair worked somehow. She made him a better husband by dragging him out more into the social sphere and he helped her move on from the crippling grief she felt when Colman died. Colman had been ill for some time, and if you compare her letters during that time to the letters after her marriage you can see that she was operating under a huge strain and hadn't really realized it. Sanders it turned out, made her laugh which is a power not to be underestimated in such a situation, and she describes him as nothing but thoughtful and caring. It's difficult to imagine to those with much familiarity with Sander's as an actor, but he seems to have made Benita an exception to his caddish ways for the 18 years of their marriage.

I'm about five minutes away from starting a Tumblr blog called "FuckyeahGeorgeandBenita" based on this picture alone. The caption was written by one or the other of them, probably Benita.

One of the more intriguing aspects of "A Dreadful Man" is its depiction of Sanders strange business dealings. Robbed of his birthright title and fortune by the Bolshevik Revolution, Rossian-born Sanders chased the dream of being a tycoon for most of his life. He created a number of dodgy companies to hide his wealth around the globe. In several cases he encouraged friends to invest in these hopelessly corrupt organizations with disastrous results. While Sanders and Hume were usually the main losers in these dealings, Aherne is quick to point out that Sanders never expressed an iota of regret for the other people who lost money in these swindles. It's hard to believe but Sanders even managed to con the British government into subsidizing his "Cadco" (named after his autobiography "Memoirs of a Professional Cad.") When a company has the word "cad" in its name, should you really be surprised when it rips you off? Besides fodder for Aherne's sometimes bitter writing (he lost quite a lot of money in one of Sander's earliest schemes), these companies' main product was the prestige that Sanders desired. Though he never spent a minute actually working or managing one of them, he spent untold hours planning and decorating elaborate executive office suites for himself. He liked nothing more than a big desk with lots of buttons apparently. All of this is endearing to me as I always love a good eccentric, especially if I don't have to actually live with him or haven't given him any of my money to "invest." Sanders narrowly avoided prosecution for some his more egregious failings while the rest of Cadco's management actually went to jail.


Sanders was completely disdainful of his career as an actor. You can see a bit of Aherne's own complicated relationship with his profession coming though, here. You can tell he's driven a bit mad by Sanders who never put much effort into his work, always turned up never having even glanced at a script. Aherne who was conscientious to a fault struggled to find work as he aged, while Sanders was seemingly always had more work than he could use. Surely some of this was the lingering prestige of his Oscar for All About Eve, but some of it was what Aherne describes as "his personality." Sanders just brought class to whatever it was he was about, even if it was trash like Psychomania.

After Hume's death in the late 1960s, Sander's life went downhill in a big way. He married a second Gabor sister, Magda (he'd had a comically disastrous marriage to Zsa Zsa before Benita). The second Gabor marriage was actually Zsa Zsa's scheme to provide for her older sister and to try to help Sander's whose drinking was becoming alarming. How this loveless, nay, like-less, match was supposed to work, Zsa Zsa never explained but it was annulled six weeks after it began. After, Magda, his film choices went from bad to worse, his health was poor and made worse by drinking. He ended in suicide in 1972 with a note famous for its brevity and wit among suicide notes, "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

I think part of Aherne's motivations for writing the book was to come to terms with the loss of his friend and of course the suicide. Though Sander's claimed "boredom" I don't think Aherne was convinced by that. I certainly wasn't. The picture of a man with many talents, hobbies and interests is not one of boredom, but of destabilization and frustration with many bad choices. Sanders had an almost compulsive house buying habit. He would drive through a neighborhood, see a house for sale and buy it on the spot. He moved continuously to avoid taxes, often winding up in far flung locales far from friends and family, which was more than usual the case when he found himself at a small coastal town in Spain with too many sleeping pills. Benita seemed to bring out the best in George and provided some stability. Without her, he might have gone off the rails more completely than anyone, even he, could guess.

Shirtless and apparently underpantless as well . You'll thank me for the "archive" setting on my scanner or you'll curse me for it. Click in at your own risk, people.

There are many great Sander's anecdotes in the book but my favorite is the one Aherne tells about golfing with George. Sanders was a great lover of croquet but famously hated golf. Aherne played golf a lot in Switzerland since there wasn't much else to do. His entire social life revolved around the game and he continually pestered George to play just to get him out and about. Sanders finally relented and arrived at the country club in his favorite ensemble, a pair of ratty old shorts and bedroom slippers. No shirt and eventually the slippers were discarded as well. Sanders had no clubs so he borrowed a five iron from Aherne. He proceeded to win by several strokes all with with just the five iron and all while protesting that he hated golf and never played.

The ease with which Sanders could pick up just about anything was legendary and perhaps the key to his desperate end. A stroke had made life difficult. He hacked his beloved piano to pieces with an axe because he couldn't play it any more. For someone to whom everything came easily, it was perhaps simply too humbling to learn after all that life requires some effort.

The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

I was first drawn to The Barretts of Wimpole Street because the stage version starring Katharine Cornell and Brian Aherne (pictured at left) is on my ever-growing list of time machine plays, that if I ever get access to a TARDIS, I'll be sure to go back and watch. Written in 1930 by Rudolpf Besier, the original Broadway production ran for more than 300 performances at the Empire theater. That run was followed by a highly successful cross-country tour and then a world tour that took Aherne to far-flung places like the Australian outback about which he writes charmingly in his autobiography A Proper Job. I was intrigued by the story although, the film version stars Norma Shearer and Fredric March, (as if they were a pair to sneeze at!)

It's not often that a movie is made about one writer let alone two. Writing usually just isn't exciting enough as an activity to be the subject of a movie. And writer's lives, while they have their moments of drama, tend to be about observation more than experience. Fictional writers of the ilk of Carrie Bradshaw abound, but it's really pretty rare that a real life author is the subject of a film. The most we usually get on film is an actor portraying Sommerset Maughm appearing as a rye character in an adaptation of one his books. Occasionally a biopic about a writer, like say Becoming Jane about Jane Austen, will make it into the mainstream, but it is unusual if it is faithful to reality in any way. But Barretts is truly rare in that it focuses on the lives of two writers and it is not wildly off the mark. The story revolves around Barrett's father who was steadfastly opposed to any marriage by any of his children and the hiding in plain site courtship that she carried on with admirer and fellow-poet Robert Browning. It is based loosely on the mass of correspondence between the two famous poets from 1945 until their elopement in 1946. Much of the dialog in the film is quoted from or paraphrased from the letters. This makes for a slightly artificial and odd way of communicating, since in real life, people don't speak as they would write. The work succeeded despite this stagey quality and despite the fact that the problems of two rich neurotic thirty year old virgins couldn't have had much appeal to people facing life in America in the early 1930s.

Or could it?

I've been trying to work out what it was in the play that resonated with audiences in the grip of the Depression. At first I thought that it was just escapist fantasy, yearning for a time and place where money problems seems simply to not exist. In reality of course, money was an issue. Robert Browning was a poor poet who managed on a very small income from his father. If Elizabeth Barrett Browning had not had her own small income, free from the machinations of her father, there would be no possible elopement and no drama. The couple had a mutual friend the painter, Robert Haydon, who committed suicide as a result of a huge financial loss. But the movie simplifies even further what the play barely mentions.

Escapism alone can not explain the popularity of the play and film. The play focuses instead on the father's opposition to marriage, implying rather strongly that he was a rapist, molester and that incestous feelings were behind his strange and vehement opposition to his daughters marrying. In real life Edward Mouton Barrett was opposed to all of his 12 children marrying and disinherited the boys and girls who disobeyed him. In some of Elizabeth's letters there are hints of physical abuse, but no explicit examples are ever named. The application of modern psychology to Mr. Barrett's strange attitudes (Elizabeth describes them as "eccentricity and something more") was probably appealing to 1930s audiences as well as the lurid subject matter. Most appealing of all, was probably the theme of breaking away from one's extended family and focusing on creating a new, separate "nuclear" family. Demographically many Americans were in this boat. The Depression caused many families to stay together perhaps longer than the young people could wish as marriages were happening later, etc. My own grandparents were forced to move back in with my great-grand parents, with not always harmonious results.

As for the production of the film, it was first promised to Marion Davies. After a battle royale with Norma Shearer, the role was reassigned and the kerflufle that followed led to Davies, and the substantial bank roll behind William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan pictures, leaving MGM. As a result Hearst papers refused to review the film, which probably hurt its box office a bit. Not wanting anything to do with this hornet's nest of studio politics, Brian Aherne ran a mile from the part. The role fell to a somewhat unhappy Fredric March who complained that director, Sydney Franklin was so focused on Shearer that he allowed him to get away with the worst excesses of hamish acting. Not only does this seem like unfair criticism (it's the director's fault that you can't control your hamish instincts?) it is just plain wrong. March is actually quite wonderful and perfectly suited to the part. In real life, Robert Browning was an intense dude. This was a man who had major life crisis in his twenties because he read a poem by Percy B. Shelley. He wildly declared his love for Elizabeth Barrett Browning in his first letter to her and then spent the next 16 months trying to prove his feelings were not mere fanboy gushing. He could be overly enthusiastic (friends described him as loud-mouthed), impetuous and even unreasonably optimistic. Had he not been all these things as well as a cracking great poet he never would have gotten Elizabeth Barrett Browning to marry him.

Norma Shearer is equally well-suited, though it is not what we typically think of as a Shearer material. I think this film is often neglected by Shearer fans, because it was technically post-code. While some of the references to incest were toned down from the play, these changes were actually very minor and the film stands as one of her edgiest and most powerful performances. While Norma is emotionally restrained and subtle, she really sells the idea that is a woman battling for her life and independence, standing up to a tyrannical, even dangerous father. In one of her letters to Robert Browning, Elizabeth declares that her father would rather see her dead on his doorstep than married. I don't know how anyone could watch the last ten minutes of the film and not hum "I am woman here me roar" to themselves while Norma, with the help of her maid, Wilson (Una O'Connor) gains the strength to pick up and leave her oppressive environment for the man she loves. Franklin gives her a gorgeous close-up as she surveys for a final time the room where she's spent most of her adult life. It's powerful stuff and it hasn't been diluted a bit by the intervening seven decades since it was shot.

The unacknowledged star of the show is Charles Laughton who is at his scary best as the bullying, manipulative father. "They can't censor the twinkle in my eye" he famously groused when producers had to tone down some of his more overtly sexual moments. In a scene where his niece sits in his lap and fondles his whiskers, the stage directions for the play insist that he slaps her roughly on the thigh while she squeals in delight. This is really the only purge I can find in his scenes, which survive almost verbatim from the stage version of the script. Laughton is aided by the wonderful Maureen O'Sullivan who plays Elizabeth's lively sister Henrietta. O'Sullivan gets a great scene at the end where she relishes delivering Elizabeth's good-bye letter to their father and one very funny scene early on between she and a tongue-tied suitor whom she continually admonishes not to speak before he can get a word out to her. I'm pretty sure Woody Allen ripped off the whole concept for a similar scene in Bullets over Broadway. This sparkling bit of nonsense was invented by screenwriter Ernest Vajda for the film as comic relief.

I've spent most of the intervening ten days since I first watched the film reading everything I could get my hands on about the two poets who are subject of the film, including a volume of their letters, the script of the play, Barrett-Browning's volume of poetry written during their courtship, Sonnetts from the Portugese, and a feminist biography of her life, which dismisses the film as reducing her to a cheerful invalid who has to be rescued by a man. The problem with this assessment is the same one that haunts Barrets of Wimpole Street. When you add a layer of contemporary expectations to something that happened in the past you are really just twisting it to your own ends. We may never really understand the tortured relationship between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her father. It is probably certain that it was not as dysfunctional as what appeared on stage or screen in the 1930s. I am equally certain that this film was not intended to be a weak-kneed reinforcement of Barrett-Browning as a cheerful invalid. Of all the films in which I've seen Shearer since starting this blog, I liked The Barretts of Wimpole Street the best. I think it deserves a second look from fans as it may be the height of her achievement as a barrier- breaker for the way in which women were depicted in film.

Merrily We Live (1938) and If You Only Could Cook (1935)

Merrily We Live has been on my Wish List for years. TCM has started showing it recently to my delight. It's difficult to describe the movie, without using the words "My Man Godfrey" and "derivative," and yet this is a wonderfully enjoyable film. I will go so far as to say I enjoyed it at least as much as the earlier far more famous flick. Billie Burke plays the ditsy mother whose habit of hiring tramps as chauffeurs has left the family destitute of silver. An early scene has the family eating breakfast using kitchen utensils. She received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for the role. Despite the "forgotten men" as servants/love interests plot device, this movie is derived from different source material, a 1926 play, "They All Want Something" and the first film incarnation of it, What a Man (1930).

Brian Aherne plays Wade Rawlins a novelist who has a car accident on a fishing trip and stops at the Kilbourne mansion to use the telephone. Assuming he's a tramp looking for work, he is whisked away, protesting loudly, to be be suited up as the family's new chauffeur. One look at him in his work duds and heiress Jerry (Constance Bennett) is a goner. This is one of those moments where 1930s sensibilities are lost on me. While I think Aherne looks pretty tasty in his scruffy fishing outfit, shown above, chauffeur's uniforms always remind me a little too much of Berlin in 1939. It hardly signifies what he wears because when a tramp who isn't really a tramp and an heiress are in the same movie together, it's a sure bet they're gonna wind up getting married.

All the supporting cast are excellent including Bonita Granville as aspiring thespian/rich brat (territory that Virginia Wiedler had pretty well sown up in my book), Ann Dvorak as the chief rival for Rawlins' attention, Patsy Kelly as the sassy kitchen main and Alan Mowbray, as the family butler who quits at least once a day. This family is so screwball, even the dogs are funny, with names like "Down Boy" and "Off the Carpet" though sadly there are no wire-haired terriers present.

To add to the Dreamboat in Disguise as Servant sub-genre, If You Only Could Cook (1935) features Jim Buchanon (Herbert Marshall) as an automotive mogul who, after a rough day at the office, meets Joan Hawthorn (Jean Arthur) on a park bench while she's looking through the want ads. Mistaking him for a fellow job-seeker, she invites him to pose as a married couple in order to get jobs as a cook and a butler. Marshall of course, has his own butler, who he hits up for tips, before heading off for a few weeks vacation as a servant. Only in the movies!

Lionel Sander, best known as Max from the TV series Hart to Hart has a supporting role as one of the gangsters in the employ of Mike Rossini (Leo Carillo). The mob boss hires the couple, and then falls for Joan, which presents complications for Jim who is also in love with her. Oh, and I forgot to mention, Jim is supposed to be getting married to a woman he doesn't love in a few days. As is the way in screwball comedy, it all works out right in the end after much confusion over sleeping arrangements in the couple's cramped servant's quarters. One of Sander's lines, "If you were married to her, would you sleep on the sofa!?" sums up the tensions that drove the entire screwball genre.

Marshall doesn't quite go through the mistaken for a "forgotten man," routine. It's enough for him merely to sit on a park bench and to be branded as unemployed. Arthur is plucky and funny as usual. She always plays well as the wiser and more worldly member of a couple, and it's a nice twist to see reserved Marshall cast as her love interest. Mr. Smith and Mr. Deeds were hicks, but they were also dreamers, as is our Mr. Buchanon. He's just a bit more sophisticated.

Familiar tropes are sometimes the best because their variations delight and amuse almost more than those films which are entirely novel. During the Depression there was no greater fantasy than being a rich person with servants, unless of course it was that you were rich, your servant happened to look like a movie star and be a millionaire in disguise.

Surprise! Another gratuitous pic spam!

Kate Gabriel at Silents and Talkies came up with this meme. Who are your most swoon worthy actors? Who will you watch in anything, just to see them? Though I've probably pummeled you with this information subliminally for the last 18 months, I thought I'd spell it out, just in case someone wasn't paying attention. But really this is just a great excuse for me to spend hours trolling through my hard drive to find favorite pictures that I haven't posted yet.



Cary Grant: Duh, my obsession with him is so long standing I've been known at work as the Cary Grant Girl for years. Favorite Film: Bringing Up Baby. Movie that made me an obsessed fanatic, versus a casual admirer: weirdly, it was Monkey Business, which was the only Cary video tape I owned in college. It was a desert island thing. You had to be there.




Gary Cooper: At first I kept my Cooper obsession to myself. Would my Cary Grant fandom friends understand that there was room in my heart for "GC" as well as "CG?" Turns out there were a whole bunch of us crowded into that particular closet. Favorite film: Ball of Fire, also the movie that made me lurve him. I must have watched half a dozen Cooper films before this movie changed my mind forever.


Laurence Olivier: Only classic actor obsession that predates Cary Grant. I taped speeches from Wuthering Heights when I was 15 and played them on my walkman. I love Olivier's Matinee idol period, and mostly avoid movies from the 60s and 70s were he tended to work for anyone with the greenback dollars. Still I've watched enough of those. Favorite Film: Wuthering Heights, and That Hamilton Woman. Honarable mention: Divorce of Lady X.


Michael Redgrave: If I had an Essentials list, I'd have to include The Lady Vanishes and The Importance of Being Earnest. I probably said all I had to say about how swoony he is in my Thunder Rock post.


Gregory Peck: First actor obsession to come out of this blog. The movie was Spellbound. I'd probably seen it more than ten times before I got all goopy about Greg. Weird, huh? Favorite Film: Roman Holiday


Herbert Marshall: so there I was watching Riptide and I just couldn't believe that anyone even cared anything about Norma Shearer when she was playing opposite this totally awesome Brit who was understated and had such a dry, detached delivery made every line seem as if it were a gem descended from the gods or at least Noel Coward. He was elevating the shit out of his material, yo. Favorite film: The Good Fairy.


Robert Donat: Goodbye Mr. Chips? Goodbye my heart, more like. This guy is so awesome and he only made 20 movies. So why, why can't I see all of them right now. Favorite film: The Thirty Nine Steps. After that, I honestly can't decide: it's a five way tie between Mr. Chips, The Ghost Goes West, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Winslow Boy, and Knight without Armor.


Jeremy Northam: See the best actor you've never heard of. Swoon. Favorite Film: Emma.

Brian Aherne: The first time I saw him in a film, Sylvia Scarlett, I made a note to myself to watch more of his movies. And then it occurred to me while putting together youtube playlists for myself, that years had gone by and the opportunity to see more Brian Aherne movies just never came up. What the? So I went on a mission. I scanned my sources carefully, and managed to collect a tiny handful of his films. I bought his autobiography and read it. I've been collecting photos and putting together an online gallery. Favorite Film: Merrily we Live.


David Manners: David Manners got me to watch horror movies in earnest for the first time in my life. He helped get me over a life-long fear of ventriloquist dummies with his character in The Miracle Woman. And in the above picture he proves that one can wear jodhpurs and not look like a silent film director. He really is quite an actor. Favorite Film: Man Wanted.


Colin Firth: I've been holding forth on Firth a lot lately. It's my campaign to bring him Oscar buzz. Oh yeah, he's a cinch now. Favorite Film: Pride and Prejudice.



Warren William: The funny thing about Warren William is that I don't usually like cads or men with mustaches and William has both cadishness and mustaches in spades in most of his screen roles. (Above pic is from one of his rare clean shaven roles, Cleopatra (1934). Favorite film: The Dark Horse and Golddiggers of 1933.



Liam Neeson: I may have been the only person ever to sit through a preview of Schindler's List and say aloud in the theater, "hey, it's the guy from Satisfaction!" I look for this actor so frequently in programming searches on my Tivo, that the machine knows what I'm looking for after typing the letters, "L" and "I". As proof that I'll watch any thing with him in it, here's a sampling from Tivo in the last year: Suspect (Neeson has 5 minutes as a homeless murder suspect in this Cher, Dennis Quaid drama), Next of Kin (Neeson has 10 minutes as a hillbilly murder suspect in this awful Patrick Swayze movie), Gangs of New York (Neeson wanders through this violent mess of a movie for about 10 minutes). The above still is from one of my favorite Tivo finds of the last few years, Seraphim Falls which not only features Liam Neeson in a fur coat, it co-stars Pierce Brosnan, another of my 1980s obsessions. Favorite film: Michael Collins.

Some who didn't quite make the cut: George Sanders, Joel McCrea, Ronald Colman, Ricardo Cortez, Paul Henreid and Rossano Brazzi. All these actors I either haven't seen enough of their films to quite qualify them or I'm mainly interested in certain periods of their work, such as Pre-Code Joel McCrea for example.

I live My Life (1935)

Joan Crawford sports a to die for sailor pants suit and Brian Aherne manages to make boots and shorts work for him. (Just think of William Powell in a similar get-up in I Love You Again, played for laughs.)


In I Live My Life, Joan Crawford plays a spoiled heiress who gets entangled with an archeologist on a cruise to Greece. To her surprise he follows her to New York where he proceeds to interfere with her plan to marry a society stooge. (Fred Keating)

The spoiled-heiress-gets-schooled-by-love plot requires a delicate touch for it not to become a series of increasingly violent hissy fits. Joan Crawford is a force of nature, taking over the movie, and not always to betterment of the picture as a whole. In the scenes where she's supposed to be cracking wise, she bursts into laughter that seems like it might be as likely leveled at the script as it is at her counterpart in the scene. This is the first time I've seen her play comedy, and I wasn't really impressed. Brian Aherne tries admirably to be as rude, petty and obnoxious as his British genes will allow him, managing an insane screaming rant at one point, but even that is not enough to quite balance things when Hurricane Joan takes center stage.

Crawford and Aherne put across the idea that they are attracted to one another, and yet there's no real warmth or feeling of sympathy between them. Mick LaSalle had a good post on his blog a while back about what he called the Romantic Fallacy. The idea that just because a Person A is the wrong mate, doesn't necessarily mean that Person B is the right match. In a good romantic comedy you never question the Romantic Fallacy. In a bad one, it becomes achingly clear. I would say that I Live my Life is a mediocre romantic comedy about two fiercely independent people who have nothing in common and no willingness for compromise. If these two really did get married they'd be miserable, and the audience knows it. The plot doesn't even bother to resolve these differences and in the end Joan just gives in, I guess because she's the woman and this is a post-production code world.

Though I love these two actors, I can't help but think they are probably just miscast. If it were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard we would accept the whole conceit because that was Gable and Lombard after all in real life. In a way, Gable and Lombard loom like a shadow over I Live My Life. Nobody played the spoiled heiress better than Lombard and the following year her performance in My Man Godfrey would make all other spoiled heiresses to come afterward seem like cheap imitations. She had a way of bringing sympathy to the character that Crawford can't manage. In one scene Joan keeps trying to get up from her chair and Aherne keeps pushing her back down in her seat a la Gable in A Free Soul. Apparently some of Aherne's antics were so over the top, they had to be toned down for British audiences to the point that an alternate ending was made for the film for the foreign market. Yet, later that year British Audiences would make rude, unchivalrous Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps a box office sensation.

Thank goodness for MGM's stable of character actors: Frank Morgan, Arthur Treacher, Eric Blore and Aline McMahon who provide most of the laughs. Crawford's scenes with Morgan are particularly delightful. A good supporting cast is not only essential for a good romantic comedy, but in this case, they manage to keep things reasonably afloat while the leads flounder a bit. I Live My Life is definitely worth watching as an early, though not totally successful, example of screwball comedy.

Eye Candy of the Day: A Brian Aherne Gallery

Brian Aherne surrounded by adoring nurses during a World War II USO tour.

I started this blog, in part, because I always had a fantasy of producing a modern version of the fairly trashy movie magazines that were popular during the golden age of Hollywood. If I had such a power, I would print lots of lovely pictures of all my favorite actors and actresses and of course give all my favorite obscure English actors the spotlight they deserve. I would probably devote an entire issue,or at least a cover to the under-rated Brian Aherne. I first noticed Aherne in Sylvia Scarlett (1935) playing the floppy-haired bohemian artist rival to Cary Grant's "bad, handsome" cockney piano man. It's the rare actor that can turn my head away from Cary for even a moment. Though Aherne's character is kind of a jerk in the movie, I've always gotten what it is that Katharine Hepburn's character sees in him.

Brian Aherne was a British theatrical star who had been on stage since he was eight years old. Like many of his fellow thespians he was recruited to Hollywood when the movies got sound. Women ruled at the box office in those days and Aherne was fortunate enough to play second fiddle to some of the best. His first talkie was made at Paramount as Marlene Dietrich arm candy in Song of Songs (1933). One of his first films was the British version of The Constant Nymph (1934), which was later remade in 1943 starring Ahern's then-wife, Joan Fontaine. Another standout part for Aherne was the male lead to Helen Hayes in What Every Woman Knows (1934) where he plays a thickly-accented Scottish politician at the turn of the century. That same year he starred opposite Ann Harding in the World War I picture The Fountain. He also played the male lead in the Joan Crawford vehicle, I Live My Life (1935). He played the sympathetic Irish rebel, Dennis O'Riordan, in Beloved Enemy (1936) with Merle Oberon and David Niven.

Aherne got his first starring role in 1937 in Jame Whale's The Great Garrick, a biopic about the great 18th Century actor, David Garrick. Though the movie was a critical success it was expensive, especially for a Warner's picture and it flopped. Aherne's comic abilities got further airing with Constance Bennett in the My Man Godfrey knock-off, Merrily We Live (1938). Ahern eplays a rehabilitated tramp who becomes the family chauffeur. Screwball antics ensue. In 1939, Aherne starred in Captain Fury, his most commercially successful movie, about another Irish rebel who escapes from an Australian prison. That same year he earned his only Oscar nomination in a hilariously-bearded supporting role in the Paul Muni biopic Juarez. He played a self-made man who spoils his child in My Son, My Son (1940) and made the first of three comedies with Rosalind Russel, Hired Wife and My Sister Eileen and What a Woman.

He co starred in a courtroom drama with Rita Hayworth, The Woman in Question (1940) . He starred in The Man who Lost Himself (1941) and the musical remake of Smilin' Through where he listened contemplatively to songbird, Jeanette McDonald. He made a romantic comedy with Lorraine Day, A Night to Remember and a pair of war movies Forever and A Day and First Comes Courage. After that he took some time off from film and returned in the later forties as a supporting player. One later Aherne role that comes to mind is the teen pregnancy drama Susan Slade (1961) in which his wife is played by Natalie Schafer, best known as Mrs. Thirston "Lovey" Howell the Third on "Gilligan's Island."

After retiring from Hollywood, Aherne tried his hand at writing, composing a casual biography of George Saunders called "Dreadful Man" and his own autobiography "Proper Job." He was married to actress Joan Fontaine, from 1939-1945. He met Fontaine because he had first dated her sister, Olivia De Haviland, while filming their movie, The Great Garrick. He later married Eleanor de Liagre Labrot, the sister of celebrated broadway producer Alfred de Liagre, Jr. The couple were married until his death in 1986.

Enjoy more pictures of Brian in my gallery.

First Comes Courage (1943)

Merle Oberon and Brian Aherne in the wartime spy drama, First Comes Courage (1943).

First Comes Courage is saved from being a rather forgettable bit of wartime propaganda by some interesting direction by Dorothy Arzner. Though it was dismissed in its day by critics as ordinary and mediocre, Arzner's talents as a director have been more greatly appreciated in hindsight. I think that First Comes Courage, her last movie, was more influential than even the revisionist feminist critics imagined.

One film that First Comes Courage seems to have influenced quite a bit is Alfred Hitchock's Notorious (1946). Though Notorious is admittedly a superior work in every respect, there are a number of plot similarities, at least one actor who plays a similar role in both films and a striking use of a wine cellar as suspense device. First Comes Courage is the story of a female underground agent, Nicole Larsen (Merle Oberon), in Norway who is willing to make love to a German officer (Carl Esmond) in order to gain valuable information. One evening while entertaining an important senior officer (Reinhold Schunzel, best known as "kind faced" Mr. Anderson from Notorious) her boyfriend begins to suspect that she is responsible for a series of raids. With her position threatened, the Allies send a former lover Allan Lowell (Brian Aherne) to assasinate the officer. Lowell's plan of attack and rescue is intricate to the point of ridiculous and its not a huge shock when it goes horribly wrong. Oberon and another member of the underground, a nurse in the prison ward in the hospital, manage to break Lowell out of jail and he hides out in her wine cellar. In one scene Oberon appears in the doorway of the cellar in a backlit sillouette that is an exact match to several of the wine cellar shots in Notorious.

To further dispel suspicion and to gain even greater access to information Oberon agrees to marry the German officer. Naturally this causes a bit of tension between the recently reunited couple. When Nicole's new husband realizes that she leaked information leading to a raid on a munitions plant he threatens to kill her in faked car accident. (Is any of this sounding familiar? Yeah, I thought so too. Poor Emil Hupka.) After the raid is successful Allen rushes to Nicole's house and shoots her husband before he can kill her. The pair move his body so that it looks like he was heroically killed in the raid. Allan begs Nicole to return to England with him but she refuses, reasoning that as the widow of a German war hero she will be more valuable than ever.

The script is a bit talky and Arzner's attempts to build suspense from it are not always successful. I can't help but think if Hitchcock was watching and taking notes, he thought of ways that he would have done things differently. For example, the audience doesn't know that Nicole and Allan are former lovers until after they are reunited on screen. I think the tension would have been far greater had we known that ahead of time. As it is the intercutting between Nicole and Allan's sides of the story seems a bit weird and jumpy. Despite these flaws, First Comes Courage is well worth watching if you get the chance.