Thursday 31 August 2017

Britain should celebrate the actress, director, singer, and screen-writer Ida Lupino

A few years ago, I was slumped on the sofa watching an old film noir on television - Roadhouse (1948), starring the rather charmless Richard Widmark as a nightclub owner, the rather wooden Cornel Wilde as his bar manager, and Ida Lupino - an actress who had barely impinged on my consciousness until that point - playing a cabaret singer. I wasn't sure whether to stick with it - until this scene, in which Lupino delivers a mesmerisingly strange performance of "One for My Baby":
I'm not a big fan of...

...The Great American Songbook, but I've always been partial to this song (first performed by Fred Astaire in The Sky's the Limit  in 1943, and by just about everyone else since then). Ida Lupino's low, husky voice and her sullen, resentful, on-the-verge-of-tears performance is the most affecting one I've ever seen or heard - she's utterly rivetting.

Shortly after seeing Roadhouse, I was desultorily half-watching The Ghost Camera,  a silly but energetic 1933 British movie, on the Talking Pictures TV channel, starring John Mills (the full version is available on YouTube). I vaguely recognised the young female lead from somewhere, but I couldn't quite place her. I eventually hit the "info", only to discover that it was Ida Lupino. I was confused, because the Ida Lupino who starred in Roadhouse was indisputably American - and this bouncy, squeaky young woman was just as indisputably "You're med d'you hyah me? Med, med, med!" English. So I checked online, and discovered that Ida Lupino was indeed English, born into a showbiz family in Herne Hill, and that she would have turned 15 a few weeks before playing the sparky love interest in this mildly diverting piece of vintage fluff.  Mind you, she started early, enrolling in RADA when she was 13, and landed her first starring role at 14. In 1933, she appeared in five British feature films, which led to her being "discovered" by Paramount, who invited her over to Hollywood.

Despite finding her a little more adult and sultry than they'd expected (they'd been thinking of casting her as Alice in Alice in Wonderland), Paramount put her under contract - and then evidently didn't know what to do with her. She worked for several studios over the years, and made a number memorable films in amongst the B-picture dross, but had a reputation for being difficult and was suspended on a number of occasions. Eventually, maddened by the studio system, she started directing films, at a time when female directors were almost unheard of in Hollywood. She became the first woman to direct a film noir in 1953 with the tough, all-male The Hitchhiker, and, later that year, the first woman to direct and star in the same film - The Bigamist, with Joan Fontaine and Edmund O'Brien. She was married - stormily - to the actor, Howard Duff, suffered bouts of depression, became an alcoholic (just like hubby), and, when her production company folded, became a TV drama director.

Quite a gal - and a multi-talented, pioneering English gal at that. At the very least, BBC Four should commission a documentary to celebrate her achievements. Here, she performs "The Man I Love" in the 1947 film of the same name:

There's lots of stuff about Ida Lupino available online, including this decent biography:

14 comments:

  1. If you move forward to 2011 the talented British actress Carey Mulligan performed the same feat with a touching rendition of "New York, New York" which is also available on YouTube. The film is "Shame" after which the male lead was re-named "Fassmember".

    I am a little taken aback by your description of Richard Widmark as "rather charmless". Apart from his parentage [mixed Scandinavian/Scottish i.e. beyond criticism] he was one of the finest and most versatile screen actors of his generation who was equally at home in westerns, war and gangster films. You may want to re-consider withdrawing this slur.

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    1. Thank you, SDG - I enjoyed Carey Mulligan's performance. She also did a lovely version of the traditional folk song, "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" on the soundtrack of Far from the Madding Crowd. Mind you, anything she does is fine by me - I think she's gorgeous.

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    2. As for Richard Widmark, he made a great heavy, and he was good at playing brutally tough officials who needed to bang heads together to achieve an important goal - e.g. the public health official in the excellent Panic in the Streets trying to prevent a plague epidemic in New Orleans. But he's never remotely likeable or warm or amusing. I expect the same could have been said for the necrophiliac serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who boasted Norwegian/Scottish ancestry(!). A local government worker and trade union activist, he was so boring and charmless the only way he could get young men to keep him company at his North London flat was to kill them.

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    3. "Everybody's Talking" and "Without You". Great songs. He couldn't have been that boring.

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    4. "Mind you, anything she does is fine by me - I think she's gorgeous" – and married to a King's boy.

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  2. I really do enjoy this site. I come for the right wing politics and stay for the film noir. Lupino is a great director not just with films like The Bigamist but also her TV work (The Fugitive and Thriller stand out.)
    http://www.gogilesgo.com/eleven/discovered-in-the-archives-the-bigamist/

    My favourite performances of hers are probably the back to back High Sierra & They Drive by Night, and I'm incredibly fond of the later film she made for Sam Peckinpah, Junior Bonner.

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    1. Thank you, gogilesgo! I love High Sierra and They Drive by Night, but Junior Bonner's one of those films I've always meant to see, but just never get round to - I'll have to now, because the full film is available on YouTube, without having to sign up to one of those rather dodgy-sounding subscription services.

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  3. I agree with your opinion of this site, gogilesgo, but it can sometimes be a bit wide of the mark.

    I'd forgotten about "Junior Bonner" where Ida Lupino is the mother of Joe Don Baker and Steve McQueen. It is one of these quiet American masterpieces like "The Outfit" and "The Getaway" which are forgotten

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    1. Wide of the mark? How dare you!

      If Joe Don Baker is in "Junior Bonner", it's a must-watch. He was utterly splendid in "Walking Tall" (the 1973 original) and as the hit-man in that other classic, "Charley Varrick" - and as a CIA agent in the TV series, "Edge of Darkness". Undervalued actor.

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  4. "She reminds me of the first woman that ever slapped my face.". I am sure that comes from the famous interview with Kanye West about his relationship with Lady Isabelle Barnett

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    1. Which reminds me... there was an absolutely filthy, racist joke involving Lady Isobel Barnett and the TV programme "Twenty Questions" which every schoolboy knew in the early '60s. Maybe Kanye told it to her.

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    2. I vaguely remember this joke. As it was early '60s is it vaguely in the Duchess of Argyll - "Headless Man" Uganda Activity Category?

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  5. Joe Don Baker was a scene - dominator in Scorsese's Cape Fear.

    The diametric opposite of Travis McGee's ' Busted Flush '

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  6. The Isobel Barnett jest being the private (s) joke about the two Roedean girls discussing the forthcoming nuptials of one of those Brighton Belles to a White officer of Idi Amin's old regiment?

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