Dame Judith Anderson’s had enough of everyone’s crap in Lady Scarface.
Judith Anderson’s reputation as a titan of the stage didn’t always translate to her film work, as Lady Scarface demonstrates. Released a year after her Oscar-nominated turn as Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Scarface, an RKO production, was B-list all the way. Screenwriters Arnaud d’Usseau and Richard Collins struggled to fill its 66-minute runtime, but it has a few sweet moments, and best of all, Anderson’s given the bulk of its hardboiled dialogue.
Her Slade, the ruthless head of a crime gang, distinguishes herself early, during a heist at the Chicago Securities Building. “You gonna leave this guy here to yap to the police?” one of her associates asks about the hostage forking over the safe’s combination. “When we leave here, his yappin’ days are over!” she replies. True to her word, he’s shot. During their escape, a disguised Slade is literally run into by Lt. Bill Mason (Dennis O’Keefe), who takes a moment to apologize — after all, she is a lady.
Judith Anderson’s a gun-wielding crime boss in Lady Scarface.
Does Lizabeth Scott have Perez Hilton bookmarked? We know she glances at tabloid covers, if this blurb at Contact Music is any indication. The website quotes the 85-year-old actress, who has spent decades denying interview requests, as saying, “I saw Kate Moss and her new beau all over the cover on the news-stand and thought they looked like vagrants; so scruffy and grubby—just awful. I’d like to see Miss Moss smarten up her act. Doesn’t she know young women look up to her? She would have lasted 10 seconds under the Hollywood studio system.”
Scott goes on to praise Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham and Dita Von Teese as celebrities with genuine senses of style, saying, “Two of the three might not be the sharpest tools in the box, but they are glamorous and always impeccably turned out.”
Could it be that Scott, the gorgeous starlet whose career was all but over by the time she was outed by Confidential in the mid-1950s (she sued them for libel, and contrary to what has been reported on several websites, didn’t win the case, which was dismissed on a technicality), is one of those anonymous posters who always replies to Hilton items about Dita Von Teese by typing “FIRST!!!!!!!!”? Or maybe she’s more the Dlisted type, preferring bitchy remarks about Victoria Beckham’s skeletal frame to crude, hastily drawn MS Paint penises pointing at the Spice Girl’s face.
I’ve yet to figure out where Contact Music got their Scott quotes from, so if anyone can help, drop me a line. And if you’ve never seen the luminous Lizabeth in a movie, you must rent The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, pronto. (The Paramount release, which has a nice transfer, not the $4.99 rush jobs by no-name companies.) Seeing Barbara Stanwyck, Lizabeth Scott and Dame Judith Anderson all in the same movie is a bit like watching Jodie Foster act opposite Alexis Smith in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, if you catch my drift, and Martha Ivers is indeed quite strange, one of the oddest noirs you’ll ever come across. Scott is superb in it as a mysterious young woman just released from prison.
It was only the second film she appeared in (Scott started her career in the theater, working as Tallulah Bankhead’s understudy in The Skin of Our Teeth, and years later there were rumors that parts of All About Eve might have been modeled on their relationship), but she wastes little time in illustrating why Paramount’s publicity department called her “The Threat.”
Though she was given little in the way of quality material during her all-too-brief career, Scott had the kind of sultry looks and prickly presence that were tailor-made for film noir, and was briefly seen as the studio’s answer to the Warner Brothers upstart siren Lauren Bacall. And, on a personal note, if I had to be shot by or because of a ’40s femme fatale, she would certainly make the short list of dames worth dying for, right alongside Rita Hayworth, Gene Tierney, Jane Greer and Yvonne De Carlo. (Geez, who knew I was so easy?)
UPDATE: The Scott quotes have been credited elsewhere to the Daily Express.
RECOMMENDED READING: There are Scott fans who’ve sent me defensive emails over the years about her sexuality, even though I never labeled it in this post. More than once I was told “She was a Republican!”, as if that means anything. (So was Rock Hudson.)
The man-crazy take on Scott is more of a recent phenomenon. It’s reflected on fan sites and in iterations of her Wikipedia page linking her to basically every man she was ever photographed with (even names that don’t help the cause, like Van Johnson), a curiosity that wasn’t as common prior to her 2015 death. Historically, the man she was most consistently linked with was producer Hal Wallis, and it was often insinuated that it was a transactional relationship on Scott’s end.
For the more traditional gay Hollywood take on both Scott and her Confidential woes, you might consider consulting books like William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 and Diana McLellan’s The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood. The public and private travails of Scott only take up a few pages in each of those volumes, but the details will be of interest to certain readers.
Her name pops up unexpectedly in some memoirs as well. In Curtis Harrington’sNice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, the filmmaker (Killer Bees; The Cat Creature) recounts an early gig as a messenger boy for Paramount studios. He recalls lesbian rumors, including those linking her to Bankhead, following her from New York to Hollywood, despite common knowledge of her situation with Wallis. However, he adds nothing new to what’s been previously written.
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Richard Widmark, who died Monday at the age of 93, will no doubt be best remembered for his debut role, that of the gleefully psychopathic Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death. It was a dazzling introduction to moviegoers and critics alike; Widmark was electrifying and unpredictable and his Udo became an indelible creation, the kind of shockingly vile, violent weasel Steve Buscemi played in Fargo nearly fifty years later.
But Widmark, when his characters weren’t pushing wheelchair-bound women down staircases with wild-eyed, giddy abandon, was also capable of projecting an easy con man charm (even when his characters were morally conflicted, as in Samuel Fuller’s gritty Pickup on South Street), and, in Jules Dassin’s classic Night and the City, such palpable desperation that you’ll break into a sweat just looking at him. He was a fascinating actor, one of my favorites, and if you haven’t seen his work in the films mentioned here, you should head over to Netflix and add them to your queue.
Programming note: Widmark will be remembered by Turner Classic Movies with a 3-film retrospective on Friday, April 4th, but they’ve inexplicably chosen to show movies that kind of suck. What were you thinking, TCM programmers? Is The Tunnel of Love really the best you can do?
