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.
In the 1990s, a young Cranky excitedly reserved the family TV and VCR to record Dame Judith Anderson’s Lady Scarface (1941) off AMC. Despite this, my parents still didn’t realize I was gay. I’ll rewatch this forgettable, somewhat lighthearted RKO gangster film this weekend ahead of viewing Susan Lucci’s Lady Mobster. Oh, the humanity!
If you’ve always wanted to see Barbara Stanwyck face off against Judith Anderson (it was the child actress playing Stanwyck’s character who sent Anderson tumbling down the staircase in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers), the Criterion Collection is now giving you the chance to do just that: today it releases Anthony Mann’s The Furies on DVD.
Made in 1950, it was only Mann’s second western (he’d go on to direct many more), and his background in film noir is wonderfully apparent throughout: This is one of the most shadowy westerns ever made. It’s also one of the most melodramatic, which is why the casting is pitch-perfect.
Stanwyck plays Vance, the rather passionate daughter of cattle baron T.C. Jeffords (Walter Huston, in what would be his final film), and given the bond the two of them share, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to call this Electra: The Western. When Vance acquires a love interest in the form of Wendell Corey, T.C. can’t help but meddle. What Vance does when her father brings Judith Anderson home goes far past meddling.
To describe The Furies as psychosexual is a bit like calling Cries & Whispers depressing — it doesn’t really tell you the half of it. Think of it as a kind of precursor to Johnny Guitar, the most gleefully perverse of all westerns, but with incest instead of lesbianism. (And before I get my wrist slapped for using the words lesbian and perverse in the same sentence, let me point out that I’m not the one who wrote the fucking movies. I could never write a western unless horses were suddenly equipped with air conditioning.) And with high-quality acting from Huston, Stanwyck and Anderson, none of whom lumber in front of the camera with a dazed “WTF?” look in their eyes à la Sterling Hayden.
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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