Spring Trivia – Laraine Day, Van Heflin, Robert Taylor and More
Classic movie trivia and the budding of spring – two things that go great together . . . at least, they do here at the Noir Nook! This month’s Nook celebrates the new season with some tasty tidbits about six great performers and some of their noir roles. Enjoy!
Laraine Day
In 1946, Laraine Day starred in RKO’s The Locket, which she would later call her favorite film. In it, she plays a kleptomaniac who destroys the lives of every man who is unlucky enough to fall for her beauty and charm. The story, originally called What Nancy Wanted, unfolds through a series of flashbacks – in fact, the film serves up flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks. According to Day, she almost didn’t get the role; after she’d expressed interest in the film, William Dozier, who was in charge of RKO at the time, decided he wanted the film to star his then-wife, Joan Fontaine. Day said that she and her agent “put up such a battle that we finally got it.”
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Barry Sullivan
Speaking of favorite films, The Gangster (1947) was one of Barry Sullivan’s. He starred in the feature as Shubunka, a neurotic, scar-faced mobster. Critics of the day weren’t impressed by the film; the critic for the New York Times described Sullivan as “stern and tight-lipped” and Viriginia Wright of the Los Angeles Daily News opined that the film suffered from a “confused and over-written script.” Sullivan disagreed, however. He appreciated the “rather artsy” look of the film, provided by director Gordon Wiles, who was an Academy Award-winning art director, and he found the screenplay to be the best part of the picture: “[Screenwriter] Daniel Fuchs had been a teacher in New York, knew the milieu and really had a handle on the sort of small-time gangster the picture portrayed.”
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Signe Hasso
The House on 92nd Street (1945), based on actual FBI files, started a trend for crime films shot entirely on location, according to the picture’s star, Signe Hasso. She played the owner of a dress shop who ran a Nazi spy ring in New York, masquerading as a man known only as “Mr. Christopher.” Hasso explained that the real-life head of the spy ring was a man masquerading as a woman, “but the censors wouldn’t allow that. [But] a woman posing as a man was all right.” She recalled once arriving on set dressed as Mr. Christopher: “Someone came up to me and said, ‘No visitors on this set!’ I said, ‘It’s me!’ No one had recognized me as a man.”
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Van Heflin
Van Heflin starred in 1947 opposite Joan Crawford in Possessed, in which she played a mentally ill nurse obsessed with Heflin’s engineer. When he first met the actress in the early 1940s, Heflin recalled that he was “very snooty,” dismissing Crawford as “just a movie star.” He changed his tune when the two appeared together in Possessed, stating that he “found in her a tremendous knowledge of acting. She knew everything about the camera. She knew everything about those lights. She knew everything about the psychopathic girl she was playing. She knew everything, period.”
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Ann Savage
Although Ann Savage enjoyed a screen career that spanned six decades, she is best known today for her role as the snarling, hard-boiled, take-no-prisoners femme fatale in Detour (1945). She recalled that it took less than four days to film her role but added that Edgar Ulmer was the best director she’d ever worked with. “He gave me a click-click-click tempo that he wanted me to use as the character, and I kept that approach throughout the part,” Savage said. She also said that Ulmer combed cold cream through her hair “to make me look a believable wreck. Remember, this was still the period in Hollywood when everyone was looking their best, when your face never got messed up when you cried, when you awoke in the morning with a fresh make-up job.”
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Robert Taylor
Robert Taylor was openly complimentary about his Johnny Eager (1941) co-star Lana Turner – and that’s putting it mildly. He recalled that her face was “delicate and beautiful” and said that he had “never seen lips like hers.” He added that her voice was like that of a breathless child: “I don’t think she knew how to talk without being sexy.” Although he was married to Barbara Stanwyck at the time, Taylor reportedly became romantically involved with Turner during shooting, telling reporters that he “was never known to run after blondes, [but] Lana was the exception.” For his performance on screen – which was one of Taylor’s first as a “heavy” – the actor earned raves from critics. The Variety reviewer labeled his performance “soundly socked and . . . very convincing,” and the critic for The Hollywood Reporter raved, “Robert Taylor is brilliant in projecting a relentless mobster, hard as nails and twice as sharp.”
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– Karen Burroughs Hannsberry for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Karen’s Noir Nook articles here.
Karen Burroughs Hannsberry is the author of the Shadows and Satin blog, which focuses on movies and performers from the film noir and pre-Code eras, and the editor-in-chief of The Dark Pages, a bimonthly newsletter devoted to all things film noir. Karen is also the author of two books on film noir – Femme Noir: The Bad Girls of Film and Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. You can follow Karen on Twitter at @TheDarkPages.
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