Now certain that Power’s image had a touch of something malodorous, Fox was quick to recognize it as repressed sexuality, better known to them as Really Big Box Office. Power was not typecast as much as he was type-sexed. In his first years, Hollywood had him wear a tuxedo, lean against a pillar, lower his lids, and just let what happened to the audience happen. Then they started having him wear a tuxedo, lean against a pillar, lower his lids, and actively motivate the audience to ambivalent responses by having him play a character with a hidden subtext, a guy who was up to no good. The studio realized there was more than met the eye in Ty Power. Whatever it was, audiences liked it, but it still needed shaping. If a young man is perfect, who is going to identify with him? Sympathize with him? Since no one was ever more perfect than Power, the system found a way to neutralize his perfection. Build in a little imperfection. Make him too spoiled, too weak, too gullible, too bad, too something … give him just a touch of the ugly that could put him within a fan’s reach. None of this had anything to do with acting, of course.
In Jesse James, Power found box office gold playing an outlaw, confirming the studio’s ideas about how to shade his type. Next, in Rose of Washington Square, released in May 1939, Power played a cad based loosely on the gambler Nick Arnstein, who had married Fanny Brice (with Alice Faye in the Brice role). The movie was also obviously designed to cash in on Ragtime’s success, re-pairing Faye and Power and giving Faye several wonderful songs to sing, including Brice’s famous “My Man.” (Strong support comes from Al Jolson, in one of his last screen roles.) Power is comfortable playing his second outlaw in a row, as if he is relieved not to have to be a carelessly happy-go-lucky young prince or someone swanning around in breeches. He was beginning to hunger for the opportunity to play someone complex, with contradictory layers, a role he could get his teeth into. (Fanny Brice got her teeth into it, too. Recognizing her own life story, she sued 20th Century–Fox for defamation of character, invasion of privacy, and for using her life story without permission. The case was settled out of court.) Power was hopeful that his next film would give him a chance to really act.
The lavish The Rains Came was released in September. Power plays the role of Rama, an Indian doctor and scientist. Zanuck, now fully understanding what he had in Power, obviously presents him in the Valentino mode. The cinematography and lighting are stunning. Power, at the peak of his male beauty, is presented in a dazzling series of costume changes: stark white turbans that offset his darkened skin and black hair, white brocaded satins, white dinner jackets, a natty little military uniform, hospital whites, and, in a final outfit worthy of Valentino’s The Young Rajah (1922), a gem-encrusted, ornately brocaded Indian outfit with a jeweled feathered headdress. Power looks exotic, unattainable, and well turbaned. Mostly he stands around in his outfits. (Zanuck apparently thought casting him as if he were Hedy Lamarr was a good idea.) To pair him with a female lead who was not girlish, Zanuck borrowed from MGM a star of proven sophistication to play the predatory Lady Esker, Myrna Loy. The Rains Came looks like a gender bender today, with Power in “dresses” and Loy the highly experienced “wolf” (like a Gable or Boyer) lusting after him. (When she first sees him, Lady Esker asks, “Who’s the pale copper Apollo?”*) The story line is explicit about the attraction between the two. Loy is sexually on the prowl, although Power is noble and dedicated to his work. (He is not innocent, however; that would have blown the sexual tension.) The movie, based on a literary success, gave Power prestige as an actor but maintained his sex symbol status and provided him with no real challenge. For instance, he arrives on-screen in an automobile. He gets out and walks to stand beside his male co-star, George Brent. A medium close-up shows them together, but Power is lit by the main light, and Brent is given a half shadow over his face. All focus is on the handsome Tyrone Power. George Brent is a very good-looking man, a sort of second-string Clark Gable, with a low voice and a command of screen space. Not much of an actor, Brent was nevertheless a strong male presence. But beside Power, he fades. Power was once again being used for his looks, even in a “prestige” movie. He was a passive object of desire.
As 1940 opened, 20th Century–Fox—with the help of America’s moviegoers—had found out Tyrone Power was a box office bonanza of the best kind: an all-purpose bad guy/good guy who could be dangerously sexy and still serve the generic needs of the studio system. He could be royal. He could be common. He could be noble. He could be naughty. He could be an honest citizen. He could be an outlaw. He could be hardworking and dedicated in the most righteous manner. He could be spoiled rotten. His characters could hurt women and still be sympathetic, or they could be themselves hurt and still look well dressed. He could look beyond extraordinary in top hat, white tie, and tails, but he could also look downright casual and relaxed in a brocaded period costume and powdered wig. He wore current fashions as if he were a male model, and he filled out a pair of tights as well as any male star ever had. Women swooned and wanted to be in his arms. Men swooned, too, and wanted to be him, taking women like Loretta Young and Linda Darnell in their arms. He touched all bases in all categories. He didn’t need specific typecasting as long as he looked good, was perfectly tailored, and his sex appeal was on display. He just had to be what he was: drop-dead gorgeous. This simple typing of Power as “male sex object” is different from the simple typing of a Dennis Morgan as “handsome leading man” for one main reason. Morgan’s type was what he was. Power’s type was how he was being used. Morgan’s limitations were turned into an asset. Power’s assets were turned into a limitation. His gifts worked against him.
Tyrone Power now faced a movie star dilemma. He was being used to fill in the blanks of all kinds of movies. He was “product.” Any ambitions he had to be taken seriously, to get roles that challenged him were going to be difficult to fulfill. His career was sexualized—however subtly—in an androgynous manner. He would have to live with whatever limitations that imposed. Power started to complain privately around the time of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and by 1940 he was openly vocal about his disappointment. He began telling interviewers that he would like to give up Hollywood and return to the stage. No one, of course, paid much attention, especially 20th Century–Fox. Power, however, was paying attention. He couldn’t overlook a sameness and a shallowness in everything he did. As Power’s stardom progressed, he understood he was becoming a studio-defined “Tyrone Power”—an entity that had little to do with who he really was. This “Tyrone Power”—the one who excited the fans—was being shaped toward two main elements: a mildly villainous or outlaw quality and an ambiguous hidden sexuality. But his performance style refused to embrace either. He was often passive in the frame. Sometimes he seems to be a reluctant lover, restrained and unwilling. Other times, he allowed his sexuality to be displayed flamboyantly, and he offered it up as the camera sought it out. Unlike other top male stars—Gable, Cooper, Flynn—Power seemed to deny type. It’s not easy to say something is a “Tyrone Power” role in the same way one can identify a “Gable” or a “Flynn.” Power didn’t cooperate with fan desires the way other actors did. Ironically, this made audiences like him even more. He held back; he seemed to be a mystery. He had everyone wondering—and wanting. His studio boldly exploited this quality.
Stars like Bogart, Flynn, and Robert Mitchum channeled their anger and embarrassment about stardom into a mocking acting style. Not Tyrone Power. Seen today, Power always seems to be detached from his movies. Only rarely is there any irony in his performances (perhaps in The Black Swan, 1942, but it is a sincere kind of irony). As a result, much of what he might have accomplished was lost. Because he posed, let himself be decorated and draped, and became more of a sex object than his talent deserved, he was complicit in his own exploitation.
Outside the movies, Power’s status as a sex object was pushed by the studio through fan magazine layouts. More portrait photos were taken of him than of any other male star, including fashion poses. In The Mark of Zorro (1940), his pants are so ti
ght they upstage Linda Darnell, and in The Black Swan (his last genuinely entertaining movie before he entered military service), he is stretched out shirtless on a rack and tortured. No leading lady ever had more glamour close-ups than Tyrone Power.
Johnny Apollo (1940), an ordinary, low-budget movie, was designed to capitalize on Power’s popularity.* It shows clearly how Fox used Power’s looks and sex appeal to carry a weak vehicle. Right in the middle of a flimsy plot about how a rich young man turns into a bitter gangster (with a sultry Dorothy Lamour to help him), there’s a perfect moment of exploitation. Wearing the obligatory tuxedo and smoking a cigarette, Power sits at a ringside table watching Lamour’s nightclub performance. His eyes are heavy lidded and his lips are moist. He’s casual, relaxed in his appreciation of her, but there’s something coiled and waiting underneath. The camera just sits and watches him. He smokes and smolders. And that’s mainly what he’s there for—to be looked at, admired, and desired. Action stops while Power smokes and the audience fantasizes. They want that nice young man with the good manners and the good clothes who, when something went wrong and he was denied things, turned into a lawless gangster who’s no better than anyone in the audience might want him to be. If they could just get their hands on him.
For his final release of the year, on November 1, 1940, Fox presented Power in a beautiful movie for all ages that has lasted for the ages, his version of The Mark of Zorro, co-starring him with Linda Darnell, well supported by Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, Eugene Pallette, J. Edward Bromberg, Montagu Love, and others. Rouben Mamoulian directed with flair and panache, and the exquisite black-and-white photography presented Power as the ultimate in physical beauty. Seen today, the movie is fast-paced, charming, and stunningly shot and designed.
Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro, which showcased the two halves of his appeal: the dashing and dynamic swordsman … and the pretty and sensuous clotheshorse.
Power is at his peak, and The Mark of Zorro presents clearly the star machine’s fully designed and typed Tyrone Power. Pretending to be a foppish Don Diego, he is glamorous and effete, tasseled and ruffled. (“Here comes the California cockerel!”) When he portrays the dashing Zorro, he is utterly macho, lean and mean, dressed in stark black, dueling and fighting and jumping on and off his horse. He is two Tyrone Powers, and one of them addresses directly the subject of Power’s beauty and possible effeminacy. Don Diego swishes around in highly polished boots, carrying a fan, his hair all in curls, his costume a symphony of ribbons, brocade, and lace. He studies everyone through a lorgnette, letting his diamond ring catch the light, barely stifling a bored yawn, and sharing his feelings. “I was positively suffering from boredom,” or, in hearing about Zorro, “Ooooh, politics, politics!” As Hollywood had done with Valentino before him, the business put Power’s sexuality on the screen and let the chips fall wherever the audience chose.
In 1941, war was already raging in Europe, and events would soon change Power’s personal life. He would make only six more films before leaving to enlist: Blood and Sand, a May 1941 release; A Yank in the RAF, in September 1941; Son of Fury, January 1942; This Above All, May 1942; The Black Swan, in October 1942; and Crash Dive, April 1943.
Son of Fury and A Yank in the RAF continued the Fox tradition of having their number-one leading man, Tyrone Power, play opposite their most beautiful and popular leading ladies. Son of Fury (co-starring Gene Tierney) was an adaptation of a popular adventure novel, Benjamin Blake. It is a period piece that puts him back in tights fighting a dastardly villain (George Sanders) and marooned in Tahiti wearing beads, lotus blossoms, and a sarong. Yank co-starred him with popular pinup queen Betty Grable. The movie was the first real World War II movie at Fox, even though America was not yet in the war. Neither of these movies, however entertaining audiences found them, provided Power with any challenge, but two other releases did. The first was Blood and Sand, a Technicolor remake of the Valentino silent, well directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The other was This Above All, an adaptation of a novel by Eric Knight that was the first real opportunity Power had to use his acting gifts in a part that did not rely solely on his good looks.
In Blood and Sand, Tyrone Power is beautiful, but so is everyone else. Even the supporting players—Anthony Quinn, Lynn Bari, and Power’s two women, Linda Darnell and Rita Hayworth—are beautiful. In fact, everything in the movie is beautiful, lushly designed to reflect bullfighting posters and the colors of Spain. Even heavyweight Laird Cregar as a villainous critic and an aging Alla Nazimova as Power’s mother look beautiful. By starring Power in a remake of one of Valentino’s biggest hits, Fox officially announced Power as the heir to Valentino—to his female fans, to his sex appeal, to his androgyny, and to his reputation as the male star of his day.* The story has him change from a happy-go-lucky, lusty, energetic, and successful young bullfighter with everything in front of him into a disillusioned, debauched celebrity who is facing the collapse of his world and ultimate loss of his life. (It’s a star’s story.) As was by now common, Power is seen repeatedly in close-ups and medium close-ups.
The novel Blood and Sand (by Blasco Ibañez) was stuffed full of significant questions regarding fame and fortune, religiosity, and sex and death in the afternoon via bullfighting. Fox kept the bullfighting, slid past the questions, weighed in heavily with the sex in the afternoon, and threw in a couple of deaths. Blood and Sand, like Zorro, puts two Tyrone Powers on screen. One is the aggressive, active bullfighter who slays el toro with courage and bravado. The other is the passive target for a nymphomaniacal woman of experience. In between, he tries to be a good husband and knows he’s a failure. Power is part male, part female, part aggressive, part passive, part lusty figure of joy, part tragic figure of doom. He’s available for any way you’d like to see him, the ultimate studio star business plan for him. And, as can never be said often enough, he’s beautiful. He’s presented for both men and women to admire. He wears lavish bullfighting costumes, tuxedos, and expensive suits. As he’s being dressed by his assistant for a fight, he sits sprawled in a chair on a dais, leaning backward, his legs loose. While his stockings are slowly pulled on, he is surrounded by admiring men. Later he’s seen naked from the waist up in bed when Darnell brings him his breakfast and cuddles with him. In his love scenes with the truly spectacular young Rita Hayworth, playing Doña Sol, a Gilda-before-she-was-Gilda kind of role, Power is passive, overwhelmed by her dominating sexuality. In one scene, she calls him as if he were a bull, stamping her foot and crying out, “Eh! Toro!” He comes submissively, bends her back in a hot kiss, only to see that his wife (Darnell) has unexpectedly arrived in the room. When Anthony Quinn, in a choice role as a rival, steals Hayworth from Power by taking her onto the dance floor to perform an acceptable form of public sex, Power is again passive, shattering a glass with his hand in glorious close-up, brooding, sulking, but still looking hot. The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand represent the most confident fulfillment of the popularity and beauty that Tyrone Power had first fully hit in 1939 with Jesse James. Screenland magazine called him “the hottest thing in Hollywood.”
Before he left to serve his country in World War II, Power made two successful movies, Blood and Sand and The Black Swan.
This Above All was a more serious venture.* The novel on which it was based was a tremendous best seller—the story of a wartime romance. In the film Power plays an army hero from the lower classes who has become a deserter. His co-star, Joan Fontaine, plays an aristocratic young woman who has enlisted in the WAAFs. Power’s character is confused, scornful of England, angry at the war and his role in it, and shattered by events. He is less than heroic, although of course still romantic, as he and Fontaine fall in love and work out their social differences against a background of war. For Power the film was serious work, a chance to be more than a pretty guy in tights. When you’re watching This Above All, a somewhat treacly affair, the question inevitably arises: What if the war hadn’t interrupted Power’s career trajectory? Would this serious
movie, in which he gives a tender and touching performance, have altered the direction of his career and freed him of being only a sex symbol? How Power’s screen persona would have evolved if World War II hadn’t interrupted is not certain, particularly since his disillusionment with Hollywood had already blossomed.
Following This Above All, Power was immediately back behind a sword, facing off once again with George Sanders in a movie that became another big success. The Black Swan was Power’s own version of the tongue-in-cheek “pirates of the Caribbean” movie.† Almost all pirate movies are playful, or mocking, to some degree. They have to find a way to make acceptable a hero who murders, rapes, and pillages—and they do it by treating it all as a big wink. By 1952 and Burt Lancaster’s The Crimson Pirate, critics knew that the tradition was firmly in place, but it had been around since Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and certainly Power’s Black Swan helped to put it there. The title card that follows the credits tells the audience that it is returning to “a time when villainy wore a sash … and there was love, gold, and adventure.” A male chorus is heard lustily singing “Heave ho! Heave ho! We never will fail, wherever we sail.” Eventually, the audience gets to ogle Tyrone Power in pirate garb, barefooted and jolly. For an added bonus, he’s often bare-chested. He’s forced to climb into a hammock with Maureen O’Hara, to pretend they’re married and save her life. (So much for the old idea that Hollywood insisted on “one foot on the floor” in bedroom scenes. O’Hara’s in a sheer nightie, he’s bare-chested, and they’re squeezed up together in a small bed and definitely under the covers.) O’Hara later described Power as “murderously handsome.”
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