Taxi! is one of Young’s most typical roles of this period. She’s only nineteen years old, but she’s made twenty-five movies since Laugh, Clown, Laugh: eight films in 1930 alone and another seven in 1931. Her Taxi! co-star is James Cagney, and if there’s a movie star who could steal any scene or any picture from any other movie star, it’s James Cagney, possibly the greatest of them all. Who today pictures Loretta Young as a suitable co-star for James Cagney? But she was. She was cool to his heat, and hot to his cool. By 1932, she was no amateur and she plays him smart. She never tries to top him, wisely adapting to his electricity, making herself a part of his crackle, making it work between them. She knows she can’t match his energy, so she gets inside it, concentrating on staying in there with him, thereby establishing her own ground and her equality.
There are three great scenes in Taxi! in which Cagney and Young are perfectly matched: their courtship at a dance hall, their wedding night, and a post-argument make-up scene. In these, Young has her work cut out for her. Cagney might have been short, but in these early years of his own career, he is beautiful: blond, long lashed, and totally charismatic. Furthermore, he is the master of all kinds of loose, improvisational movements. In their wedding-night sequence, the new couple have taken friends to a smoky Harlem nightclub (The Cotton Pickers Club) and while dancers gyrate their hips suggestively around their table, working in pairs on the floor, Cagney has his hands all over her, and she just leans back onto him and accepts it. They whisper to each other, kissing and smiling and cuddling in the loose, bluesy atmosphere. They’re openly erotic.
Loretta Young and James Cagney in Taxi, hot to trot on their wedding night … and trotting a light two-step while courting.
Loretta Young was a sensu- ous and radiant co-star for Spencer Tracy in Frank Borzage’s passionate story about a Depression-era couple, Man’s Castle.
The movie presents their relationship as contentious. They constantly trade insults. “I wouldn’t go out with that dame,” says Cagney when he meets her, “if she were the last dame on earth and I just got out of the navy.” She’s always breaking up with him: “I’m tellin’ ya, we’re through,” she yells at him, and his smirking response is “Aw, give us a little kiss, will ya?” After one of these big fights, Cagney arrives outside Young’s apartment and tries out his welcome by first tossing his hat in the door. Is she still mad or can he come in? Once assured he can, he snaps right up to her doing a sharp little tap dance—a miniature musical number—wearing a big and sexually confident grin.* Young is ironing, still plenty annoyed. Cagney comes up close to her, almost letting his body touch hers, his face barely an inch away. He flirts, playfully threatens to sock her, and finally kisses her, tilting her chin up and giving her a fake little slap. After he’s defused her anger, making a joke of it, he smirks again and says, “Stay that way.” Then he abandons her, sauntering off with an evil little grin. What’s Loretta Young—or any actress—supposed to do in the face of all that? Cagney was one of Hollywood’s most sexually dangerous men on-screen—threatening yet irresistible, dangerously impatient with women. (He is, after all, the guy who pushed a grapefruit in Mae Clark’s face.) But Young has her own self-confidence. She’s one of the most beautiful women in the world, so she just waits for her reactive close-up—then radiates, smolders, and gets to finish off the scene on her own terms.
The real test for Young comes in a dance hall scene. Cagney is a hoofer. Young is not. Their characters enter a dance contest, and it’s important for the action to show the audience that this dame is the one for Cagney—if she can keep up with him. After he spins her around the floor at full speed to put her to the ultimate test—and she survives—they take a break. Casually chewing her gum, paying no real attention to him, Young pulls her sweater back down into place as if he hadn’t even gotten her engine going. She holds herself still, detached, and adopts a slightly bored air of inbred confidence. He moves in for the kill, and as they take off on the dance floor again, Young relaxes her body and allows herself to be completely controlled by the sweet-stepping Cagney, keeping up with him by submitting to his physicality, making herself part of him, as if she were born in his arms. She surrenders, but again on her own terms. This is not our mothers’ Loretta Young, and yet she does possess an underlying ladylike dignity, some sense of herself that is decent even though she is sexy, willing, and available. At the very least, there’s always honesty in her fallen women. Since she was often shot with a halo behind her head and an emphasis on her expressive eyes, there is an indirect implication of purity.
But only an implication. These early pre-code movies present Loretta Young as both tough and sensual, and being pre-code, they don’t have to hide the fact that she is having sex with men she’s not married to. “Hey, sugar,” a guy in a car calls out to “Midnight” Mary, noticing Mary (Young) and her girlfriend (Una Merkel) hanging out on the street, heavily made up, and flirty. Young moves right toward the car with a look in her eye that says she’s ready for anything, and the next scene shows her with legs already entwined around the man who called out to her as the car speeds forward. (Merkel is hanging out the front car window, obviously dead drunk.) As I say, this isn’t your mother’s Loretta Young. These early movies reveal that Young became a star because she was ravishingly beautiful, obviously sexy, talented enough to work with the best, and willing to give all she had to her roles.
After her pre-code years, when Young left Warner Bros./First National, she entered the middle period of her career. She played in lavish costume pictures (Clive of India [1935], House of Rothschild [1934], Suez, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, The Crusades), low-budget modern stories (Week-end Marriage [1932]), and a series of romantic screwball comedies, three of which paired her with her partner in exquisite looks Tyrone Power.* In her costume pictures, Young was lavishly gowned and lovingly photographed. Her delicate looks made her the perfect heroine for period pieces, but she also made a perfect modern heroine decked out in furs, jewels, and ever-changing hairdos in her lighthearted comedies.
By the end of the 1930s, Loretta Young had survived silent films, the pre-code sexy era, and hoopskirts and studio assignments. She had become a top-drawer movie star, appearing in top-drawer films. She had the money, the fan mag adulation, the fame, and the respect, and she had done it without most of the star machine manipulations, slipping past the one-two-three-kick plan for manufacturing people like her. Almost any actress in Hollywood would have settled for Young’s career; it was what most of them dreamed of achieving. But Young was restless, dissatisfied—not with stardom itself, which had always been a motivating goal for her, but with her form of it. She knew what it was she wanted from her stardom: She wanted more than the others had; she wanted control. She didn’t want to walk away, like a Deanna Durbin, or get away from the crowds, like a Garbo, or just choose her own roles, like a Davis. She wanted to make all the decisions herself. Like her mother, Loretta Young was a smart businesswoman. The system told her she was a product, so she figured that if her business was herself, she wanted to be the CEO.
Loretta Young (left) was easily cast in modern dramas, where she was svelte and chic (on the set of Ladies in Love, with Constance Bennett [center] and Janet Gaynor [right]) …
And so, to everyone’s surprise, Loretta Young just up and packed her bags when her contract at 20th Century–Fox expired in 1939 and went independent. She boldly and consciously broke away from the direction in which she was being taken. It was a move almost no stars made, and the ones who did were usually men. She had taken a daring step toward control, and like the good businessman she was, she had a project lined up for herself. She had formed an arrangement with an independent producer, Walter Wanger, to make her first film outside studio dominance. Unfortunately, the movie turned out to be one of her worst. If it was freedom from slight romantic screwball comedies she wanted, if it was to get away from being a clotheshorse, if it was to get out of trivial material, her first movie was a sobering failure. Eternally Yours
, co-starring David Niven, became her last release for 1939 and her first truly awful movie. It’s a silly story about a magician (Niven) whose wife (Young) feels his devotion to his magic tricks is ruining their marriage. This is all anyone needs to know, except that Young wears a great many astonishing hats. The movie was not well received and can hardly have been what she had in mind. What was worse for her—and what probably discouraged other actresses from considering such a move—was that for almost a year, she received no other offers. Loretta Young, still young, still beautiful, and at the top of her game, was out of work for a year. Finally, Columbia Pictures rescued her, but only by offering her another silly film, The Doctor Takes a Wife (1940), opposite Ray Milland. Young herself summed this movie up best by saying, “I had made it many times before, believe me.”
… or in epic costume dramas, with blond wig and long gown (in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Crusades, with, to her right, Henry Wilcoxin).
She decided to hang tough. Furthermore, she knew that her goals were realistic and compatible with those of the movie business. She was always practical; she wasn’t mooning around, yearning to play Joan of Arc or Madame Bovary. She wanted good roles, challenges to her talent, but what she wanted was to make commercially successful movies with what she considered to be important values, or which reflected a woman’s life in a way she felt was related to her own experience as a career woman living in a family of intelligent and independent women. She didn’t eschew roles as wives or mothers or women in love, but she did look for stories that could reflect something she understood about life from her own experience: Women could do things, women could be heroic. Such movies, she knew, could appeal at the box office.
In the 1930s Loretta Young and Tyrone Power were the epitome of Hollywood beauty, constantly posed together. Here they publicize Love Is News.
By the start of the 1940s, Loretta Young had taken two key steps toward career longevity: She took personal charge of her career, and she ignored type. She stepped completely out of the star machine process. In this regard, she was one of the smartest female movie stars. She made “giving a performance” her type, presenting her roles as “acted by Loretta Young.” During the 1940s, Loretta Young chose to make movies like The Lady from Cheyenne (1941), in which she played an 1869 Wyoming schoolteacher who fights for women’s rights, and Ladies Courageous (1944), in which she ferries bombers overseas during World War II. She’s a heroic savior of Chinese war orphans in China (1943) and a deaf woman bravely facing experimental surgery in the soapy And Now Tomorrow (1944). When an opportunity to work with clever people came along, she took it, as in The Stranger (1946), which co-starred her with Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson in a movie about postwar Nazis, also directed by Welles. In 1948, she undertook Rachel and the Stranger, pairing her with William Holden and Robert Mitchum. Beneath a somewhat conventional exterior, the story subtly questions how wives are treated as property by husbands. And, in a movie no one remembers, she played a pistol-packin’ mama in an overtly feminist western, Along Came Jones, with Gary Cooper.
As a freelance actress, Young kept her career going by taking on a more mature look and making films, such as China (pictured above), that addressed current political issues.
In Jones (1945), she participates in a role-reversal story. Young, the lovely and ethereal beauty, plays the hero. Cooper, the westerner from the strong-and-silent-type school, plays a guy who can’t shoot a gun. The film is allegedly a western and does contain a stagecoach robbery, shoot-outs, saloons, and horses. However, it is actually a comedy of mistaken identity, almost a French farce with changing venues and surprise twists. Cooper’s character, Melody Jones, is a singing cowpoke, laid back and incompetent. He can’t shoot a gun well enough to hit the broad side of a barn, and he constantly stumbles over his own feet. When he’s mistaken for desperate outlaw killer Monte Jerrad because of the initials he has on his saddle, M.J., he meets Young’s character, Cherry. As a youngster growing up, she had loved Jerrad and is helping him now, although she’s begun to realize he’s mean. (“He’s changed,” is a single line sensitively delivered by Young to explain everything and also exonerate her.) Young drives a horse and buggy at full speed, is a first-rate horsewoman, and is not only fast with her gun (or rifle), but also a dead-eye shot. (“Ain’t she a lulu?” Cooper asks.) William Demarest (playing Cooper’s acerbic partner) has a different point of view: “She’s an ornery little lady skunk.” (Even playing the western hero, which she surely does here, she’s called a “lady.”) Young saves or protects Cooper in scene after scene, and the story allows her to remain quick thinking to the very end by showing Cooper just how good a shot she really is. In the final scene, she uses her rifle to bring down the villain (Dan Duryea), dropping him with one swift shot in the forehead. (Cooper has tried to face down Duryea, and has been shot, finally sinking to his knees in the dirt.)
Considering that Loretta Young is appearing in one of the few pistol-packin’ mama roles of the 1940s, and that the film, although it ends with a clinch, never suggests that her character is anything but liberated, one can only wonder why her movie career is remembered as a bunch of nun roles. (She played exactly one nun in the movies.*) In fact, from 1940 to 1953, the end of her film career, Young played an authoress, an actress (twice), a suffragette who runs for office, a ballerina, a mystery writer’s wife, a schoolteacher in China, a bomber-ferrying participant in WAFS, a deaf rich girl, an endangered wife (twice), a nurse (twice), a maid, a murderess, a widow, a mayor, a hit-and-run driver, and a wife (three times, with great variations of type).†
Loretta Young knew how to vary her roles. She went blonde and Swedish and won an Oscar playing opposite Joseph Cotten in The Farmer’s Daughter.
Loretta Young wanted to be recognized by her peers, and that meant winning an Oscar. She searched endlessly for roles that might bring her the coveted recognition, but her business savvy wouldn’t let her choose something that she felt could never be a commercial success. She understood the need for balance—good, meaty roles, but also good, crowd-pleasing pictures. Finally, in 1947, she found the part that would be the crowning moment of her movie stardom.
The Farmer’s Daughter is a film most viewers today would like to sneer at but find they actually can’t. It’s droll, but charmingly so, and Young is lovely and completely in control of her performance as Karin Holstrom, the country mouse who shapes up the city folks. Young didn’t treat the movie as a minor comedy to be walked through, but studied hard for her part, which required a Swedish accent. Her coach was Ruth Roberts, the sister of director George Seaton, who had once taught English to Swedish immigrants. In fact, she had been hired by David O. Selznick to work with Ingrid Bergman on how to lose her Swedish accent. Young later said, “Ruth took away Ingrid’s accent … and gave it to me.”
She also garnered an Oscar nomination by playing a nun (her only movie nun) alongside Celeste Holm in Come to the Stable.
No one imagined Loretta Young would win the Oscar for The Farmer’s Daughter. Even her nomination was a shock. Things being what they are with the Oscars, no one thought she had a chance. Who would give the Oscar to a woman playing a Swedish maid in a lighthearted political comedy? Once it had happened, people wrote it off as a reward for her long and distinguished career, and also for her being a good citizen in Hollywood. Her competition included strong performances: Joan Crawford in Possessed, Susan Hayward for Smash-up: The Story of a Woman, Dorothy McGuire in Gentleman’s Agreement, and Young’s close friend Rosalind Russell in the movie adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, a candidate for the worst movie ever made. Everyone assumed Russell was a shoo-in with her serious literary entry (and as good a performance as anyone could muster in the material). Thus, it was that a stunned audience watched an equally stunned Loretta Young mount the stage to accept the award. She made Oscar history out of her moment, giving a speech that managed to be both graceful and flustered—a speech that is always included in Academy clips. Stepping up to acc
ept, she said, “The Academy Awards has always been a spectator sport for me, but tonight”—here she referred to her magnificently ruffled, showstopping gown designed especially for her by Adrian—“I dressed for the stage, just in case!” While the audience erupted in applause and laughter, she added, speaking to her statue, “And as for you, at long last!” She kissed the award, added “Good night and God bless you,” and swept out magnificently, as a movie star should.
With her Oscar, Young had proved herself. Although she could choose her own scripts, a rare thing for any star, particularly an actress, good roles were hard to come by for a woman who had been around a long time. One of the last big movies Loretta Young made was in 1950, just before she turned her attention to television. A comedy, Key to the City, paired her with Clark Gable for the second time. Young was approaching forty, which in those days meant trouble for female stars. She looks fabulous, slim and youthful, but by now she’s no “Midnight Mary.” She’s prim, proper, and dressed in button-up blouses, coy little hats, white gloves, and straight-lined suits. No low necklines. No clinging velvet. No loose straps falling off a shoulder. She’s Mayor Standish of Winona, Maine, a woman who’s frugal, practical, and takes no nonsense from any man, an out-and-out New England spinster who went to law school at Harvard (Loretta Young plays Katharine Hepburn). At this point in her career, she has developed the habit of smiling big, flashing her teeth, and making sure audiences appreciate her lovely apple cheeks. Whereas she seemed in her early years to rely on what she knew people actually felt in life, and to let her eyes and her beauty carry her, now she’s more technique and less raw response. Where once she was all melting eyes, sensuous mouth, and dreamy sexuality, now she’s tight and reflects tension. She’s a good-looking woman, but no one a cruising driver would call out, “Hey, sugar,” to.*
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