Love Affair opens up on shipboard after a short sequence of news media establishing the playboy status of Boyer’s character, Michel Marnet. Boyer enters the frame in a tuxedo, carrying a lighted cigarette, and Dunne enters in furs, pearls, and a long gown. They are the ultimate in sophisticated chic, witty self-confidence, and soigné manners. But that’s just the characters they’re playing. Dunne and Boyer as actors are even more: two successful stars at the top of their form, easily displaying their own glamorous personae. They’re ever so easy with each other as they tease, challenge, flirt, and ultimately fall helplessly, honestly in love, despite the fact that both their characters are what used to be called “no better than they should be.” Boyer admits he’s never worked a day in his life, that he’s just had a fling with his fiancée’s best friend, and that his engagement to a very, very wealthy sausage heiress is, well, convenient. For her part, Dunne originally came from Kansas, had hoped to become a singer, but a wealthy sugar daddy had shown up to drape the furs and the pearls on her, and, well, money counts, doesn’t it?
With Irene Dunne (his most perfect match) in Love Affair
Dunne and Boyer are so utterly appealing that no one pays any attention to these character flaws—which the film does make clear yet ultimately treats lightly. Since both are on their way home to their meal-ticket significant others, they try to avoid the unavoidable. Yet they can’t help themselves, and everything changes when they disembark in Porto Santo, Madeira, for four hours, and Boyer takes Dunne to meet his aging grandmother. She’s played by that old ham actress Maria Ouspenskaya, who manages to pull off the idea that visiting her could change their lives forever. When Dunne and Boyer go into her chapel and awkwardly kneel—and ever more awkwardly cross themselves, almost with embarrassment—the sense that they are turning over the page to something new seems honest and deeply felt.
Boyer was a perfect co-star for actresses of all ages and types in movies that were dramatic or comic. ABOVE: With Rita Hayworth in Tales of Manhattan (shown also with Thomas Mitchell) … BELOW: Bette Davis in All This, and Heaven Too …
… Joan Fontaine in The Constant Nymph, and her rival for his affections, Alexis Smith.
Love Affair moves from a lighthearted screwball comedy about two people used to a life of pink champagne into a sad story about the accidental wrecking of the new life they plan to share after a six-month trial period. All ends well, of course, and in the scene in which they are reunited, Boyer’s eloquent face reveals everything he’s been through as he figures out what happened to her (a crippling accident), which was even worse. (It’s Irene Dunne’s film, actually, but without Boyer, as was so often the case, her character would not have had the same depth. Dunne plays in a stiff-upper-lip, slightly brittle manner that doesn’t seem shallow because Boyer himself demonstrates her contained grief and pain. Irene Dunne is wonderful, but she’s dependent on Boyer’s credibility as a previously defined desirable French lover to fill out her character’s motivations.)
The success of Love Affair inspired the business to rush the two stars into a second co-starring feature. When Tomorrow Comes, brilliantly directed by John M. Stahl, is generally considered much less than Love Affair, but it’s a fine movie. Today it enjoys a cult status, and in its own day it was Universal’s top box office draw of the year. Dunne and Boyer are once again marvelous together, easy, natural, playing in an almost improvisational manner. The difference between this second hit and their first is that When Tomorrow Comes is definitely a melodramatic women’s film without a happy ending. There is also a lack of glamour, in that Dunne plays a waitress with a limited wardrobe. The movie begins lightheartedly and descends into disappointment, providing both stars with acting challenges. She has to deliver lines such as “When I was a child back in the orphanage …” and Boyer has to be on the Jack Nicholson end of the old routine in which he tries to order a slice of cheese that comes only with the apple pie. (Why did no one mention that Five Easy Pieces [1970], with its “hold the chicken salad, just give me the toast” routine, was recycling old-movie dialogue that had appeared in many films?)
In the end, they must give each other up, since Boyer is married to a crazy wife. They have a last romantic dinner together in a beautiful restaurant, and when Boyer gets up to leave for his ship (which sails at midnight as ships always do in romantic movies), he tells Dunne, “I’ll be back in a little while.” “I’ll be waiting,” she says. For once, a noble sacrifice seems real, because Dunne and Boyer make it so. When Tomorrow Comes proves the pairing of Dunne and Boyer in Love Affair was not a fluke.
These two 1939 movies not only present Boyer’s established type but work by using it as a foundation. The audience accepts that the delicate Dunne, whether sophisticated or naïve, would want the great French lover for her own. It accepts that he’s irresistible, whether a slight cad needing to be shaped up or a noble spirit who knows he mustn’t be selfish.
By the end of the 1930s, Boyer had proved he could support Hollywood’s biggest female stars. From The Garden of Allah in 1936 to All This, and Heaven Too in 1940, he was cast opposite Marlene Dietrich, Danielle Darrieux, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Hedy Lamarr, Michèle Morgan, Irene Dunne, and Bette Davis. He was excessive and mysterious with Dietrich, definitely French with Darrieux, lightly comedic with Colbert, solidly loving with Arthur, exotic with Lamarr, loyal with Morgan, romantically sophisticated with Dunne, and all-out dramatic with Davis. He truly seemed to love the women his co-stars were portraying. He was so effective, in fact, that he seemed to be loving his co-stars themselves. He gave everything he had to them, leaning in, listening, his soft eyes filled with responsive emotion and appreciation. Boyer was one male actor who really was willing to support his leading lady, to make his own characterization about her—how fascinating she was, how adorable, how beautiful, how sexy. In this regard, he was not only the consummate leading man but also the greatest supporting actor any movie could possibly have. An unnamed actress who played a supporting role in a Boyer film was quoted as having said, “I don’t know of a woman who has made a picture with Charles Boyer without enjoying the experience. Women are comfortable with him, because they sense right away that their bodies are safe. He isn’t hell-bent on screwing them … Women become his friends because they trust him, and because of that trust, actresses play well with him. Whether he’s being informal on a set, or acting for the camera, Charles does know how to handle women.” His co-star was talking about Charles Boyer, the actor, but she was also describing how the women in the audience felt about him.
Boyer didn’t always have an easy time offering this support, however. The opposite of Dunne, and perhaps Boyer’s most incompatible leading lady, was Bette Davis, with whom he appeared in All This, and Heaven Too (1940). Although he’s billed as “co-star” and plays the romantic interest, the movie is a Bette Davis vehicle—it runs for more than twenty minutes before Boyer appears, and the story is all about Davis, who plays a poor little governess accused of murder. Boyer is heavy artillery assigned to the pop-gun level of support usually provided at Warners by George Brent.* But All This, and Heaven Too had serious aspirations to being a Best Picture. Oscar lust is written all over it, but at the bottom, it’s just another women’s film. Boyer raises it up, though. He represents Gallic heat in a dignified way that can get by the censors. He is George Brent, but crowned and elevated. He gives Davis’s pain credibility. Since the story is one of unfulfilled love—she’s a little hireling, he’s a big duke with a wife and kids—the passion has to be muted. The result is a talky, dragged-out affair about two people who don’t have the oomph to really do anything about their feelings. Davis plays it all noble and proper, low key and high minded. Without Boyer, who seems to seethe with something under the surface, the story wouldn’t work at all.
Anatole Litvak, the director, was unhappy with the final movie. “The picture was overproduced,” he said. “You couldn’t see the actors for the candelabra … Bette Davis was the world’s most expensive
ly costumed governess … Somehow, though, Charles’s performance transcended the curse of overproduction. He was easily the best actor I ever directed, although in the three pictures we made, I didn’t direct him once. He was his own creative artist.”
Because audiences so clearly believed that Boyer was irresistible, his type could credibly be reversed. Two movies in which Boyer successfully played bad lovers—one a cad, one a killer—are, respectively, Hold Back the Dawn (1940) and Gaslight (1944). In Hold Back the Dawn, Boyer’s character narrates the story of how he seduced and married an innocent schoolteacher (Olivia de Havilland) in order to gain legal entry to the United States. The story is presented in flashback form, as “a Roumanian” (Boyer) first tricks his way into Paramount Studios and onto the set of 1941’s I Wanted Wings (a real movie), under the alleged direction of Dwight Saxon. Saxon is actually played by Mitchell Leisen, the real director of I Wanted Wings … and also the director of Hold Back the Dawn. As “the Roumanian” interrupts Saxon to tell him his flashback story, the scene that is being shot involves the actress Veronica Lake, playing herself playing her character, while Brian Donlevy, one of her co-stars from Wings, plays himself watching her play that convoluted role. This Pirandellian effect works well, and it casts a meaningful shadow over Boyer’s performance, in which he, too, plays with his own filmed image.
As he explains his former life, Boyer says, he lived off rich women. He is honest but delicate in his wording. “My occupation was listed as ‘dancer’ … if you had a deep voice and knew how to look at a woman … it was an easy life.” He says little but tells everything. He admits he convinced de Havilland to marry him after having known him less than a day: “I had cast the crumbs of romance before a hungry heart. The trap was set.” This, in effect, is what Boyer’s movie persona does for American women. To play the false European lover, Boyer, the true European lover, is subtle. He doesn’t slobber over de Havilland. He doesn’t turn into Erik Rhodes in The Gay Divorcée. He doesn’t become a silly caricature, or spoil de Havilland’s performance of a woman who’s too intelligent to be taken in by such a creature but who’s also too naïve and too lonely to realize the subterfuge. Instead, he just puts a little extra body language on what, in another film, would have been his serious romantic dialogue.
In Gaslight, Boyer turns toward evil and is utterly convincing. This time, the audience is actually forced to re-evaluate his French charm. His behavior—so romantic, so loving—is called into question. What is he after? And the answer is sinister. Gaslight is first-class entertainment all the way. The young and radiantly beautiful Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar for playing the naïve creature he seduces, and the role is her very best performance. Gaslight is well directed by George Cukor, and the production values are tops. Sets, costumes, cast, lighting, music—everything is the best MGM had to offer, which means, really, the best Hollywood had to offer. The stars—Boyer, Bergman, and Joseph Cotten—are all placed inside the frame in exactly the ways they were created, built, and hired to be. Boyer is handsome and charming. Bergman is beautiful and tenderly vulnerable. Cotten is intelligent and the Anglo anti-Boyer. The supporting cast includes the very young Angela Lansbury, superb as a tart of a maid, and Dame May Whitty at her dithery best.
Boyer’s greatest role as a villain was opposite Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, in which he played a suave man who had what it took to drive any woman crazy.
Boyer now does for Bergman what Lamarr did for him in Algiers: He authenticates her performance. If he were not the romantic seducer, audiences might question why she wasn’t smart enough to see through him. In Gaslight, Boyer carefully conceals his cunning, letting it out of the bag slowly. It’s when the newly married couple—wed after only two weeks of meeting—return home that Boyer’s plan is put firmly into place. When he opens the door to the darkly shadowed No. 9 Thornton Square for his bride, he opens the door to hell, a hell he creates and defines. “Now, Paula,” he says, ushering her in. At that moment begins a series of scenes of abject abuse and humiliation for her, but all done so simply, so logically, that she really does begin to look crazy in our eyes as well as her own. Slowly, in the guise of love, concern, and support, he drives her toward madness, making her believe she imagines things, loses things, forgets things. “You are inclined to forget things,” he tells her lovingly. “Am I?” she asks in surprise and confusion. If he is vaguely insulting to her and she protests, he charmingly, gently says, “I was teasing you, my dear.” Boyer’s humiliation of Bergman is both private and public. “Paula … my watch is gone,” he whispers to her at an elegant musical soirée. Then he regretfully takes over her little purse, of course finding his watch secreted at its bottom. After she collapses in public, creating a scene, his concern for her—his good manners as he ushers her out, his loving willingness to cover up for her, his carefully controlled and publicly enacted expression of pain on her behalf—is terrifying.
The subtle change in Boyer’s character is carried out through costuming and props as well. His clothes become just that much more fashionable, even a tiny bit flashy. He starts smoking expensive-looking cigars and cigarillos. He preens a bit, easily gives orders to servants, sits down at her piano confidently. “I’m home free now,” his performance says. “It’s only a matter of time.” He handles a flirtation with Angela Lansbury like the very practiced seducer he is, wisely sizing her up for what she is, knowing he can have her if he wants, but also knowing there’s more at stake than a cheap roll in the hay. There’s just a touch of regret in his attitude toward her, as if to say, “If only I didn’t have bigger fish to fry. Ah, me.”
An actor has to own his type before he can reverse it. Because Boyer’s definition as an irresistible lover was so clear, so stabilized and accepted, it could be reversed with real credibility. Another actor in Gaslight couldn’t provide the same betrayal and couldn’t get us to accept that Bergman—a strong and healthy-looking woman—could be tricked this way. Boyer is playing from strength. We believe he’s a seducer, but we also believe him to be loyal, true, good. He’s betraying his image to us, as well as betraying his promises to her. When Bergman finally figures out what’s happening and turns the cruelty back on him, most women in the audience feel like cheering. Gaslight is an example of stardom being put to wider use than it was created to deliver.
In many ways Charles Boyer’s longevity in American films is a fluke. Generally, Americans have a native suspicion of all things foreign—particularly French men—and logically this should have shoved Boyer either off the screen or at least into secondary roles. The moviegoing public hasn’t taken much to French actors, at least not for very long. Maurice Chevalier had only a short career in early 1930s musicals,* and Louis Jourdan had a brief period as a leading man in the 1950s before returning to France. Francis Lederer, Jacques Bergerac, Fernand Gravet—even Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, and Yves Montand—these men were popular in their time, but none of them ever became a real American movie star. (Belmondo and Delon were largely hits with Americans only in their French movies.) But Americans took to Boyer in a way they never did to any other actor from France, not even the great Jean Gabin. Often called “the Spencer Tracy of France” (when, in fact, Tracy might better be called “the Jean Gabin of America”), Gabin was an earthy male star who could both act and generate ambience. He was perhaps the greatest male movie star in France’s history, a different type physically from Boyer, more of an ordinary guy than a gentleman. He was France’s great figure of the 1930s, projecting a doomed pessimism, playing grumpy, working-class men who were allowed to reveal a gentle inner core. Some of his greatest and most successful French films were remade in America. (One was Pépé le Moko, which became Algiers.) When war broke out in Europe, Gabin made his way to America via Spain and Portugal. His mentor, director Julien Duvivier, was already in Hollywood, and helped secure Gabin a contract at 20th Century–Fox.
Gabin made two American movies, Moontide in 1942, opposite Ida Lupino, and The Impostor (1944), also called
Strange Confession, which Duvivier directed. Neither film was a success, and Gabin had no illusions about it. “Not only did I not please myself,” he said, “but I didn’t please the Americans.” He just wasn’t America’s idea of a Frenchman. French men were Charles Boyer! Gabin looked rough and low-down. He was more like a Warner Bros. tough guy than a Paramount sophisticate. Who needed him in America, where we grew our own tough guys?* The ads for Moontide show clearly no one quite knew how to present him. The poster features a portrait of Gabin, with “Aaaaahhhh, Jean Gabin” running in large type around his head. “More than a glamour boy,” reads the copy, “more than a muscle man … more than a caveman… and … he can do more with one glance than most stars can with ten pages of script.” Uncertainty has crept in. The poster also bills Gabin as “the star of Grand Illusion in his first American motion picture …” The poster adds, “with Ida Lupino.” (Lupino was always given short shrift.)
Gabin’s stardom reflected his own appropriateness for the national mood of France in the prewar era, and after the war, when a boom of optimism prevailed, he was temporarily unfashionable. But he gradually reshaped his own persona into one of a tough man who would go it alone, control his own fate, and never be tempted by manipulative women. He became the ultimate French criminal, and when that phase wore out, he transformed himself into a respectable middle-class hero who was intelligent and mature in his wisdom. He evolved from decade to decade, reflecting current national attitudes each time he shifted his persona, finally becoming the archetypical Inspector Maigret in the movies. (Gabin’s career in France is a great example of how the rules of stardom function outside Hollywood.)
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