As Beery aged, he continued to star in remarkably successful low-budget movies. But these were not B films: Beery was a star, and his presence guaranteed their definition as programmers. Sometimes, however, he was pushed into works that used him only in the crassest business manner imaginable. Such a movie was the 1941 The Bad Man, which “starred” him but just used his name to draw in the suckers. He plays a Mexican bandit, tricked out in tall sombrero, a sequined “south of the border” suit, and sporting a Spanish accent (“Breeng ze womans here”). It’s easy to imagine the behind-the-scenes business discussion: “We have this property we bought—a weak play sitting around. Let’s use it to test some of our youngsters. We can surround them with strong people under contract and shove it out there.” The “youngsters” were relative newcomers Ronald Reagan* (a Warners guy in a Metro film) and Laraine Day, a pretty and intelligent girl who was being groomed for her brief stardom.
Perhaps fearing the results, MGM shoved not one, but two of their leading crowd-pleasers into the mix: Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore. (Imagine a movie with not one, but two old crocks, one more outrageous than the other.†) A movie like The Bad Man was the studio contract star’s fate, and Beery accepted his job. “I’m fat and handsome,” he bellows. “Look at me!” (Those very words might have been his acting credo.) Barrymore, now wheelchair-bound by his arthritis, also bellows and mugs and wheels around at an incredible pace. (The finale is simply horrible. With Barrymore sitting in his wheelchair, tied up behind Beery’s horse, the two men race to town over the tundra to save the situation. We’re treated to a few minutes of Beery’s furious riding, Barrymore’s furiously bellowing, “Whee, faster, faster,” et cetera. Movies like this discourage film scholarship.)
Beery played to the groundlings without shame or apology and always got away with it. MGM kept him as a leading man as long as his box office warranted it, squeezing every last drop out of his bonus stardom.
Wallace Beery was perfectly matched with Marie Dressler in Tugboat Annie,their second feature together.
A leading man, but always a great character actor … Beery in his Oscar-winning role as a boxer who fights for his honor and his kid (The Champ)…
…as a cruel Prussian industrialist in Grand Hotel… and shivering his timbers as the treacherous Long John Silver in Treasure Island (with Jackie Cooper).
As I studied Wallace Beery, an actor I’ve never liked, I found myself starting to respond to him. Was I losing my mind? (There’s nothing like back-to-back-to-back screenings of movies like The Bad Man, Bad Bascomb, Wyoming, and Jackass Mail to drive you crazy.) But it was becoming clear why Beery deserved his stardom. There haven’t been many truly low-class movie stars, and Beery filled a niche during a decade when people were out of work and less educated than moviegoers today. He was an oddity who was reassuring. He had nothing—no looks, no education—yet he triumphed or at least made everyone cry for him when he didn’t. He was strong, colorful, and amusing. His films mixed action, broad humor, and a deep brand of sentiment that he would let roll along and then suddenly undercut. We don’t have actors like Wallace Beery today. There aren’t any stories for them, because we’ve grown too sophisticated for lost orphans, wagon trains west, and pots of gold, and too politically correct for Mexican bandits, peg-leg cripples, and slave traders. His types have disappeared. We don’t need him anymore, because there’s no role for him to play in our fantasies. (We’re also fixated on beauty, and when an outrageous pirate no better than he should be appears on our screens, it’s either Johnny Depp or Geena Davis.) Beery was a star because he fit his times, and because he was a lifelong professional who knew what to do when given a role, no matter what it might be. In that sense, there’s nothing odd about his story at all. He was just another lucky bonus for an efficient system.
STARS BEGAT STARS. If a short man like Alan Ladd becomes a star, he must have a perfectly proportioned, equally short female co-star. Voilà! Tiny Veronica Lake becomes a star as his leading lady. It was inevitable that when Wallace Beery became a star, some Beery-like female would have to be found. And so MGM created a romantic couple that was about as odd as it gets—an aging, out of shape, beat-up version of Garbo and Gilbert for the masses.
So here they are on-screen. The guy is forty-five years old, and the babe is sixty-one. Both are, to put it tactfully, overweight and out of shape. (He’s fat and she’s a bag.) He has the beat-up face of an old hound dog, and she has jowls. There’s a deep sorrow somewhere in her eyes, and a callous lack of any real concern in his. No matter what you put on them for a costume, it’s gonna sag and hang, but they are your romantic leads. And everyone loved them. Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler.
Dressler has a sagging bosom, a plain face ungraced by cosmetics, and a limping walk. Both she and Beery are considerably overweight by today’s standards, although Beery’s stomach has not yet headed for South America. His teeth are broken, with one possibly missing, and hers are crooked. Both of them have dark circles under their eyes and flyaway, uncoiffed hair. Their costumes have no little touches of glamour. He’s in T-shirts and old pants. She shuffles downstairs barefoot, wearing an old bathrobe held together by a large safety pin. While she reads with her glasses on, he eats a watermelon, casually spitting the seeds out onto her floor. There’s no Botox and certainly no face-lifts. They are a visual relief on-screen—real people. Dressler even refers to her age, adding, “When I was young I used to make ’em sizzle.” (To this, Beery replies, “Yeah, back in the Civil War days they wasn’t so particular.”)
Min and Bill (1930) co-stars Beery and Dressler, but it is really Dressler’s film. In people’s minds, Min and Bill has more or less merged with their co-starring vehicle released three years later, Tugboat Annie (1933).* Min and Bill presents them as a pair who frequently knock ’em back together, but it’s made clear that Beery has his own room above the bar she runs, as he refers to himself as “a boarder with her for ten years, paying my rent.” (In 1930, a pre-code era, there was no need to excuse an unmarried sexual partnership, so these words are clearly there to define their separateness. In Tugboat Annie, however, they are a married couple.) Although Bill flirts with another floozy (Marjorie Rambeau), incurring Min’s wrath, the film is a mother-love story, not a relationship movie. Dressler raises Rambeau’s abandoned daughter (Dorothy Jordan) and makes the Stella Dallas sacrifice for her: Ultimately, she shoots and kills Rambeau, who is threatening to ruin the girl’s successful marriage to a wealthy young man. As the new bride and her husband, surrounded by love and happiness, board their honeymoon yacht, Dressler, tears in her eyes, watches from the wharf unbeknownst to the couple. Then she is arrested and taken away. (Just another happy Hollywood ending!)
The great thing about Beery and Dressler is that they are two highly capable acting pros, and they’re wonderful together as they engage in their easy, improvisational gab. As he leans back in her barber chair and she shaves him and tells him her troubles, they trade insults. Both are experts at physical action, such as in the scene in which Min attacks Bill after finding Rambeau sitting in his lap, half drunk. Their fight is epic. She tries to choke him. He shoves the bed at her. They crash to the floor, wrestle, and really fight, pulling hair, jabbing fingers at eyeballs, yelling and screaming. She throws a chamber pot at him, and when he seeks refuge in a closet, she tries to break the door down with an ax. When she finally crowns him but good with a beer bottle, as he sinks down to the floor he manages to piteously whine: “Min, now I’m really mad.” As she looks at his body, tied up in the fishnet that he accidentally tangled with, she wails, “Bill! You ain’t hurt? Aw, gee…You made me so sore. Bill!” In other words, Min and Bill is a real American love story—full of violence.
Marie Dressler, of course, was no machine-made product. She was a trooper. Dressler made her stage debut in 1886 at the age of seventeen in her native Canada. By 1907, she was a fully established star on the London stage. When Mack Sennett saw her perform, he immediately recognized her potential
as a moving picture comedienne, and in 1914, he offered her the chance to appear in a movie he wanted to make from one of her most popular stage hits, Tillie’s Nightmare. The movie that resulted—Tillie’s Punctured Romance—paired Dressler with Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand and has since become a classic. Dressler steals the show, even from Chaplin and Normand. Playing a bumptious farm girl who knocks Chaplin flat when she tries to cuddle up to him, she’s an unforgettable sight in a ruffled print dress, a long string of beads, and a dime-store hat decorated with some species of bird—possibly a duck—perched jauntily on top. Tillie’s Punctured Romance in its own time was so popular that Sennett followed it immediately with Tillie Wakes Up (1914) and Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (1914). Although these films did all right at the box office, neither matched the success of the original. Dressler left movies, and was off the screen for the next decade, from 1916 to 1926. She returned to movies to provide excellent support for big-name stars, such as Constance Talmadge in Breakfast at Sunrise (1927). When sound came in, Dressler’s theatre experience, her gravelly voice, and her unique presence made her a natural for motion pictures. She made, among others, Hollywood Review of 1929. In early 1930, she had two smash hits: Let Us Be Gay and Anna Christie.
In Let Us Be Gay, Dressler proved she didn’t always have to play a blowsy old waterfront woman. She cleaned up real good, playing a delightful society hostess called “Boocie” (short for Mrs. Boucicault), whose philosophy of behavior is well stated: “When I was a girl and went to a man’s room, I had the decency not to do it before the servants.” Dressler could play low comedy, high comedy of manners, and tragedy with equal skill. She had trod the professional boards.*
Her appearance opposite Garbo in the talking version of Anna Christie caused MGM bosses really to focus on her. She held her own and created a perfect waterfront barhopper, inspiring her casting opposite Beery in Min and Bill that year. Dressler /was about fifteen years older than Beery, but she was famous for making friends easily, for her wit and warmth, and for her still-youthful zest. These were qualities that the movie camera picked up and recorded, and no one questioned the age difference.
After her 1930/31 Oscar win as Best Actress for Min and Bill, Dressler made four quick films that paired her with comedienne Polly Moran: Caught Short (1930), Reducing and Politics (in 1931), and Prosperity (1932). As 1933 opened up, she was at the peak. Besides Tugboat Annie, she was scheduled for Dinner at Eight.
In Dinner at Eight (1933)—her most often seen appearance today—Dressler is off the tugboat and away from the waterfront. She’s sailing up Park Avenue in about two yards of fox furs, an actress playing an actress who is past her prime, who has financial troubles, whose feet hurt. She doesn’t want to try for a comeback (“I’ll have my double chins in privacy”) and she knows her time has passed (“I belong to the Delmonico period”). The same quality that allowed her to be believable as Min makes her believable as Carlotta Vance. Her Carlotta has had a stardom that elevated her status in life, but did not inflate either her bankbook or her low-down sense of reality. “I didn’t do so badly for a little girl from Quincy, Illi-noise, eh, Ducky?” she asks Lionel Barrymore. If Min had gone on the stage, she would have been Vance, saying something like “I didn’t do so badly for an old waterfront bag, did I?”
Dressler’s next movie was Christopher Bean (1933), with Lionel Barrymore and Jean Hersholt, and it would be her last. She died on July 28, 1934, just as MGM was planning to reteam her with Beery for the fourth time. No character actress in Hollywood was bigger at the box office than she was. The motion picture exhibitors rated her as more powerful to their business than Garbo, Gaynor, or Harlow. Time magazine had featured her on the cover in August 1933. She went out at the top.
Marie Dressler “cleaned up real good” to play Carlotta Vance, a fading actress with a touch of the tugboat in her soul, in Dinner at Eight (with Lionel Barrymore).
After Dressler’s death, Beery went without a regular female co-star until 1940, when he was paired with another oddity, Marjorie Main, in a movie called Wyoming.* Main played a lady blacksmith, and was given star billing alongside Beery. Clearly, MGM hoped for a Dressler-like success. Main had begun her movie career in 1932, in A House Divided, having been a serious stage actress with a solid career. Between 1932 and Wyoming, she had appeared in about thirty-five movies, always in supporting roles. She had choice moments in some of them: a key role in Dead End (1937), repeating her original stage part; as Barbara Stanwyck’s mother in Stella Dallas (1937); and as Walter Pidgeon’s mother in Dark Command (1940), in which she had a major death scene. In 1939, she snagged a role that would shape her persona, that of the aging cowgirl who runs a Reno dude ranch for potential divorcées in The Women. This bellowing commoner caught Metro’s attention, and Main was considered as a possible co-star for Beery, who was skeptical. Marie Dressler had been more subtle, he felt, and he was never eager to share billing with anyone. But the pair clicked on-screen, and Main was signed to a seven-year contract at MGM. For nine years, Beery and Main were a popular team, money in the bank, an example of how one bonus star (Beery) creates a need for a co-star that generates another (Main). Their movies were all programmers, and always returned a neat profit. Besides Wyoming in 1939, Beery and Main starred in Barnacle Bill (1941), The Bugle Sounds (1942), Jackass Mail (1942), Rationing (1944), Bad Bascomb (1946), and their final film, Big Jack, in 1949. (Beery had a fatal heart attack not long after this film was completed.)
The difference between Marjorie Main and Marie Dressler as a leading lady for Beery was one of sincerity. Dressler and Beery pioneered the concept of the unattractive older couple as romantic leads, but by the time Main entered the picture, Beery’s roles had become caricatures. Main was forced to play a stereotypical old shrew, trying to trap the unwilling Beery into her bed. In order to offset Beery’s increasingly broad style, Main coarsened her performance. Where she was a charming hillbilly hostess with a little cowgirl swagger in The Women, playing with Beery developed her as a man-eating harridan (although never a rum pot; Main opposed drinking and asked not to be required to drink hard liquor in her films, a request that, with a few exceptions, was granted). Her voice went lower and ever more raspy to challenge Beery’s vocal strength. Her trademark became a disbelieving snort of disgust, and it worked. The role became her basic type. Even when she was allowed to wear elaborate costumes and play in sophisticated material, as in Lubitsch’s 1943 Heaven Can Wait, she was still a nouveau-riche dame with a down-to-earth cackle. Main understood what audiences wanted, and accepted her fate, always a prerequisite for extended movie success. “I hit my stride in the Wally Beery films and the Ma Kettle roles because I knew instinctively what would be true to the parts.”* Main became limited in a way that Dressler never did, but who knows what might have happened to Dressler had she lived longer?
An oddity like Beery didn’t always have to romance his own kind—he was too big a star for that. Beery’s career demonstrates how oddities could influence the careers of other performers, not only other unlikely types such as Dressler and Main but also beautiful female stars like Joan Crawford and Harlow. Both actresses took big steps forward by being paired with Beery, not only because he himself was a star, but also because his offbeat qualities liberated and allowed them to be seen to fuller advantage. Crawford showed she could be as tough or villainous as the business wanted her to be, and Harlow showed her rowdy comedic side, her own low-class appeal.
In Grand Hotel, Beery and the young, sexy Crawford seem to understand each other perfectly: He’s “hired” her for the night and is trying to be smoothly considerate, but she knows it’s a low-down deal and just winds his clock, accepting her fate. As one watches them in their adjoining hotel rooms, it’s easy to believe they both have been there before. Crawford’s supposed to be a better person than Beery, but no better than she should be. Their scenes together are flawless.
Paired with the luminous young Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight, Beery adjusts his bombast
to hers. Together they make the most perfect white-trash, nouveau-riche couple ever. Billie Burke, their potential hostess, describes Harlow as “that common little woman” and Beery as “that noisy, vulgar man… he smells Oklahoma!” Harlow and Beery deliver on that. She plays a female who has her priorities straight. Getting ready for the party, she yells, “Don’t talk to me while I’m doing my lashes!” and snarls at her maid to “Put ’em [her orchids] in the icebox, nitwit!” Harlow slinks even when she’s lying flat on her back in an all-white bed, or maybe especially then. She inhabits an all-white world, with only a box of dark chocolates to break the monotony. She literally shimmers, and she knows what she wants. (“I’m gonna be a lady if it kills me!”) Beery is ill-bred, bad-mannered, and badly dressed, flashing a diamond ring and ornate silk scarf. He doesn’t even take his hat off in Lionel Barrymore’s office, barging around and yelling, “What kinda dump is this?”
When Harlow and Beery quarrel, Beery’s stardom has probably never had a bigger test. Can he hold his corner of the screen when the Blonde Bombshell is in the frame pouting, screaming, “How da ya get that way?” at him, and then turning all the sexual energy she’s got on him? The Harlow-Beery fights are epic, with no attempt to pretty them up. “You poisonous little rattlesnake, you,” he yells. “You big gas bag,” she yells back. Harlow is magnificent. She tells Beery off when he wants to stand her up to go to Washington: “Presidents in Washington and all those rummies, but you can’t go anywhere with me!” Flatly refused, she knows what to do—fall back against her heart-shaped white pillow and do her thing—talk baby talk and pretend to be his little kitty. Beery is wise enough to make room for Harlow. Up against her, he gives ground in the way only the shrewdest of actors give ground.
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