by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Look for the Silver Lining, a big, splashy Technicolor musical biopic of 1920’s
singer-dancer-actress Marilyn Miller brought to the world by Warner Bros.,
which perhaps not coincidentally had also been the producing studio for Marilyn
Miller’s three films: Sally (1929),
Sunny (1930) and Her
Majesty, Love (1931) — the first two based
on two of her biggest stage hits, with scores by Jerome Kern. The director was
David Butler, one of the leading lights of the early musical era — he made the
pioneering Sunnyside Up for Fox
in 1929 and the remarkable Delicious, the first film for which George and Ira Gershwin wrote songs, in 1931;
he also directed Judy Garland in her first feature, Pigskin Parade (a pretty hapless movie partially redeemed by Judy,
her future Wizard of Oz co-star
Jack Haley, and Patsy Kelly in one of her usual island-of-sanity roles), but by
1949 his reputation was pretty hacky. Probably the most formidable collection
of talents in this movie was in the writing department: the original story was
credited to Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (who’d get their own biopic from MGM in Three
Little Words one year later) and among the
three screenwriters were Harry and Phoebe Ephron, Nora Ephron’s parents and
major talents in their own rights, best known for Desk Set with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. (The third
was someone named Marian Spitzer.) The big problem making this movie — well,
there were two main problems: the first was that Marilyn Miller actually led a
pretty miserable and dissolute life, which naturally had to be chopped and
channeled into the comfortable and Production Code-safe movie clichés. After a
lifetime of sinus troubles she died at 37 of complications from an operation
that was supposed to relieve them, though she was also a chronic alcoholic and
given to a lot of one-night stands with a succession of men. She married three
times but only one of her real-life husbands appears as a character in the
film: her first one, Frank Carter (played in the movie by the young Gordon
MacRae, dull as usual in a part that doesn’t require more than he could give),
whom she married in 1919 right after he returned from fighting in World War I
but who died in a car crash a year later. (The real Miller built him an
elaborate tomb which included space for herself, and she was indeed buried
there after her own death in 1936.) After that the real Miller married Mary
Pickford’s ne’er-do-well brother Jack, a marriage that turned out so poorly she
went to France to divorce him — only to be rejected when the authorities in
Paris took exception to her public comments praising France as a country in which
it was particularly easy to get divorced, though she was able to get her
divorce later by going to Versailles (oddly appropriate given what rambunctious
goings-on had occurred there among the French royals and courtiers
pre-Revolution!).
Miller’s third husband was a chorus boy named Chester Lee
O’Brien, who was regarded then as a male gold-digger (according to her
Wikipedia page, Miller lavished $56,000 on him during their two years
together), though O’Brien not only survived her but established a career of his
own as a theatrical manager for productions like Brigadoon and Finian’s Rainbow and worked on Sesame Street as an actor and stage manager from 1969 to 1992.
Miller’s own movies showcase a spectacular performer in a rather dated style —
though it’s hard to separate the quality of her performances from the
relatively primitive aspects of the films themselves — and if anyone remembered
her in 1949 it was probably because they’d seen the MGM biopic of Jerome Kern, Till
the Clouds Roll By, three years earlier, in
which Miller had been played by Judy Garland. Judy wasn’t at all like the real Marilyn Miller (and she was doubled in
a lot of the more strenuous dancing sequences because she was pregnant with
Liza Minnelli at the time), but who cared? Judy poured her heart and soul into
the Kern standards Miller had introduced, “Look For the Silver Lining” from Sally and “Who?” from Sunny, and she had the benefit of Liza’s dad to direct
her. (“Judy’s numbers were directed by her husband, Vincente Minnelli; the rest
of the film wasn’t, unfortunately,” John Kobal rather cattily commented in his
book on musicals.) Look For the Silver Lining was one of a cycle of big, splashy musicals Warner
Bros. had started producing in the war years — including biopics like Rhapsody
in Blue (George Gershwin), Night
and Day (Cole Porter), Shine On,
Harvest Moon (Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes,
whom I described as the Sonny and Cher of their day — when they first met he
was a vaudeville star, she an unknown, he discovered her, coached her, married
her and did an act with her, only when they broke up both professionally and
personally she became a bigger star on her own than he’d ever been) and April
Showers (ostensibly fictional but pretty
obviously based on the child-star career of Buster Keaton and the act he did
with his parents on stage).
It was also endemic of a change in policy Jack
Warner decided on after the mega-success of Doris Day’s first film, Romance
on the High Seas, in 1948; though that was
also the year Warners released The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Johnny Belinda, highly acclaimed films that also were box-office
hits, Romance on the High Seas
made so much more money Jack
Warner decided that darkness was out and lightness was in, so he decided to
steer his production schedule away from gritty dramas and noirs and towards bright, lively color musicals. Day would
actually have been a good choice to play Miller except that she wasn’t that
spectacular a dancer (though in 1953’s Calamity Jane she moves quite effectively), so after briefly
considering Joan Leslie for the part Jack Warner went with June Haver. Like
Mitzi Gaynor, Haver was a genuinely talented singer and dancer but not a
particularly charismatic screen personality — she’d have been at sea trying to
portray Miller in a realistic depiction of her life but she was just fine in
the Production Code-bowdlerized version. The script is especially disappointing
given all the fine writers Warners threw at it (one would expect something more
interesting from the creators of Duck Soup and Desk Set!); like the
real Marilyn Miller, the fictional one hails from Findlay, Ohio and gets her
start in an act called “The Five Columbians” headed by her father, Caro Miller
(Charlie Ruggles) — in real life he was her stepfather — and also featuring her
mom and two older sisters. She manages to bull her way into the family act and
get discovered by ace dancer Jack Donohue — played by Ray Bolger, who’s by far
the most talented and exciting person in this movie — and in the one scene in the
film that presented Haver with a serious acting challenge, she has to register
being shocked and emotionally crushed when Donohue, whom she’s hoped would
marry her, tells her he already has a wife and baby back home (they’re in
London, where they’ve gone for work since they hadn’t been able to find any in
the U.S.).
The movie is almost half over before Miller finally makes it back to
the U.S. (signaled by an hilariously anachronistic shot of the New York skyline
with the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in place — the scene is supposed
to take place in 1914 and those buildings didn’t exist until more than a decade
later) and achieves Broadway stardom in something called Profiles of
1914 (I inevitably joked that all the
actors had to keep their heads turned so the audience would only see the sides
of their faces). The rehearsal of Profiles of 1914 features another anachronism: they’re performing the
Gershwin song “Oh Gee! Oh Joy!,” which wasn’t written until 1927. Miller then
works her way up through a series of shows with years in their titles before
she’s finally offered Sally, her
first “book show” (i.e., one with a plot rather than a revue), and when we get
to see a scene from Sally her
co-stars are S. Z. Sakall and Walter Catlett, both of whom are a delight to see
even though they don’t appear in the rest of the movie. The entire story is
framed by a flashback scene in which Miller is visibly ill during rehearsals
for an out-of-town (Boston) tryout of a revival of Sally — in yet another anachronism, we see 1949-era cars
on the street outside the theatre even though the real Miller died in 1936 —
and a visitor who remembers her from the old days in Findlay brings a poster of
the Five Columbians when he visits Miller backstage. The old poster has the
same effect on Miller as that madeleine had on Proust; she flashes back over
her entire career, and at the very end we learn that she’s so sick her doctors have
told her she should never dance again — though, being a believer in The Show Must Go On, she makes her
performance and does her spectacular dances anyway. (One would have thought she
could have continued her career as a nightclub singer.) The film ends with
Miller alive and, if not especially well, at least still performing.
Look
For the Silver Lining is a serviceable
movie, entertaining without being especially deep (if you want “deep” in a bio
of a showbiz figure, check out Doris Day’s tour de force as Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me six years later!), with the gorgeously overripe
color designs associated with Technicolor (a far cry from all the dank greens
and browns that dominate movies today!) and an overall air of insouciance that fits the subject even though there was a much
more interesting potential movie in Marilyn Miller’s real life than the one
Warners made (or could have made under the Production Code) in 1949. And it’s
almost inevitable that any mention of Marilyn Miller should be accompanied by
the tale of how Marilyn Monroe was named after her; the talent scout who signed
Norma Jeane Baker to a 20th Century-Fox contract in 1946 was Ben
Lyon, who 15 years earlier had been an actor who played the romantic lead to
Marilyn Miller in Her Majesty, Love.
Lyon suggested his new contractee appropriate the name “Marilyn Miller” for her
own screen career; Norma Jeane protested that someone might remember the real
Marilyn Miller and confuse them, but then she remembered that her maternal
grandmother’s maiden name had been Monroe, and thus “Marilyn Monroe” was born.
And at least one actor made films with both Marilyns: Joe E. Brown made his movie debut in the
1929 film of Sally and 30 years
later was in Some Like It Hot.
