by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
If The Road Back was an attempt to deal with Big Themes like war, capitalism, revolution and incipient fascism that got unhinged by all the clashing agendas of the people involved – including the German consul who successfully dictated to Universal an extensive revision of the movie after James Whale thought he had completed it – Whale’s next film, The Great Garrick, is just the opposite, a trivial story given such high style in its treatment it’s an absolute delight, start to finish, and probably Whale’s last truly great film. Though Mervyn LeRoy is credited as having “personally supervised” the project – at the time it was made (1937) he was branching out from directing to producing, and within a year he would leave Warner Bros. for a highly paid contract as producer with the strong possibility that Louis B. Mayer was grooming him to take the place of the recently deceased Irving Thalberg as second in command of all MGM’s production (though after four flops in a row as producer – including The Wizard of Oz, which like Citizen Kane and Vertigo – is now considered a classic but lost money on its original release, Mayer cut LeRoy’s salary in half and relieved him of producing duties but kept him on as a director) – the deal to make The Great Garrick was actually set up by Whale’s partner, David Lewis. The two were living a sort of Gay version of A Star Is Born; as Whale’s career declined into “B” pictures, for-hire assignments and stories unworthy of him – and he started drinking more and working less as a result – Lewis’s career continued to rise until the financial failure of Arch of Triumph (1948) – another critically reviled and commercially unsuccessful film of an Erich Maria Remarque movie! – forced him to do major surgery on his reputation and ultimately broke him and Whale up as Whale wanted to travel to Europe in the early 1950’s and Lewis refused.
The Great Garrick began life as a story by Hungarian writer Ernest Vajda called Ladies and Gentlemen, which he originally envisioned first as a novel and then as a stage play (which actually got produced in Britain and lasted for nearly two years), but he ended up writing it as a movie. It’s about the celebrated real-life British actor David Garrick (Brian Aherne), who lived from 1717 to 1779 and worked in the British theatre as an actor, director and uncredited story editor. There’s an early scene in the movie in which he’s billed as performing “Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (With Alterations),” a reference to the real-life Garrick’s penchant for wholesale rewriting of Shakespeare’s plays, both to fatten his own parts and to bring them more in line with what 18th century audiences considered ‘fine drama.” (Garrick’s rewrites of Shakespeare held the stage well into the 19th century; Hector Berlioz’s brilliant “dramatic symphony” on Romeo and Juliet was actually based on the Garrick edition, in which Juliet comes to after Romeo has drunk the poison but before he has died from it.)
The tltle The Great Garrick suggests a prestige Warner Bros. biopic on the lines of the ones they’d previously done on Disraeli, Alexander Hamilton, Voltaire, Madame Du Barry, Louis Pasteur and Émile Zola, but nothing could be further from the film Whale and Vajda gave us. It begins in Garrick’s theatre on Drury Lane in London, where he announces that he is going to Paris to play a season as guest actor at the Comédie Française. The audience members – especially the ones from proletarian or lower-class backgrounds (it’s typical of Whale that we get moving-camera shots of Warner Bros.’ backlot version of 1750 London that give us the workers and street people before we see anyone in the movie with money) – respond by throwing vegetables at the stage, which Garrick thanks them for as a compliment and announces that the real reason he’s going to Paris is that the Comédie Française members are overrated incompetents who don’t know the first thing about acting, and he’s going over there to teach them their craft. Though Garrick later denies having ever said anything like this, word filters through to the Comédie’s president, M. Picard (Melville Cooper). His first response is to write Garrick to cancel the invitation, which will require a vote of the Comédie’s members; alas, the prompter, Jean Cabot (Étienne Girardot), shows up to vote but is told he can’t since he isn’t really an actor, and he’s thrown out of the theatre.
Then playwright Pierre August Caron de Beaumarchais (Lionel Atwill in his third film for Whale, and playing his part with all the snappy self-importance it needs) decides that instead of firing Garrick the Comédie actors should humiliate him. They should do this, Beaumarchais tells them, by occupying Adam and Eve, the second inn Garrick is planning to stay at on his way to Paris, making themselves over to pose as the inn’s true owners and wait staff, with some of them playing guests and portraying swordfight duels and romantic quarrels on the premises. The objective, as Beaumarchais explains it, is to make Garrick look so ridiculous no one will ever pay money to see him on a stage again. Only the prompter, understandably bitter at being told he doesn’t count as a “real” member of the Comédie Française, rides on ahead and intercepts Garrick at the first inn he’s staying at, the Turk’s Head, to tell him how the Comédie members are planning to entrap him. Garrick is therefore able to parry the threats against him with disdain – he’s even unafraid of the man who’s supposed to act crazy in order to drive Garrick crazy – but a wild card enters the picture in the person of Georgette (Olivia de Havilland). Georgette claims to be a woman fleeing from her aristocratic father, who’s supposedly forcing her to marry a man she doesn’t love. She was fleeing him when her carriage overturned on the road to the inn and tipped over, spilling out all her stuff on the road.
Garrick finds himself attracted to the woman but also convinced that she’s an actress from the Comédie Française sent out to seduce him, then abandon him and really make him look stupid. He tears into her and tells her she’s a lousy actress and proof that the vaunted Comédie really did need him as a teacher to tell them how to act. The revelation that she was not part of Beaumarchais’ plot against him and that she genuinely fell in love with him (predictably, Garrick in the earlier stages of the film has been shown as a total woman magnet, living as well as playing the role of Don Juan) sends him into a blue funk that leads him to threaten to cancel his long-awaited performance as Don Juan in the Comédie Française, but the omnipresent prompter points to her presence in a box in the theatre and, inspired, he goes on. (In a neat touch, the entire final reel of the film is scored by Adolph Deutsch with the overture to Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, based of course on the Don Juan story.)
From my study of James Whale’s films, which Charles and I have been screening in chronological order, I’ve come to the conclusion that Whale had three main themes to which he kept returning in film after film, regardless of the sheer multiplicity of genres in which he worked. One was horror, not only in the monster-movie sense that generated his most famous films but also the real-life horrors of war in general and the First World War in particular. When David J. Skal in his book The Monster Show showed real-life photos and drawings of people physically deformed by the wounds they suffered in World War I and the operations plastic surgeons put them through to try to remodel them into presentability and compared that to the creation of the Frankenstein Monster in both Mary Shelley’s novel and Whale’s film), he made an interesting connection reinforced by Whale’s personal history with World War I both as a participant (as a combat soldier and later an inmate in a German POW camp) and a dramatist (his first successes on both stage and screen were as director of fellow veteran R. C. Sherriff’s unsparing play Journey’s End).
Whale’s second theme is the theatre itself – many of Whale’s stories are about people involved in entertainment and the multiplicity of identities they take on – and that ties in to the third running theme in Whale’s movies, imposture. Reflecting both Whale’s social background as a working-class kid from the English Midland town of Dudley (where the main business was mining and smelting iron and the furnaces kept going so much the air there turned black) who reinvented himself as an aristocrat by doing to himself what Henry Higgins did to Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (which, come to think of it, would have been a near-perfect story for Whale to film!), namely learning to talk and act the part of an upper-class Brit; and also his sexual orientation, which forced everyone in his time with same-sex attractions to lead a double life and pose as either heterosexual or asexual to avoid the omnipresent threats of disgrace and prison, it’s no surprise that Whale was so drawn to stories about characters who are living double lives. Though Whale didn’t create the great scene in Show Boat in which Julie LaVerne is revealed as half-Black and her husband Steve literally drinks some of her blood and announces to the people who are about to arrest him for miscegenation that “everyone in this room can testify I have more than one drop of Black blood in me right now,” Whale staged it with an unusual sense of power and trauma that almost certainly reflects his own fear of being “found out” as a different but equally reviled sort of sexual outlaw.
The Great Garrick is not only about theatre people who pretend to be other people for a living, they glory in their own poses; Garrick himself is a man in love with his own theatricality, while the Comédie Française performers are role-players on top of role-players, posing in the film’s closest simulacrum to real life as genuine “characters” in a script by a major playwright that has somehow wandered off the stage and entered real life – or at least what passes for real life in this sort of film. The one character who is not an impostor (though even with her, one can’t be sure if her tall tale about fleeing an aristocratic father who wants her to marry someone she doesn’t love is supposed to be true, since it sounds like the sort of bad, clichéd drama the popular theatre of 1750 indulged in) is Georgette, and Olivia de Havilland plays her with an intense sincerity even though she becomes all too aware of the theatrical world she’s stumbled into, including its divided loyalties and elaborate games involving alternate identities.
The Great Garrick is a thematically rich movie that’s also a delight start to finish – at least for the right audience, which is its main problem. When he got this one-film reprieve from the strictures of Charles R. Rogers’ Universal (where, among other things, he was working for Americans who had the usual homophobic ideas instead of Europeans who pretty much accepted Gay and Lesbian people as just a normal part of the theatrical world) he needed a blockbuster hit that would have enabled him to get out of Universal once and for all and write his ticket at any of the major studios. What he actually made was a connoisseur’s film, which then as now was going to delight a certain part of the movie audience but leave most people either uninterested or actively put off by the artifice of the story and pretensions of the characters. The Warner Archive DVD we were watching The Great Garrick on also included the film’s original trailer, and as with the trailer for the bizarre 1933 Al Jolson musical Hallelujah, I’m a Bum! I can readily imagine 1937 audiences watching that trailer, going, “What the hell was that?,” and deciding they could live their lives quite well without going to see the film it was advertising. A pity, since they missed a great movie and a real tribute both to James Whale’s (and Ernest Vajda’s) artistry and the over-the-top theatrical world that so inspired both of them.
