≤br />by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All
rights reserved
The final item we watched on TVM last night was a 2016 documentary
called Leslie Howard: The Man Who Gave a Damn. I’m presuming the title
was a reference to Leslie Howard’s well-known patriotism, his insistence as soon
as Britain entered World War II that he needed to be back home regardless of his
success in the U.S. The film was directed and co-written by Thomas Hamilton and
narrated by one of his co-writers, David Partridge, who has an unusual and
macabre connection to Howard’s story. It seems that David Partridge was a
seven-year-old boy who was about to fly back from Lisbon, Portugal to London
when he was told that he wouldn’t be allowed on the plane because a Very
Important Person needed to go in his place. The Very Important Person was, of
course, Leslie Howard, and the plane was shot down off the coast of Spain by a
fighter-bomber from the Nazi German Luftwaffe and all aboard were killed. (It’s
like Waylon Jennings narrating a documentary about Buddy Holly.) For years the
story has been that the Germans thought British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
was aboard that plane and the Nazis targeted it for that reason, but Howard’s
daughter Leslie Ruth Howard said she didn’t believe that and that there were at
least three other people important to the British war effort on that plane that
the Germans could have been targeting.
The film then goes into Howard’s career, which was an unusual one;
though he was identified as British and was born in London, he was actually the
son of a Hungarian Jewish father and a part-German Jewish mother, and he grew up
in Austria and was bilingual in English and German. Howard’s dad tried to place
him in the banking business, but Howard couldn’t have been less interested in
it. Instead he preferred to write and act in one-person plays, and he got out of
his banking job by enlisting in World War I. Alas, he only lasted a week or so
in the trenches before he got a major infection and was invalided out, whereupon
he returned to England and set out to make his career as an actor. Howard
briefly formed a movie production company and made four minor comedies, but had
the usual problems faced by indie producers then and now – finding a distributor
– and the films flopped. He had better luck on the stage, though he doesn’t seem
to have had the anti-film prejudice of a lot of British actors (including
Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Vivien Leigh) who considered the stage as
their true calling and films only as a way to keep busy during the theatrical
off-season.
Howard’s big breakthrough came in a play called
Berkeley Square, which premiered in London in 1929 to only slight success
– it wasn’t a flop but it wasn’t a huge hit either. He was convinced that it
could be a big hit in America, so he raised the money to bring himself and the
original cast to Broadway. Berkeley Square opened just two weeks before
the 1929 stock market crash kicked off the Great Depression, which devastated
theatrical grosses generally (the rise of talking pictures had also hurt the
theatre business, not only by attracting audiences but eating up venues that had
previously presented live plays), but U.S. audiences flocked to see
Berkeley Square because it was the sort of escapist entertainment for
which there was still a market. Howard got offers from Hollywood to make movies,
and the writers of this documentary – Hamilton, Partridge and Alistair Wyllie –
have what I think is an undeservedly low opinion of many of the films he made in
the early 1930’s. I quite like at least two of them, A Free Soul and
Five and Ten, and I’m especially partial to A Free Soul because,
though it’s a contemporary story, it anticipates Howard’s best-known film,
Gone with the Wind, in being a two-man, one-woman love triangle with
Howard and Clark Gable as the two men. (There’s a funny story about Howard
auditioning the then-unknown Gable for a two-line part as a chauffeur in a play
and deciding he was too uncouth even for a chauffeur.)
A Free Soul was also unexpectedly significant in Howard’s
later career in that he was fascinated by the way its director, Clarence Brown,
shot the final sequence in which alcoholic attorney Lionel Barrymore delivers
his closing argument in the trial of Howard’s character for killing Gable’s; to
allow Barrymore to do the scene without having to stop for retakes and different
camera angles, Brown used multiple cameras so Barrymore could do the scene in
one take. (Frank Capra used a similar trick to direct Barbara Stanwyck, whom he
said delivered her best performance the first time she did a scene.) So when he
filmed the Philip Barry play The Animal Kingdom (1932), which he’d
originally done on the Broadway stage, he not only insisted on having most of
his supporting cast repeat their roles on film, he wanted the film’s director,
Edward H. Griffith, to use the same multi-camera technique for his big scene
with fellow actor Wolliam Gargan. It reflected and anticipated Howard’s growing
interest in directing his own films.
In 1934 Howard got the role of Philip Carey, the self-pitying
c;ub-footed anti-hero of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel Of Human Bondage,
only he was upset that RKO didn’t cast a British actress in the female lead,
lower-class waitress Mildred Rogers to whom Philip becomes infatuated. The film
became legendary for the studio’s difficulty in finding anyone willing to
play Mildred. Just about every prominent actress RKO approached turned the part
down, apparently because while male actors could have long and prosperous
careers playing villains, the belief in Hollywood was that for a woman to
sustain a long career, she had to play characters audiences would like. One
particular actress, the young Bette Davis, desperately wanted to play Mildred,
but she was under contract to Warner Bros. and Jack Warner wouldn’t loan her
out. Nevertheless, she persisted, and finally Jack Warner gave her the needed
permission with the words, “Go ahead and hang yourself.” Once Leslie Howard
actually started shooting on Bondage, he realized Davis was a brilliant
actress, totally up to the demands of the role. The two became friends and
worked together on two more films, The Petrified Forest (1936) and
It’s Love I’m After (1937).
The Petrified Forest also became the subject of a legendary
battle between Howard and Warner Bros., with whom he had signed a three-year
contract in 1933. Even though the contract was non-exclusive – a rarity in those
days – Howard still chafed at the restrictions. For The Petrified Forest,
based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood inspired by the real-life career of outlaw
John Dillinger, Howard had played effete poet Alan Squier and Humphrey Bogart
had played the Dillinger character, Duke Mantee (Bogart seems to have got the
part largely because of his amazing resemblance to the real Dillinger, and his
entrance on stage led to electrified gasps from audience members.) Jack Warner
wanted to cast Edward G. Robinson as Mantee in the film, but Howard cabled him
that if Bogart didn’t play Mantee, Howard wouldn’t be in the film either. Bogart
got the part (though his biographers Ann Sperber and Eric Lax say at least one
reason was they wanted to advertise The Petrified Forest as the second
on-screen teaming of Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, and Robinson’s contract
guaranteed him star billing) and was so eternally grateful he named his daughter
Leslie.
Howard frequently traveled back and forth between the U.S. and
Britain at a time before air travel became routine, and he sought opportunities
to work in his home country, including the 1934 film The Scarlet Pimpernel and
the 1938 film Pygmalion, based on George Bernard Shaw’s hit play which later
became the basis for the musical My Fair Lady. For Pygmalion Howard co-directed
the film with Anthony Asquith as well as starring in it, and one cast member
recalled that he would spend so much time working with the cinematographer
lining up a shot that he would forget he was also the star and he’d have to step
in front of the cameras to act. It’s also well known that Howard didn’t want to
do Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, not least because he was aware he was at
least a decade too old for the role, but apparently he responded to the aspect
of the story of how the Confederacy was fighting for its very existence against
a more powerful enemy, as his own country was doing during the early stages of
World War II.
In 1941 Howard both starred in and directed Pimpernel Smith, an
updated remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel in which the character was transposed to
modern times and his mission became aiding the enemies of Nazism to flee to
Britain. There’s a particularly obnoxious bit of “first-itis” in the writing of
this show in that Leslie Howard in Pimpernel Smith is named as the first time a
major star also directed his own vehicle. Huh? Do the names “Orson Welles” and
“Citizen Kane” mean anything to you? At the time Howard shot Pimpernel Smith,
Citizen Kane was already finished and was sitting in the RKO vaults waiting for
its executives to overcome their fear of William Randolph Hearst’s reaction and
release it. And two decades earlier, Erich von Stroheim had written, directed
and starred in Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives, two enormous hits for
Universal.
In 1942 Howard undertook his last film as star, The First of the Few
(released in the U.S. as Spitfire), a biopic of R. J. Mitchell, designer of the
Spitfire fighter plane that had given the British a fighting chance against the
Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. He also directed it, and it was the film
that made me a Leslie Howard fan; until then I’d written him off as an inferior
copy of Ronald Colman, but the power and drive of his performance as Mitchell
took my breath away when I first saw this film on a public-domain VHS tape in
the late 1980’s. Leslie Howard the director got a much better performance out of
Leslie Howard the actor than a lot of the more prestigious directors he’d worked
with before.
Hamilton, Partridge and Wyllie deserve credit for being able to
assemble a credible documentary about Leslie Howard from archival clips, given
that by 2016 most of the people who had known or worked with him were dead, and
the result is a remarkable tribute to a highly talented actor who, among other
things, maintained a long-term marriage despite reguloar dalliances and at least
two long-term affairs (with actress Merle Oberonn and a Frenchwoman named
Violette who tragically died of an infection before Howard did), and there’s the
usual speculation of what he might have done if he’d survived the war. The
consensus was he would probably have shifted to directing, especially since the
gentility that was Howard’s stock-in-trade as an actor was decidedly out of
fashion by the late 1940’s, replaced even in Britain by edgier, more aggressive
actors like Olivier and Gielgud (with whom he’d had a fabled “Battle of the
Hamlets” on Broadway in 1937; both of them opened in productions of
Shakespeare’s play and Variety’s reviewers rated Gielgud the better of the two).
