"Clarence Brown: Hollywood's Forgotten Master"
Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2018 7:10 pm
The new biography of Clarence Brown has just been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal:
More Than a Company Man
by Scott Eyman
Clarence Brown: Hollywood's Forgotten Master, by Gwenda Young.
Kentucky, 388 pages, $60
I no longer remember how Charlie Chaplin's name came up. But in the summer of 1974 Clarence Brown was intent on banishing all doubts. "Chaplin," Brown said in a stentorian tone as we sat in his living room, "was as red as that tablecloth." I glanced at the dining room. The tablecloth was extremely red.
If contradictions make us human, then Clarence Brown was very human indeed. A political conservative and a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals -- the group that promoted the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigations into Hollywood -- Brown also produced and directed "Intruder in the Dust" (1949), a nuanced and unsparing film that examined race relations in the segregated South. Based on the novel by William Faulkner, the picture was a passion project for Brown. Four decades earlier, he had witnessed the 1906 race riots in Atlanta: When it was over, as many as 25 black men were dead -- killed, in Brown's words, by "a goddamned mob of white men."
Brown's contradictions didn't stop there. As Gwenda Young reports in her sweeping and elegantly written biography "Clarence Brown: Hollywood's Forgotten Master," the actress Louise Brooks remembered that Brown "detested lesbians" but "adored [Greta] Garbo"; he "abominated drunkards," even though his third wife, Alice Joyce, was an alcoholic.
Unlike his peers at MGM, the studio where he spent a quarter of a century, Brown would regularly make very personal productions -- pastoral movies with startling undercurrents of emotional intensity and fear: These included "Of Human Hearts" (1938), "The Human Comedy" (1943), "National Velvet" (1944), "The Yearling" (1946), as well as "Intruder in the Dust." The New Yorker's Pauline Kael perceptively once pointed out that Brown's great strength -- his attention to the "passions and obsessions of childhood" -- was exceedingly rare among American filmmakers. But what set this director apart was more complicated than that. Brown's recurring evocation of a predominantly rural landscape and the people who inhabit those places positions him firmly within the tradition of poetic Americana as originated by D.W. Griffith and perfected by John Ford.
The movie maker's close friendship with Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, gave Brown a degree of freedom that other directors at the studio didn't have. When a producer suggested a happy ending for "The Yearling," a film about a young boy and his pet fawn, Brown was able to not only flatly refuse, he instead further amplified the film's tragic conclusion. Brown's privileged position within the studio was thanks in part for a string of successful vehicles he made with Garbo early on -- "Flesh and the Devil" (1926), "A Woman of Affairs" (1928), "Anna Christie" (1930), "Anna Karenina" (1935) and "Conquest" (1937) -- even though, in retrospect, Brown believed he was too deferential to the actress; he thought George Cukor got more out of her than he did because Cukor was more demanding.
Brown's long career at MGM came with a price -- a reputation as a company man that did him no favors with critics who established directorial hierarchies. He also told me he felt that his best experience in moviemaking had not been at MGM but at 20th Century Fox, where he made "The Rains Came" (1939) with producer Darryl Zanuck, who didn't allow the departmental infighting that was always a problem at MGM.
Brown once told me he thought his great weakness was sentimentality. He was probably right. "The Yearling" occasionally teeters on the edge of bathos, while "The Human Comedy" flies right over. But these are films consumed by death and loss. Brown's own experience with savage murder in 1906 left him with a permanent sense of man's intimate relationship with mortality.
Ms. Young has been working on her book for at least a decade. The good news is that it bears its voluminous research lightly. It is as gracefully told, as delicate and memorable, as the best work of its subject. She smoothly narrates Brown's childhood in Massachusetts, his education in Tennessee -- where he studied engineering -- his seduction by the movies and his directorial apprenticeship to the great stylist Maurice Tourneur, whom he revered.
When I interviewed Brown, he was 84 years old and living in a ranch house adjacent to the Los Angeles Country Club. He came across as an enjoyably plain-spoken man who preferred to analyze moviemaking as a series of problems in need of solutions -- a pragmatic approach that reflected his engineering background. The only time he became noticeably emotional was when he choked up at the mention of his wife Alice, a serenely beautiful actress of the silent era who died in 1955.
Clarence Brown died in 1987 at the age of 97. He left $12 million to the University of Tennessee. Gwenda Young's book effortlessly portrays a man who never let the Hollywood system interfere with his filmmaking instincts.
More Than a Company Man
by Scott Eyman
Clarence Brown: Hollywood's Forgotten Master, by Gwenda Young.
Kentucky, 388 pages, $60
I no longer remember how Charlie Chaplin's name came up. But in the summer of 1974 Clarence Brown was intent on banishing all doubts. "Chaplin," Brown said in a stentorian tone as we sat in his living room, "was as red as that tablecloth." I glanced at the dining room. The tablecloth was extremely red.
If contradictions make us human, then Clarence Brown was very human indeed. A political conservative and a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals -- the group that promoted the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigations into Hollywood -- Brown also produced and directed "Intruder in the Dust" (1949), a nuanced and unsparing film that examined race relations in the segregated South. Based on the novel by William Faulkner, the picture was a passion project for Brown. Four decades earlier, he had witnessed the 1906 race riots in Atlanta: When it was over, as many as 25 black men were dead -- killed, in Brown's words, by "a goddamned mob of white men."
Brown's contradictions didn't stop there. As Gwenda Young reports in her sweeping and elegantly written biography "Clarence Brown: Hollywood's Forgotten Master," the actress Louise Brooks remembered that Brown "detested lesbians" but "adored [Greta] Garbo"; he "abominated drunkards," even though his third wife, Alice Joyce, was an alcoholic.
Unlike his peers at MGM, the studio where he spent a quarter of a century, Brown would regularly make very personal productions -- pastoral movies with startling undercurrents of emotional intensity and fear: These included "Of Human Hearts" (1938), "The Human Comedy" (1943), "National Velvet" (1944), "The Yearling" (1946), as well as "Intruder in the Dust." The New Yorker's Pauline Kael perceptively once pointed out that Brown's great strength -- his attention to the "passions and obsessions of childhood" -- was exceedingly rare among American filmmakers. But what set this director apart was more complicated than that. Brown's recurring evocation of a predominantly rural landscape and the people who inhabit those places positions him firmly within the tradition of poetic Americana as originated by D.W. Griffith and perfected by John Ford.
The movie maker's close friendship with Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, gave Brown a degree of freedom that other directors at the studio didn't have. When a producer suggested a happy ending for "The Yearling," a film about a young boy and his pet fawn, Brown was able to not only flatly refuse, he instead further amplified the film's tragic conclusion. Brown's privileged position within the studio was thanks in part for a string of successful vehicles he made with Garbo early on -- "Flesh and the Devil" (1926), "A Woman of Affairs" (1928), "Anna Christie" (1930), "Anna Karenina" (1935) and "Conquest" (1937) -- even though, in retrospect, Brown believed he was too deferential to the actress; he thought George Cukor got more out of her than he did because Cukor was more demanding.
Brown's long career at MGM came with a price -- a reputation as a company man that did him no favors with critics who established directorial hierarchies. He also told me he felt that his best experience in moviemaking had not been at MGM but at 20th Century Fox, where he made "The Rains Came" (1939) with producer Darryl Zanuck, who didn't allow the departmental infighting that was always a problem at MGM.
Brown once told me he thought his great weakness was sentimentality. He was probably right. "The Yearling" occasionally teeters on the edge of bathos, while "The Human Comedy" flies right over. But these are films consumed by death and loss. Brown's own experience with savage murder in 1906 left him with a permanent sense of man's intimate relationship with mortality.
Ms. Young has been working on her book for at least a decade. The good news is that it bears its voluminous research lightly. It is as gracefully told, as delicate and memorable, as the best work of its subject. She smoothly narrates Brown's childhood in Massachusetts, his education in Tennessee -- where he studied engineering -- his seduction by the movies and his directorial apprenticeship to the great stylist Maurice Tourneur, whom he revered.
When I interviewed Brown, he was 84 years old and living in a ranch house adjacent to the Los Angeles Country Club. He came across as an enjoyably plain-spoken man who preferred to analyze moviemaking as a series of problems in need of solutions -- a pragmatic approach that reflected his engineering background. The only time he became noticeably emotional was when he choked up at the mention of his wife Alice, a serenely beautiful actress of the silent era who died in 1955.
Clarence Brown died in 1987 at the age of 97. He left $12 million to the University of Tennessee. Gwenda Young's book effortlessly portrays a man who never let the Hollywood system interfere with his filmmaking instincts.