"Clarence Brown: Hollywood's Forgotten Master"

[IA]

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.

[Big Silent Fan]

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.

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...
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"...

Gwenda Young's book effortlessly portrays a man who never let the Hollywood system interfere with his filmmaking instincts.

If contradictions make us human, then Clarence Brown was very human indeed...

Perhaps Gwenda Young is very human as well, seeing how she likes to label the entire life and work of someone under headings like 'Lesbians' or "Drunkards." Surely, Garbo and Brown's own wife deserve a more thoughtful look, especially considering the contradictions concerning Greta Garbo. She had a long love affair with John Gilbert, both on and off the screen. Garbo was every bit the complete woman, refusing to conform to what others insisted was proper.

I also know of at least one film where the studio interfered with Clarence Brown's intentions. I might think the ending to Flesh and the Devil was inspired, but Brown hated having to end the film that way. If it had been done his way, the final scene would have Garbo selecting a black hat and handkerchief with black lace border in a millinery shop; not drowning in the frozen lake.

This is how Brown described Greta Garbo in Kevin Brownlow's, "The Parade's Gone By..." (page 146):

Flesh and the Devil was my first picture for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and it really made Greta Garbo. It also triggered off the Garbo-Gilbert romance.
Greta Garbo had something that nobody ever had on the screen. Nobody. I don't know whether she even knew she had it, but she did. And I can explain it in a few words.
I would take a scene with Garbo--pretty good. I would take it three or four times. It was pretty good, but I was never quite satisfied. When I saw that same scene on the screen, however, it had something that it just didn't have on the set.
Garbo had something behind the eyes that you couldn't see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn't have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other. Nobody else has been able to do that on the screen. Garbo did it without the command of the English language.

That's the sort of Clarence Brown I've come to admire. He appreciated actors for their ability to act. To judge others by their private lives is simply wrong. Especially since it's only someone else's perspective of who they were.

[boblipton]

I’m a bit annoyed by the perceived contradiction, as if a conservative should embrace injustice.

Bob

[Rick Lanham]

I’m a bit annoyed by the perceived contradiction, as if a conservative should embrace injustice.

Bob

That was a mind-boggler for me also…

Rick

[R. Cat]

I’m a bit annoyed by the perceived contradiction, as if a conservative should embrace injustice.

Bob

That was a mind-boggler for me also…

Rick

From my perspective, it's not mind-boggling at all. On a professional level Clarence Brown apparently treated his actors with respect regardless of how he perceived their sexual orientation or political persuasion. Yes, that poses some head-scratching inconsistencies given his own socio-political biases, but at the same time makes the Director a more interesting study.

[Rick Lanham]

I’m a bit annoyed by the perceived contradiction, as if a conservative should embrace injustice.

Bob

That was a mind-boggler for me also…

Rick

From my perspective, it's not mind-boggling at all. On a professional level Clarence Brown apparently treated his actors with respect regardless of how he perceived their sexual orientation or political persuasion. Yes, that poses some head-scratching inconsistencies given his own socio-political biases, but at the same time makes the Director a more interesting study.

I wasn't writing about Clarence Brown at all. I was writing about the apparent political opinions of the author of the piece.

Rick

[maliejandra]

Looks good! I'm excited to read this. However, the list price seems pretty steep, so I hope my library picks one up that I can borrow.

[R. Cat]

That was a mind-boggler for me also…

Rick

From my perspective, it's not mind-boggling at all. On a professional level Clarence Brown apparently treated his actors with respect regardless of how he perceived their sexual orientation or political persuasion. Yes, that poses some head-scratching inconsistencies given his own socio-political biases, but at the same time makes the Director a more interesting study.

I wasn't writing about Clarence Brown at all. I was writing about the apparent political opinions of the author of the piece.

Rick

That was my point. I have no problems with the author's warts and all analysis of the Director's legacy.

By the same token I didn't perceive any particular bias on the author's part in analyzing Clarence Brown's legacy, at least none based on facts given the quotes provided. If you did perceive an unreasonable bias, please be more specific. In fairness to all parties, sometimes a raw analysis of any creator of art removed by several generation's distance can be both illuminating and evoke controversy given the tribal culture in which we live today.

[R. Cat]

Looks good! I'm excited to read this. However, the list price seems pretty steep, so I hope my library picks one up that I can borrow.

It is on the pricey side, but should be a great read. Only one book in the queue ahead of it, so it looks like my long suffering wallet will just have to ache a little more.