George Cukor (1947)
A Double Life, from a screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, is based on the idea of an actor becoming the role he plays. (This in turn is based on the idea that an actor is somehow inadequate as a human being – an empty vessel filled by the other people that he temporarily pretends to be.) I feel this is a well-worn premise although I can’t immediately think of other films or plays propelled by it. The actor’s name is Anthony John and he is played by Ronald Colman, whose first penetrating look to camera instantly announces a troubled mind. That look has terrific impact even if in retrospect it doesn’t make much sense: at this point John is enjoying a huge success in a drawing room comedy on Broadway. And Colman’s impatience is unnecessary anyway – within a few screen minutes Anthony John is being encouraged to play Othello and what’s to come is certain sure unless you don’t know what happened to the Moor of Venice.
Did those in the know find the film’s realisation of the contemporary theatre world believable? The smart dialogue and George Cukor’s direction certainly give it a convincing feel. There’s a crackle to the talk, particularly in the early scenes, about what actors, and this one in particular, do. Because it’s clear that the protagonist is destined to commit murder (and to pay for it with his life) the focus of A Double Life is on the character of Anthony John and the pressure is on Ronald Colman to keep the film going. The working out of the plot, once John has murdered Pat, a working-class girl who becomes John’s mistress in the hope of becoming an actress, is mechanical and protracted – there’s not much interest in waiting for the cop played by Edmond O’Brien to catch up with what the audience already knows. Fortunately, Colman is excellent. The bright dangerous eyes in a face that’s otherwise pale and ageing are very expressive – and the effect of seeing those eyes through the Moor’s dark make-up is strong. Colman is vocally less charismatic as Othello on the Broadway stage but he’s powerful speaking lines from the play as he finishes off Pat, who’s well played by Shelley Winters.
George Cukor too is much more successful handling the scenes between Anthony John and his ex-wife Brita or with Pat than he is with the scenes from Othello proper (and Signe Hasso also is more persuasive as Brita than she is as Desdemona). There’s a tension and rhythm in these exchanges – particularly John’s first conversation with Pat in the Italian eatery where she’s waitressing – that seem unusual for a Hollywood melodrama of the period. Cukor orchestrates the most extended excerpt from the play with great care but the effect is not quite right: this Broadway production of Othello is stranded uneasily between screen Shakespeare and stage Shakespeare. In visual terms, though, the sequences on stage are good. They’re dramatically lit (by Milton R Krasner) and the strangulation of Desdemona by a kiss – Anthony John’s big idea for making his Othello unique – is unnerving, just as the people in the theatre audience on the screen feel it to be.
5 June 2012
