Gregory La Cava (1937)
Brilliant entertainment. Based on a play by George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber (who also wrote – inter alia – Showboat and Giant), Stage Door is set mainly in the Footlights Club, a New York boarding house for girls aspiring to theatrical fame and fortune – and one or two older women who never achieved it. The boarders’ wisecracks come thick and fast – both the quality of the writing (the adaptation is by Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller) and the delivery of the lines are elating. Gregory La Cava does a great job of orchestrating the performances. The cast is theatrical in the best way – they’re a company – but the rhythms of the girls’ combative chatter are beautifully free and true. Orchestration really is the operative word here: La Cava understands the importance of creating a variety of timbre and tempos, of having some performers register by coming in under the more obvious soloists. The Depression setting increases the odds against the girls making it and their fear of failure gives the competitive wit an edge: verbal attack is the girls’ best (only) means of defence.
It’s obvious from an early stage, however, that the principal characters at least are going to have to learn lessons that give them depth of a more conventional (and less convincing) kind. It’s soon clear too that that process will centre on the person of Kay Hamilton, the dedicated, intensely desperate young actress struggling to pay the rent and whose whole life is set on the lead in ‘Enchanted April’, which the powerful, philandering Broadway producer Anthony Powell is about to stage. The climax of Stage Door arrives when Kay, who doesn’t get the part, commits suicide: she jumps from an upstairs window in the boarding house as the curtain is about to go up on the first night of ‘Enchanted April’. The starring role is being played instead by Terry Randall, the daughter of a vastly rich industrialist, who likes the idea of being an actress (as an act of rebellion) but who has no stage experience at all. Terry gets the lead thanks to her father’s financing the production. He does so with a view to exposing his daughter’s ambitions as a foolish fantasy and killing her theatrical pretensions as quickly as possible. Terry is just as hopeless as her father expects – until she learns of Kay’s suicide. The traumatic news is transforming. It not only humanises Terry; it turns her – sur le champ – into an emotionally passionate and expressive performer. This is not a one-night-only transformation but the beginning of a long run and, we assume, a stellar stage career.
Stage Door slides nervelessly between comedy and tragedy – a movement epitomised by the aging actress Catherine Luther. Most of the time, Catherine is a figure of fun, deploring the younger generation’s declining theatrical standards, latching onto Terry’s pretentious yatter about Shakespeare in order to indulge her own fragile vanity (Catherine’s yellowed newspaper clippings, for a performance she gave in Twelfth Night, are conveniently to hand). But when Terry, shocked by the news of Kay’s death, panics in her dressing room and says she can’t go on, Catherine’s insistence that the show must is presented without irony. You don’t remotely believe the serious side of Stage Door but, as I was watching it, I didn’t mind at all, assuming that the director and the writers were well aware of and amused by the falsity of their sudden change of tone. Reading the BFI programme note afterwards, I was less sure that this was true of the authors of the original play. Edna Ferber, at any rate, seems to have intended a straight-faced statement about the grind and agony of theatre life. But the film soon shakes off its darker mood – not least because Terry’s success (and her father’s failure) comes across as a comic payoff.
The superlative cast is headed by Katharine Hepburn as Terry and Ginger Rogers as her sharp-tongued, illusionless room-mate Jean Maitland. The film was made around the time Hepburn was reckoned ‘box office poison’. You can see why audiences disliked her high-strung hauteur – they must have accepted her in this role because they saw those qualities in Hepburn being lampooned (and paid for). Ginger Rogers is highly convincing as a working girl, wonderfully natural and witty: the opening verbal sparring between her and Hepburn is electric, with neither Terry/Hepburn nor Jean/Rogers giving an inch. When Jean Maitland’s in a chorus line, you want Ginger Rogers to show why she wouldn’t stay in one for long. She dances enough for you to be able to enjoy it but not enough to stop your feeling tantalised.
The supporting players include Eve Arden (particularly distinctive as a dry, drawling, cat-owning boarder), Constance Collier (charming as Catherine Luther), Ann Miller and Lucille Ball. Andrea Leeds is Kay Hamilton and Phyllis Kennedy is the Footlight Club’s very bad cook. Terry Randall is the newcomer there at the start; at the end another hopeful arrives to lodge there. She’s no Katharine Hepburn but her lack of obvious charisma seems like an odd foreshadowing of the charmlessly scheming Eve Harrington hanging round the stage door for Margo Channing in All About Eve. The men’s roles are relatively thin but very well played by, among others, Adolphe Menjou (Anthony Powell), Franklin Pangborn (his droll butler) and Jack Carson. The cat’s good too. Among the names on the credits are two of Hollywood’s most enduringly exotic: the producer was Pandro S Berman and the art director Van Nest Polglase.
27 March 2011
