Lots of actors who had impressed on the stage during the early years of talkies — when Hollywood talent scouts were scrambling to find new stars with voices as well as faces — had managed to dictate their own terms to the studios, and successfully. But not Aherne. He was given to self-sabotage and chronic indecision. Over time, his repeated waffling created enemies in high places who found it easier to ignore him than to haggle with him. And he never managed that one hugely popular starring vehicle that would’ve convinced studio heads that he was worth all the aggravation. With one breakthrough hit, Brian Aherne might be remembered today alongside the greats of Golden Age cinema. As it is, his name is practically forgotten and — even among the folks who know his face and films — his talents remain largely underrated.
Nothing about Aherne’s manner suggests that he had a hunger for superstardom, but his early career pointed in that direction. Born in Birmingham, England, in 1902, he first appeared onstage with the Pilgrim Players (later known as the Birmingham Repertory Theatre) when he was seven years old, and reached London’s West End by the age of 11. Although he dabbled, during his teenage years, with the notion of becoming an architect, the life of an actor was too appealing and the offers too plentiful. He spent his 20’s essaying lead roles in the West End (Jack O'Hara in a revival of Paddy the Next Best Thing, Langford in Leon Gordon’s White Cargo) and in the provinces. In 1926, impresario Dion Boucicault Jr. hired him to tour Australia as part of a troupe performing the plays of J.M. Barrie. Returning to the West End in 1927, he became a staple of the London theatre scene, boosting his notoriety in 1929 by originating the role of Brandon in Patrick Hamilton’s electrifying Rope, as one of two undergraduates determined to commit the perfect murder. (The play, inspired by the real-life murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 by University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, was adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock nearly 20 years later.)
At the same time, Aherne’s film career was taking off. His first screen appearance came in 1924’s The Eleventh Commandment, the only movie in which he was not top-billed. Between 1925 and 1931, he assumed leading roles in eight British films, including two now-classics from director Anthony Asquith (Shooting Stars and Underground). But it was his Broadway debut in 1931 — in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, opposite Katherine “Kit” Cornell (dubbed "The First Lady of the Theatre" by critic Alexander Woollcott) — that made Hollywood take notice. The acclaimed production opened in February of 1931 and ran over 300 performances, then toured the United States for an additional four years. (Aherne and Cornell would ultimately costar in eight additional Broadway plays.) In its July, 1931 issue, Screenland magazine — always on the hunt for promising newcomers — devoted a lavish spread to this fresh and commanding talent:
Is Hollywood overlooking a bet in Brian Aherne, Broadway's combination of Gary Cooper and Ronald Colman? There’s star material in those broad shoulders, clean-cut features, Cooper eyes and Colman accent — to say nothing of an acting talent that made all the New York critics eat their old adjectives. At the moment Mr. Aherne is playing in America for the first time — imported especially to play Robert Browning to Katherine Cornell's Elizabeth Barrett in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, a play based on the poet's real romance. The play is a success, as are all Miss Cornell's productions, but for the first time in this great young actress's career she has shared her applause and critical attention with her leading man. Mr. Aherne has scored with his portrayal of Browning; playing a Victorian poet, he yet manages to be vital, ingratiating, humorous! If Hollywood doesn't know about Brian Aherne, we’re suggesting that he be signed without delay!
In short, he was the hottest thing on Broadway, and this was at a time when — as so many silent film stars found themselves washed up with the coming of sound — movie producers were trolling the boards for fresh talent. Small wonder that every studio wanted him. But the studios expected their new artists to sign long-term contracts, something Aherne refused to do. His heart belonged to the stage, and he was unwilling to abandon Broadway or the West End for years on end, just to satisfy the contractual wishes of a studio.
His wasn’t an unusual case. Quite a few ’30s stage stars were hesistant to devote themselves full-time to film. Margaret Sullavan might be the best example of a star who insisted Hollywood play by her rules. Wooed by all the studios, she settled on a three-year deal with Universal that allowed for summers off to return to the stage. But Aherne’s demands were much more stringent: he insisted on a contract that provided for six months on and six months off — and MGM reluctantly agreed. In retrospect, it doomed his Hollywood career when it was barely underway. It made it virtually impossible for the studio to attach him to a project unless the start date was set in stone, and made it perilously hard for them to build his brand. One of the ways studios nurtured stars was to ensure that they were in front of the camera enough that if one film flopped, there was another on the way. Aherne never allowed himself that cushion. In 1934, Aherne’s second year in Hollywood, he appeared in just two films. (Cary Grant appeared in no less than six, Gable and Cooper in four.) Between 1936 and 1938, he appeared in one per year. Margaret Sullavan had been just as choosy with her roles and her time, but her first film had proven a smash hit that established her as a bankable new star. Aherne had no such luck. He was increasingly greeted with lavish critical praise for films that underwhelmed financially. Of his first ten Hollywood films, half failed at the box office — two in spectacular fashion. And the others were modest hits at best. (Ironically, his insistence on splitting his time between screen and stage didn’t advance his theatrical career either. When his first film at MGM went into retakes, he missed rehearsals for a play he was to do in London, alienating his producers and fellow cast members.)
Aherne made dreadful career choices. At one point, the three biggest independent producers in Hollywood (Walter Wanger, Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick) — recognizing his gifts and his apprehension about tying himself down — offered him an unprecedented contract where they would share his services, on projects on which he had right of approval. He turned them down; he had started dating someone in England, and she was disenchanted with his long absences. (They broke up shortly thereafter.) Aherne’s ruinous decisions have become almost legendary; in the same six-month period in which he turned down Wanger, Goldwyn and Selznick, he also rejected an offer from MGM to star in Romeo and Juliet opposite Norma Shearer — even after George Cukor had screen-tested the two of them and the MGM brass had proven enthusiastic. Aherne, prone to overanalyzing, insisted he was too mature for Romeo. (In typical Hollywood fashion, MGM handed the role to Leslie Howard, nine years his senior.) During this six-month period, he also turned down an offer to play
And something else hampered his rise to fame. In his autobiography, A Proper Job, Aherne describes his acting approach, and what he saw as a key factor in his inability to achieve stardom:
Is there something self-serving about the way he categorizes himself, exalting himself while at the same time excusing his ability to achieve greater celebrity? Perhaps — but there’s also more than a grain of truth to it. Let’s not kid ourselves. Our culture is more impressed by personality than talent — it always has been, and never more so than in the heyday of the studio system, when the public was fed a steady diet of carefully crafted details about their favorite stars. If a star had a brand, they were easier to promote. Few leading actors at the time had Aherne’s skill and range, but most had clearer onscreen personae — something Aherne resolutely lacked and assiduously avoided. He worked from the inside out, finding the core of a character and letting everything flow from there: the body language, the tenor of his delivery, the speed of his reactions. Even the way in which his hands fidgeted with props. (Reminiscent of his story about the actor who found his character when handed a green umbrella, he frequently armed himself with a pipe of some sort — a Ronson, a Zulu, a Prince — and never approached it the same way twice.) And when he was only appearing one or two times per year onscreen — and varying his look and approach drastically from film to film — it was difficult for audiences to retain their memory of his last performance when they sat down to his next one.
There are quite a few impressive Brian Aherne performances on the screen in the 1930’s; after that, not so many. Most of the studios weren’t interested in hiring him anymore. By the 1940’s, pretty much only Columbia — one of the "Little Three" of the major studios (along with United Artists and Universal) — gave him regular work, and mostly in lackluster vehicles. In the ’40s, he’s asked to headline — to buoy and to salvage — so many subpar films, it’s almost a relief by the ’50s when he’s relegated to supporting roles in films that are of mercifully higher quality. I’m not going to do a chronological dive into each of Brian Aherne’s films (it doesn’t seem the best way to examine his singular talent), although I will try to put key films in context. But if you’re looking to see what made Brian Aherne special, I might suggest you start with these six films. All are worthy vehicles ranging from excellent to exceptional, and Aherne’s performances are not merely beyond reproach; they’re frequently dazzling and disarming.
Aherne had been lured to Hollywood with a two-picture deal from Paramount: to star opposite Marlene Dietrich in Rouben Mamoulian’s The Song of Songs, followed by an adaptation of the classic novel Peter Ibbetson. But The Song of Songs was not a hit — and Aherne’s performance was neutered by Mamoulian. Playing opposite three vibrant personalities (Dietrich, Lionel Atwill and Alison Skipworth), Aherne desperately wanted to give some character and colors to his struggling sculptor: to imbue him with idiosyncrasies emblematic of the artist at work. Mamoulian insisted he play him as a standard leading man, and the resulting performance — although sound and effective — barely hinted at what Aherne was capable of. When the film flopped (through no fault of Aherne’s), Paramount withdraw their offer for him to star in Peter Ibbetson; Aherne, in the meantime, accepted an invitation to return to the UK for the second screen adaptation of Margaret Kennedy’s play The Constant Nymph — and to show just how vibrant and original he could be playing an artist obsessed with his work. His composer in The Constant Nymph is in some ways the furthest thing from a leading man: a musical genius with ruffled hair and eyes that don’t quite seem focused, who’s taken to running across fields like a gazelle with rubber legs. Aherne could have been played the role more conventionally (see Charles Boyer in the 1943 remake), but after the disappointment of Song of Songs, he wanted to show how decidedly uncommon he could be — to test himself and even the limits of what a romantic lead could be on the screen. It’s a daring and triumphant performance, and if he’s occasionally upstaged by his co-star Victoria Hopper (as the young muse who becomes his soulmate), it doesn’t matter, because when they’re together, you buy into their untraditional love affair completely. His performance was highly acclaimed when The Constant Nymph was released in the States in the spring of 1934, and prompted RKO to reach out to Aherne with a promising offer.
RKO had purchased British author Charles Morgan’s sprawling 685-page novel The Fountain, and set out adapting it as a vehicle for one of their biggest stars, Ann Harding. For this wartime triangle involving a woman, her injured husband, and her former schoolmate, RKO borrowed Paul Lukas from Universal to play the husband; for the other role — the romantic lead — they wooed Aherne (then touring the country with The Barretts of Wimpole Street) into giving Hollywood another chance. In A Proper Job — more an accounting of the high and low points of his life than a recitation of his film and stage credits — Aherne makes no mention of The Fountain. It was certainly not an insignificant work to him: it was only his second Hollywood film, and Harding was one of the screen’s most accomplished leading ladies. (Her background and sensibility very much mirrored Aherne’s own.) Directed by the formidable John Cromwell, The Fountain boasts one of Aherne’s most powerful — and defining — screen performances, and it's in many ways a film quite unlike any produced in Hollywood at the time. But it was a financial failure, and perhaps putting so much work into a movie that didn't register with Middle America (though big-city audiences embraced it) made it a memory Aherne didn't want to revisit. (Both Harding and Cromwell, late in life, recalled it as one of their finest films.)
Morgan’s novel is told mostly through narration, which made it a tricky adaptation. RKO made a couple of shrewd moves. They hired the reliable Jane Muftin (whose titles included Little Women, Ann Vickers and Harding‘s own The Life of Vergie Winters and Double Harness) to trim the book into something that would fit comfortably on the screen, then brought in Samuel Hoffenstein — a screenwriter who had found his greatest success as a poet — to write the dialogue. Hoffenstein borrows very little from the novel; he finds ways to convey in his own words the sentiments that consumed Morgan — but in a fashion far more conducive to the screen. Yet The Fountain remains a challenging watch. It requires attention and patience and — not to put too fine a point on it — a certain level of sophistication. The romance between Harding and Aherne never evolves into passionate displays of affection; the love triangle never degenerates into angry recriminations. These are people who think about their actions — they think about them too much. They’re prone to philosophizing; they spend their days analyzing their existence and trying to ascertain their purpose. Above all, they’re anxious to carve out a corner of the world where they can be shielded from life’s horrors.
The opening — which finds Englishman Lewis Allison (Aherne) and his fellow officers being transported to an internment camp in neutral Holland in 1916 — provides crucial balance to the rest of the film. It also provides our first insights into Lewis’s character. Interned in a castle near Oostland, Lewis — a writer and publisher — thinks he’s found his ideal existence: “Hanging around here, to me, is heaven — or at least the nearest I’ll ever get to it.” He sees the months they spend there as the only real freedom he’s known; he spends his days reading, studying and relaxing. Nonetheless, his fellow officers convince him to help plot an escape, and as they dig a tunnel beneath their bunks, his best friend Ballater demands of him, “What is it you want, anyway? “Nothing much,” Lewis replies: “Peace of mind, I should say.” His friend insists, “That’s too vague,” and Lewis tries harder to elucidate: “Well, call it stillness of spirit.”
That search for “stillness of spirit” will come to haunt all three principals. When a general parole is declared (providing the officers remain in Holland), Lewis finds himself invited to stay at the estate of a Baron and Baroness. As he reads their letter of introduction, emotions sweep across his face that you can’t quite make out. Gratitude certainly, relief perhaps — but when he sees that the invitation is from someone he knew at Oxford, who signs it “with love from Julie,” his face glows with anticipation. (Julie, as it turns out, is the Baroness’s daughter; she’s come to Holland to stay with her mother and stepfather for the duration of the war.) But as much as Lewis looks forward to reuniting with Julie, his excitement is short-lived; Julie, it turns out, has also been trapped in a prison — but one of her own making. Although her husband Rupert is a German officer, Julie feels no empathy with Germany — but she’s been abroad for so long, she’s felt her connection to England slip away. Judged and condescended to by her stepfather’s family, Julie has come to see herself as “an outside breed,” and confides in Lewis, “Inside of me I feel as though I were beating against a wall in the dark, trying to find a door that would let me out. It’s rather a desperate state to be in.”
Lewis had found the internment camp “heaven”; reconnecting with his first love — yet being unable to be with her — feels like purgatory. When Julie purposefully lets it slip that she’s never been in love with Rupert (he’s so self-sufficient, he’s never once seemed to need her: the quality she most craves), Lewis — unwilling to cuckold her husband — fights to contain the passion they once felt. But when news comes of a crushing English maritime defeat — and the rest of the family rejoices that the war might be nearing its conclusion — he and Julie can’t help but bond over the sense of isolation they share. The fear of a German victory prompts him to cast aside all pretenses, giving into emotions that have no outlet: “The thing I tried to escape from was the thing I was looking for. It was you, Julie. It had your name, it had your face. What’s the use of pretending? What’s the use of being strong?” And Julie — stricken with a crippling sense of alienation — rejoices to have someone who understands how very unjust life can be, and the futility of fighting it: “What comfort is there in strength? What peace is there in greatness? Let the strong and the great have their paradise. We don’t belong in it.”
This is demanding prose, and the drama is conveyed not merely in words, but in lingering looks that throb with meaning — and through Max Steiner’s score as well. When the story can no longer be furthered in lines or in looks, the music takes over. The room Lewis uses as a library sits just below the room Julie refers to as her “sanctuary.” A door, locked and swollen shut for many years, leads to a spiral staircase connecting the two. Longing to tighten their bond, Julie implores Lewis to help her unlock and pry open the door, then she leads him up the staircase. Once seated at the piano in her sanctuary, she pours out her soul in stirring arpeggios and dramatic cadences. A floor below, Sophie — the unhappiest member of her step-family — enters Lewis’s study, hears the music from upstairs and sees the door between the two rooms ajar. And at that moment, all of Julie’s pianistic flourishes resolve in the first utterance of the F-minor theme we’ll come to associate with Lewis and Julie. Sophie hears the theme and intuits what’s happening on the floor above. As she exits, the camera rises to reveal Julie playing and Lewis listening — wistfully, forlornly and entirely entranced. There’s no need for a show of physical intimacy between the two. A connection has been made that exceeds intimacy; Sophie might as well have walked in on the two of them making love.
Midway through the film, word comes that Rupert has been wounded in battle, and will be dependent upon his wife to help him heal — and Julie feels obligated to send Lewis away. (The stillness of spirit that Lewis once strove for — the “road beyond suffering” he dreamed of — has never seemed so hopelessly out of reach.) In a remarkable feat of acting, Aherne appears to grow more gaunt and pale with every blow, as all the things Lewis thirsted for — peace of mind, hope, love, Julie — are slowly stripped away. When Rupert returns home, it turns out that he too is burdened by the same quest as Lewis. He asks to meet the man with whom his wife has spent her days, and as he and Lewis bond over their common philosophy — and Lewis comes to realize how much he shares with his rival — you see in Aherne’s performance how Lewis’s heart quietly breaks: for Rupert, for Julie, for himself — all three searching in vain for what Rupert describes as “the struggle of the human spirit to find peace: peace it doesn’t want, but that it must find to endure what it must endure.”
In the Los Angeles Times, critic W.E. Oliver enthused, “I have never seen more good performances collected in one picture …. Brooding beauty saturates the film, beauty of the feelings of gentle, civilized folk retaining their decency midst the brutality of war. It will be [long] remembered for its power.” Oliver’s prediction has proven correct. Although the film initially lost $150,000 at the box office and faded for a while into obscurity, it’s been reclaimed by the latest generation of film critics and aficionados. When he penciled his autobiography, Aherne was of course unaware that the film would prove enduring; had he known, he no doubt would’ve hailed it as the first Hollywood film — one of the few, actually — to show his talents at their finest and fullest. Near the end, following Rupert‘s death, when the two lovers have come to fear that too much has happened for them to reunite in the way they once dreamed, Lewis determines to go to London and Julie to Venice — but she suggests, as elliptically as ever, that she might find her way home once the winter has passed. And in his delivery of Hoffenstein’s final line — in which he cautiously reminds her that “England is beautiful in the spring” — Aherne eloquently expresses the promise of hope that seems to be forever dampened by the expectation of defeat. They look at each other longingly, ruefully, mournfully, and we come to realize that these two have suffered the war far worse than Rupert did. Their bodies survived, but their souls were shattered. Aherne and Harding leave your own soul a bit shattered, too.
As a coda, Aherne did one more film for RKO in the 1930’s: Sylvia Scarlett, the first in a string of flops that led Katherine Hepburn to be labeled box-office poison. For almost a century now, Hepburn fans and George Cukor auteurists have been struggling to do an reassessment, or at least to explain the film’s financial failure in positive artistic terms: the film was ahead of its time; its controversial subject matter made audiences uneasy. Or, you know, in some cases, a flop film just lives up to its (bad) reputation. Neither Hepburn nor Cukor were looking for a reevaluation. When the film was screened at Cukor’s home, they both knew it was so awful that they offered to make producer Pandro Berman another film for free if he agreed never to release this one. It’s a mystifying mess, built on a simple premise that the authors seem to lose track of five minutes in. When her father is forced to escape France to England (having gambled away the money he’s embezzled from his employers), young Sylvia Scarlett — aware that the police will be looking for a man traveling with his daughter — manages the trip by disguising herself as a boy. And then she remains dressed as a boy. What possibly prompts her to remain dressed in drag for most of the film’s length? (We don’t hear another word about the people her father stole from; are we supposed to believe that, months later, they’re still out there scouring the English countryside?) The strangest and most telling thing about Sylvia Scarlett is that when the others — one by one — discovers she’s a girl, no one asks why she’s been disguised as a boy all this time. They can’t ask because the screenwriters never came up with a reason. The film feels tethered to an unwieldy premise — until Sylvia‘s sudden infatuation sets it free. She meets Aherne, a bohemian artist, and instantly desires to be a young woman again. When she searches the beach for some clothes she can steal to present herself to him properly, the film starts to feel like it’s finally dabbling in something of consequence. And when she goes to see him — and he realizes at once that she’s a woman — the film takes off. Hepburn and Aherne hit all their notes perfectly, as she struggles to be the sort of woman she imagines he wants, and he can’t help but giggle at how nervous and awkward she is. And then the magic happens when — artist that he is — he suggests they play the whole scene again, and she goes outside and comes back in, and she’s acquired a certain amount of knowledge and grace, and he’s fully prepared for what he’s about to see — and you watch the romance take wing. You even see her — quickly and admirably — learn the tricks of a woman’s trade that he has been telling her about, as he leans in for a kiss, then she pulls away coquettishly. Hepburn’s transformation into a boy was never remotely convincing; her transformation into a young woman is a delight, and full of delicacies you had no idea the film was capable of. And Aherne matches her beat for beat; as he plays it, the fact that he’s an artist makes him all the more willing to accept her idiosyncrasies — and not just accept them, but embrace them. The love story almost salvages the film — almost. But audiences loathed it all. The Fountain, a critical success, was a box-office failure, but a modest one; Sylvia Scarlett was an artistic and financial disaster of epic proportions. Aherne had appeared in two money losers in a row at RKO. The studio didn’t call upon his services again for nearly a decade.
Aherne’s brief time at MGM — six months on, six months off — began after the completion of The Fountain; like his time at RKO, it didn’t last long. MGM had wooed him by offering him What Every Woman Knows, opposite Helen Hayes; set in Scotland, J.M. Barrie’s 1908 play concerns the Wylie family, who agree to fund a young man’s studies for five years, providing at the end of it, he marry their “old maid” sister Maggie. Aherne had played student-turned-politician John Shand on tour in Australia, and was enthusiastic about the opportunity to reprise it on film. He delivered a bravura performance, eschewing likability for the sake of authenticity. (The New York Times cheered, “In a striking piece of acting, Brian Aherne presents the lummox John Shand as he should be: humorless, single-minded, without perception, or vision, or even common understanding.”) But Helen Hayes, nearly a decade after playing Maggie on Broadway, had lost the essence of her character, substituting something precious and mannered. (She seems to have forgotten everything she once found in the role except the self-pity.) And director Gregory La Cava’s customary elasticity seems hopelessly at odds with the stodgy material. With What Every Woman Knows promising to underwhelm at the box office, MGM placed Aherne into a sure-fire hit guaranteed to boost his visibility: the comedy I Live My Life, opposite Joan Crawford, one of the studio’s most valuable properties. As it turned out, Crawford and Aherne are about the only items in the film worth watching. Almost no one else is doing their best work: not director Woody Van Dyke, not writer Joseph Mankiewicz, not beloved supporting players Frank Morgan, Arthur Treacher, Eric Blore or Esther Dale. Not cinematographer George Folsey or art director Cedric Gibbons — and most assuredly, not costume designer Adrian, whose love-hate relationship with Crawford prompts him to dress her in some absolute monstrosities. Nothing works except the film’s two stars. In the “runaway heiress“ role that had become de rigueur in Hollywood barely a year after It Happened One Night, Crawford puts lovely, fizzy spins on her lines that you don’t see coming, and when she and Aherne have a whale of a fight right before their final-reel wedding, her angriest accusation turns into a cry of pain, even if she’s saying it. It’s one of her most seemingly spontaneous performances, and it’s not unreasonable to imagine that Aherne had something to do with it. She was playing opposite a star of the Broadway stage — someone whose credentials were far loftier than her own — and she acts like she has something to prove. If she was intimidated by him, she puts that intimidation to good use. And Aherne — as a humble architect turned reluctant businessman — convinces during every stage of his transformation, even when the transitions themselves are left unclear by the screenplay. (Mankiewicz gives him a bravura late-stage monologue — in which he savages the high-rise job he’s been forced to take by ironically extolling its many virtues — that seems like the kind of speech you’d deliver onstage, to rapturous applause. No one in Hollywood could’ve pulled that scene off better.) But as noted, I Live My Life feels like exactly what it is: a film hastily assembled to showcase a proven star and an up-and-coming one.
With MGM running afoul in its efforts to make Aherne a household name — while running out of patience with his on-again/off-again schedule — Samuel Goldwyn approached him with an offer to star opposite Merle Oberon in a fictionalized account of the life of Michael Collins (here renamed Dennis Riordan), the revolutionary and politician who was a leading figure in the early-20th century struggle for Irish independence. Goldwyn’s only condition: that Aherne ask to be released from his contract at Metro. Since Aherne and MGM’s uneasy alliance was growing increasingly strained, both parties agreed.
Beloved Enemy gives Aherne the sort of buildup designed to turn an actor into a star. The entire opening sequence is structured to anticipate the star’s entrance. We see members of the IRA in their headquarters, each foot soldier receiving orders — and swearing allegiance to the name of Dennis Riordan. Outside, we see British forces pulling up to raid the building, and they, too, can’t help invoking his name. (No one in British intelligence knows what he looks like.) Aherne has a lot to live up to by the time he appears — we anticipate someone larger than life: classically handsome and heroic — and Aherne doesn’t disappoint. Whereas Lewis in The Fountain (another soldier in much the same time period) felt frail and wraithlike, Riordan is full-bodied, with piercing eyes and a face that somehow feels fuller. He’s uncommonly alert. With a prominent English ambassador due in town to determine how best to quash the rebellion, his colleagues want to step up their reign of terror, but Riordan scolds them: “We’re not a handful of conspirators, but the government of a free people.” Riordan lives by a code that’s shaped him into the man that he is, and within a few scenes, we get a full sense of just how rich Aherne’s portrayal is going to be. He captures Riordan’s warmth, his humility, his stubbornness, his pride, his deep capacity for caring, his occasional obliviousness, his outrage and his impetuousness — and his unyielding belief in his country’s right to independent rule.
The screenplay gets off to an amusing start. Captured by the authorities for being at the wrong place at the wrong time, he cops to the name “Dennis Riordan,” knowing no one will believe him. When the ambassador‘s daughter Helen (Merle Oberon) later realizes that she and the British authorities were duped, she hatches a plan to see that Riordan is captured. Although she instantly has second thoughts (she’s already started to develop feelings for him), she learns how easy it is to get caught up in political intrigue: to let your emotions so take hold of you that you’ll do anything — give up anything — to score a win. But when she comes to him begging for his forgiveness, he has no patience for her posturing. He has no patience for her people. Having flirted with her — and started to care for her — has made him a harder man than he was at the start. Her betrayal has only affirmed all that he’s fighting for — and against. She begs him to understand, but he counters, “You can keep your benevolence to yourself. I do understand you. You hate nothing and you love nothing. You live inside your stuffy heads where no feelings ever enter. You people think you can kill us and still be our friends. It’s an amazing kind of people you are, with ice in your hearts.”
But ultimately, of course, the ice in both their hearts melts, and it’s here that we get the most extraordinary scene in the film. Beloved Enemy was the first film helmed by noted stage director H.C. Potter, and the set pieces — the skirmishes in the streets and the chases across rooftops — are well staged. Potter maintains an admirable level of tension. But it’s in the handling of the love story that Potter impresses most. Riordan — as John Balderston’s screenplay imagines him — is prepared to die for his country’s freedom, but he secretly harbors a dream of someday retiring to a farm and putting aside the conflict that’s consumed him. But he doesn’t let that vision take shape until he meets Helen, and then he can’t seem to keep it from surfacing. At a time when it appears that their love is most doomed, he pulls her into that dream with a quiet desperation, seducing her with words rather than actions. Potter stages it with Oberon facing the camera and Aherne in profile, whispering in her ear, and this simple setup makes for one of the sexiest scenes ever committed to film, as Riordan — ever the tactician — makes love to her in the conditional perfect tense:
Riordan: All the years after you’ll be gone from me, I’ll be thinking about what might’ve been, and maybe it would be good to know if we both thought of it same way.
And Potter goes in for an even deeper close-up.
Riordan: Laughing, crazy all the day…
He casts his gaze downwards, realizing how unlikely his dreams sound. And sensing his pain, she turns to him, sees the sadness in his eyes and cries on his behalf, “God help us both.” And they kiss.
The marvelous thing about Beloved Enemy is that — other than the scene above — Dennis and Helen spend very little time talking about their love. They’re too consumed with politics. As Aherne plays it, Riordan’s core values aren’t diminished by his falling in love. He doesn’t temper his beliefs to conform to Helen’s more pacifist views. She doesn’t make him rethink his approach to Irish independence — even towards the end, he resolutely believes that “freedom has always been bought with lives” — but he does gain fresh perspective. Helen begins as a conquest, but winds up as a confidante — or perhaps his conscience. (“I can’t forget the lads that died and all they fought for,” he insists. “Is it wrong to forget those who want to live?” she wonders, and he’s quick to reply, “Yes, if we fail the dead in order to bring easy comfort to the living.”) Through their discussions, he comes to realize that there might be a diplomatic solution that he hadn’t considered — as Michael Collins himself came to conclude. The scenework between the two of them is exemplary; I don’t think Oberon was ever quite so relaxed yet surprising onscreen. And as for Aherne, it’s hard to imagine who else could’ve tackled this role so effectively — cutting such a dashing figure, yet so beautifully conveying Riordan’s inner torment. He manages to be both quiet lover and ardent warrior.
Only the end of Beloved Enemy — as seen today, at least — fails to impress. In the film that was screened for critics in 1936, Riordan died at the end, betrayed — as Collins himself was — by the faction of the IRA that resented his signing of the Anglo-Irish treaty. And indeed, all the foreshadowing about the danger Riordan faces from forces within only makes sense if he dies by an assassin’s bullet, and the love affair plays out as a beloved memory. But although the critics hailed the tragic ending, moviegoers were dissatisfied. Aherne and Oberon had done their jobs too well; audiences didn’t want their love to be thwarted by violence. Goldwyn substituted a quick ending in which Riordan survives the assassination attempt: the only version known to survive. The ending comes as a letdown, but the film nonetheless gave Aherne his first real box-office hit.
Aherne was riding high after Beloved Enemy, but it didn’t last long. His next film, The Great Garrick — which demonstrates his talent and versatility better than any other film, in a role that no other actor in Hollywood could have approached with the same virtuosic flair — proved one of his biggest flops. Jack Warner, with characteristic class and restraint, told Aherne’s agent that he never wanted to see Aherne on the lot again. Aherne later admitted, “Hollywood washed their hands of me after The Great Garrick.”
And yet The Great Garrick offers not just one of Aherne’s most memorable performances, it’s also sheer delight. It’s hard to imagine a daring premise for a ’30s film: a duel between two distinctive acting styles, told through the eyes of a long-forgotten historical figure. (Small wonder that ‘30s audiences couldn’t connect to it.) Jack Warner presumably greenlighted it, and not since A Midsummer Night’s Dream had he given the go-ahead to anything nearly as ambitious — and so potentially disastrous. The Great Garrick is a fictional anecdote in the life of historical figure David Garrick, considered the greatest English actor in the early and mid-18th century. As directed by James Whale with style and flourish — and with the same devilish sense of humor that had distinguished his Universal horror films — the film was clearly a labor of love for all involved (Warners assigned it its A team: cinematographer Ernest Haller and art director Anton Grot), and what results is a magnificent staging of an inspired and riotously funny narrative. The Great Garrick imagines that — following performances of Hamlet at the Theatre Royale Drury Lane — Garrick has been invited to perform with the Comédie Française in Paris. A chance remark about the company — taken out of context — reaches Paris, where the theatre troupe grows so offended by the perceived slight that they determine to teach Garrick a lesson: they’ll ambush him at an inn en route to Paris and disguise themselves as employees and guests, to drive him mad and drive him away. Will Garrick get wise? Who will outwit whom?
Aherne walks a fine line throughout, convincing us that he’s playing a thespian so great that noblemen and peasants alike would crowd the theatre to see him perform Hamlet, and yet such a self-absorbed ham that he’d not only make changes to the text but advertise them. (The signs outside the theatre announce “Hamlet: With Alterations.”) And yet every new opening night terrifies him, and he’s given to faking illness to try to avoid them. Aherne pitches his performance to incorporate three sides of David Garrick: the man, the trained actor and the born performer; as Aherne conceives him, Garrick is forever play-acting in life as he is on stage, varying his tenor and tone and intensity to achieve the desired effect and result.
The Great Garrick is a character-driven farce about artifice and duality: one scenario is playing out on the screen, another behind the scenes. Aherne crafts a performance that allows the viewer to see something entirely different from what the characters in the film are imagining — and the other actors take their cue from him. When Olivia de Havilland’s Germaine — the only character with no theatrical background, an inadvertent intruder on the Comédie Française’s charade — turns up at the inn, needing a room for the night, the actress has to pitch her sob story so it will seem equally convincing as the truth (which it is) and as an acting improvisation, which Garrick mistakes it to be. When Garrick then determines to make love to her (which he convinces himself the Comédie Française is expecting), he has to ensure that his wooing is flowery enough that we laugh at its absurdity (“Don’t you remember how once I stood beneath your balcony, in fair Verona?”), but sincere enough that Germaine sees it as an honest expression of sudden desire. And when the members of the Comédie Française enact their various roles at the Adam and Eve Inn — the unctuous innkeeper, the surly blacksmith, the obliging maids — they have to play them broadly enough to entertain the movie audience, but reasonably enough that they still convince as a company of respected thespians.
The fact that Whale can work so many angles with such accuracy stems from the glories of Aherne’s performance: a high-wire act that he performs confidently and faultlessly. He blurs the line between truth and fiction, between honesty and chicanery. The times when Garrick’s emotions are at their rawest — when he’s the most furious or the most disgraced — are the times he grows the most theatrical. He can’t just humiliate Germaine; he has to stage a scene to humiliate her. And at the end, he can’t just admit his love and beg forgiveness; he has to turn that into a public spectacle. His whole life is a performance, and not until he reflects on the irony of his time at the Adam and Eve Inn — when he couldn’t distinguish between real life and acting — do we see him at his most honest and vulnerable. Ernest Vajda’s screenplay demands that Aherne keep us so entertained that we don’t much mind the fact that we never get to the heart of the man until the final curtain has almost been rung: a daring concept that Aherne runs with, masterfully. The Great Garrick is a tour-de-force like few in Hollywood history, and Aherne received the most effusive notices of his career. Frank Nugent in The New York Times hailed him as “the young and handsome swashbuckler we rather hoped to find.” He found him “a bravura actor, Mr. Aherne, with a flair for the dramatic handling of a cloak, an easy grace with his ruffles, a penchant for striding across a spell-bound stage.” Although he had praise for the full cast and creative team, Nugent reserved his biggest plaudits for Aherne, labeling the film “boldly, richly, unabashedly an excuse for Mr. Aherne's gallant play-acting. That is enough for me.”
Following the film’s enormous financial failure, Jack Warner banished Aherne from the lot, but welcomed him back two years later — because he wasn’t a complete idiot. In the meantime, Aherne had signed a two-picture deal with Hal Roach Productions. The second of the two films is a slipshod Robin Hood wannabe entitled Captain Fury, which, ironically, proved his biggest international hit of the ’30s. But the first (also a box office hit) is a slapstick comedy that — for at least 2/3 of its length — maintains the high spirits that it aims for. Coming directly after The Great Garrick, and calling for such a different set of comedic skills, it showcases the breadth of Aherne’s talents.
In Merrily We Live, director Norman McLeod has no problem unleashing chaos; he just doesn’t know how to shape it. There are times when you long for a close-up to clarify the storytelling, and he almost defiantly refuses to give it to you. If the film didn’t experience a drop off in quality about 30 minutes from the end, I’d take more space to write it up here, but it’s not quite up to the level of the other films I spotlight. It’s about a wealthy, unruly family that hires a tramp to come to work for them — and if that sounds familiar, it should and it shouldn’t. Merrily We Live is based on Courtenay Savage's play They All Want Something (itself an adaptation of the E. J. Rath book The Dark Chapter), and it had previously been filmed in 1930 as What a Man, directed by George J. Crone and starring Reginald Denny. In 1936, My Man Godfrey borrowed loosely from its plot, and because Godfrey has gone on to be a classic, Merrily has been deemed a rip off — film history be damned. But there are only a couple of spots where Merrily plagiarizes Godfrey, and let’s get real: if you’re going to disqualify ’30s comedies for cribbing from each other, you’ll end up with about three left.
For the most part, Merrily We Live is a delight, with a flavor all its own. Wilder and more chaotic than My Man Godfrey, it’s in the slapstick routines that the film especially shines. (Roach — who had produced the Laurel and Hardy franchise, as well as the early Harold Lloyd silents — obviously knew a thing or two about pratfalls.) The story isn’t focused enough to take the time with the love story that you’d like, but Aherne and his costar, Constance Bennett, have good chemistry and manage on their own. He knows how to lay on the charm, and she knows how to counter his charm with indignation and quiet surprise. He’s very good at double takes, but he also knows how and when to play the comic foil. Given to scratching the back of his neck when he’s bemused, he at first seems a sort of Everyman, but the moment he’s left alone (after agreeing to take a position as the family chauffeur), we catch him in his bathroom shaving, and as he stares into the mirror, he parodies each member of the family one by one. We instantly intuit that in some ways he’s as daft as they are, but with an alert mind and an ability for self-mockery that they lack. Aherne manages to combine sleek sophistication with a talent for misbehaving. It’s one of his most ingratiating performances, and a scene in which family matriarch Billie Burke instructs him on how to wait on guests at an upcoming dinner party (below) — her utterly befuddled, him forever adapting and obliging — is a stone-cold classic.
Fresh on the heels of Merrily We Live, Aherne learned that Warner Bros. had optioned Bertita Harding’s 1934 novel The Phantom Crown, about the installation of Maximilian von Habsburg as Emperor of Mexico in 1864. Aherne knew he was a perfect match for the role, and lobbied hard for the part — which he won. Then Warners decided that the film, slightly rebalanced, could serve as another biographical showcase for star Paul Muni, who had already taken home an Oscar for The Story of Louis Pasteur and starred in their Oscar-winning The Life of Emile Zola — and instructed the screenwriters to build up the role of rebel leader Benito Juarez. Although the shifting emphasis of the storyline was a disappointment to Aherne, none of that registers on the screen. Instead, he offers up one of his greatest performances, in one of his finest films.
Juarez — which charts the struggle for the soul of the Mexican people between Benito Juarez and newly-installed Emperor Maximilian von Habsburg — doesn’t just deconstruct the Warners biopic formula. It blows it to bits. Director William Dieterle stubbornly refuses to streamline its story into a tale of good vs. evil; although there are two warring factions, he declines to imbue one with a clearer sense of virtue. Screenwriters John Huston, Æneas MacKenzie and Wolfgang Reinhardt imagine political protagonists who badly misread each other’s motivations. Juarez presumes Maximilian has come to “rule over us as a tyrant”; Maximilian’s military advisers convince him that Juarez is a “wild beast in the jungle.” Neither statement is true. But Juarez can’t let go of his preconceptions; when Maximilian makes a conciliatory proposal that speaks to his desire “to protect the interests of a great majority of our subjects,” Juarez sees it as a political tactic concocted by a wily opponent: “Virtue is a formable weapon in the hands of an enemy.” The more Maximilian proceeds in good faith, the more Juarez acts like the savage Maximilian’s advisors warned him of. The movie shows Juarez misusing his power out of vanity and greed, and relishing his plans of attack in a way Maximilian never does. It’s a battle between a conqueror and a statesman — but which is which?
Aherne and Muni — who never share a scene onscreen — pitch their roles perfectly. Aherne makes Maximilian proud but kind, soft-spoken and trusting, magnanimous yet misguided. And he uses his height to good advantage: he towers over his advisors, his generals and even his wife (Bette Davis) — but he never seems intimidating; instead, he seems imbued with a sort of paternal benevolence. Aherne leans so heavily into Maximilian’s humble yet noble bearing that he fully convinces you the man would sacrifice his authority to serve his people, and sacrifice his life to save his soldiers. He’s almost too perfect: a ready-made martyr. At times, Maximilian is so adaptable and Juarez (by comparison) so unyielding that it’s difficult to say which of them wields the moral compass. Muni plays Juarez as more stubborn than single-minded, more manipulative than inspiring. He doesn’t try to paint a saintly portrait; he paints a credible and useful one. Muni’s performance is at once ostentatious and self-effacing; he gives himself over to the role — both in makeup and manner — till he’s all but unrecognizable. But he doesn’t try to play the hero. Huston complained that Muni added dialogue during filming to augment his role. But the proportions as they stand now are perfect. With any less camera time, there would be too little Juarez, and the essential conflict between two self-respecting men — each of them satisfied that their political ideology best serves the people — would never ignite.
As scripted, Juarez is a film about delusion. As Dieterle shoots it, it’s a film about the romance of delusion — and Maximilian is the face of it. It’s fitting that it’s Aherne — of all the cast members — who snared the sole Oscar nod; he’s the one who garners our sympathy. As we near the film’s midway mark, Maximilian discovers Napoleon tricked him into accepting the title of emperor through a phony plebiscite and sets out to make things right: proposing a constitutional monarchy, with himself as Emperor and Juarez as Prime Minister. (When Juarez rejects the offer out of hand, it’s easy to wonder if a golden opportunity hasn’t somehow been missed.) As Maximilian suffers one setback after another, Dieterle engages in the sort of haunted lyricism that would become his trademark, and ties it to Maximilian’s mindset. Aherne and Dieterle convince you that there’s something undeniably virtuous about a man sacrificing himself for a cause, even if that cause was never real. “From first to last, you’ve been deceived,” his best friend and physician pleads with him: “Deceived by everybody, including yourself.” But Maximilian can’t help himself: “Is it not the sacred duty of a monarch to sacrifice his life for his people?” As he continues to respond to an imagined call to arms, scenes bleed into each other with an inevitability that grows unsettling, trapping him in an ordeal of his own making. POV shots draw the viewer deeper into his Don Quixote-like delusions. And by the time Maximilian has come to understand that he is leading a truly lost cause, but pauses to reflect on a dream he had about his absent wife Carlota, Dieterle holds the camera still on Aherne for a three-minute monologue — a shattering break from how the rest of the film has been shot — and the effect is transfixing: Aherne offers up a masterclass in commanding the screen. Quite despite yourself, you’re left caring less about Juarez’s efforts to uphold democracy and more about the downfall of a righteous man who arrived in Mexico with the best of intentions, on a fool’s errand. In his final speech, as Maximilian awaits his execution, he’s given not to lamenting his fate, but to praising Juarez — in effect, to validating him — for not sparing his life, but rather holding true to his principles; the speech is accompanied by the ticking of a clock, one that bleeds into the following scene — as if Maximilian’s generosity of spirit has seeped into the soul of a nation.
The movie — expected to be Warners’ next blockbuster biopic — received an unexpectedly chilly reception from audiences. (Yet again, Aherne was denied the audience favor he deserved.) Juarez posed challenging ethical questions: the kind they weren’t prepared to ponder. They had come to the movies to celebrate the virtues of democracy, and along comes this film, asking us to empathize with an emperor. But Dieterle refused to condescend to his audience. If they weren’t aware of Mexico’s complex political history, they should have been — or at the very least, they should have understood that Juarez’s legacy didn’t last long. The script obviously doesn’t reference the decades of double-dealing that followed Juarez’s presidency (Porfirio Díaz’s de facto dictatorship, the PRI’s control of power for 70 years), but in the way Dieterle frames Juarez’s cunning without endorsing it — in his refusal to step aside even after his term is up, in the pleasure he takes in initiating guerrilla warfare to undermine enemy forces, in the perverse way he interrupts the coronation of Maximilian’s heir — he reminds us that one of the dangers of representative government lies in its capacity to enable and reward the corrupt. And that revolutions (even the best intended) have consequences — and casualties. While in no way denigrating democracy, Dieterle asks us to consider how hard it is to achieve, and how much harder to maintain — and why the lure of monarchical rule can seem so potent. (Needless to say, the film has grown increasingly relevant over the last decade.) Dieterle was no doubt guided by his memory of how Germany’s constitutional monarchy was replaced by a parliamentary democracy in 1918, and how the next fifteen years were marked by economic hardship — and where it all led. Dieterle, devoutly anti-fascist, nonetheless muddied the political waters in a way that Warners never intended; instead, he forged a biopic as profound and powerful of any that emerged from the Warners lot. Aherne received some of the finest reviews of his career — and the Oscar nod, to boot — but this was effectively the end of his time as a Hollywood star. Despite a string of remarkable and varied performances — nine of them from The Fountain to Juarez — he had never been granted that one vehicle that might have made him an audience favorite. And his acting style — which prompted him to lose himself in every part — made it tough for audiences to connect with him, especially in films of which they were none too fond.
The ’30s had been cruel to Aherne; the ’40s were more subtly unkind. His roles by and large were not good ones. RKO offered him the sleep-inducing Vigil in the Night, in which Carole Lombard and Anne Shirley — as nurses in London — have a competition to see who can be more noble, and the only loser is the audience. MGM contracted him to star in a musical remake of 1932’s Smilin’ Through, a gaudy-awful film that once again proved that when Frank Borzage misses the mark, he really misses it. (See The Shining Hour — or for the sake of your sanity, don’t.) But Paramount had the strangest proposition: Skylark, in which husband Ray Milland behaves so shabbily to wife Claudette Colbert — manhandling and humiliating her — you root for her to run off with new suitor Brian Aherne. It’s a movie that could only have made sense in 1941, when Milland and Colbert were the shining stars of the Paramount lot, and the minute their names appeared on the marquee, you knew they were meant to be together. But Skylark makes it awfully hard to believe in cinematic destiny. Aherne is so suave and so confident in his effects, and Colbert lightens up around him in a way that she never does with Milland — yet we’re supposed to view Aherne as an interloper. It’s an utterly bizarre, twisted little film. When Colbert and Aherne realize that Milland has been lying to them about an injury he claims to have suffered and decide to trick him and toss him into the nearest bay, they instantly become a screwball couple — the pair who plot together, who see through the dreary people obsessed with rules and comportment. The ones you root for. And yet, in the end, Colbert returns dutifully to her dullard of a husband, and we’re expected to cheer her on. Skylark, which features one of Aherne’s sexiest and most charming performances, essentially pioneered a new genre: the anti-screwball. It didn’t catch on.
Columbia decided that Aherne could be useful to them paired with contract player Ros Russell, and costarred them in three films. The first, Hired Wife, is unbearable: one of those films where you know in advance where all the comic beats are going to fall, and the creative team still can’t make them funny. My Sister Eileen is one of the more overrated film comedies of the ’40s. Every other property drawn from the same source is better: the play, the Broadway musical, the musical film. Russell disliked her costar Janet Blair — who she insisted was looking out only for herself — and although Russell claims that she put Blair in her place, she seems unaware how the tension affected her own performance; her timing is frequently uncertain, and her retorts too self-aware. The best of the three films Russell and Aherne made together is easily the last, What a Woman! (1943), the rare Forties screwball. Russell is at her most comedically resourceful as a persuasive talent agent who creates a monster she can’t control. The lines are bright and the satire sound. Unfortunately, Aherne — acting as her foil, confidant and savior — barely gets to flex his acting muscles.
But let’s not get too down on Columbia. Aherne starred in only three great vehicles in the ’40s, and two of them came from Columbia. Neither is the kind of ambitious project he was typically assigned in the ’30s, when the studios sought to complement his theatrical training with prestige pics. But as modest, middle-of-the-road pictures, they’re pretty fine.
As the middle-class proprietor of a Parisian bicycle shop, Aherne is clearly delighted at the chance to play a role unlike any he’d essayed on the screen. He seems a good 10 years older than he did in his previous film. His character, Andre Morestan — a juror in a murder trial who fights to acquit a defendant, then invites her to move into his family home — is a bit dithering, yet at the same time a little too passionate about insignificant things. He’s intensely enthused about taking part in a trial; he listens to testimony by placing his head on his hands, as if scrutinizing the veracity of the stories. “They respect me,” he boasts to his family about his fellow jurors: “Oh, I annoy them, but they respect me.” As Andre sees it, he annoys them because he cares so much, and perhaps no one has ever cared about a jury trial quite so much. (Andre annoys a lot of people in this film — he can be abrupt and dismissive and even tyrannical — and as ever, Aherne doesn’t shy away from his character’s more odious qualities; as he did in The Great Garrick, he embraces them. He encourages the audience to giggle at Andre’s pretensions.) Aherne combines the giddiness of a child and the eccentricities of an old man. Andre is very susceptible to flattery: both proud and eager to be thanked. He’s full of himself — because he sees what he’s doing as so very important.
Aherne drops his voice about an octave and deepens it, and occasionally when he clears his throat, to laugh or to invalidate an opinion he’s heard, he sounds like an elderly man with a heavy cough. He’s unrecognizable from anyone he’s put on the screen to that point, and clearly relishes it. The role was such a change of pace for Aherne — such a blessed change of pace — that he declared to The Saturday Evening Post, "After I got into the swing of creating that bourgeois father, living his nature and working it out through the torturous path of the story, it proved more stimulating than any other role that came my way." He’s surrounded by a superlative cast, including early performances by Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth. The script, adapted from the French film Gribouille, is amusing and well paced, and Charles Vidor — the sort of director who only came to life on certain films — does unexpectedly lively and precise work.
Near the end, Andre grows so mistrustful of the young woman he’s welcomed into his home that he strikes her. Although the film up to that point has been a comic one — full of running gags and misunderstandings, mistaken identities and mistaken moties – Aherne doesn’t lighten the blow. He lets the moment register with full dramatic force — and it’s intense and disturbing. But he’s created a character so convincing that he doesn’t “merely” seem to belong in a comic universe, and that allows Aherne to take the character — and the movie, in turn — to a much deeper and darker place than you imagined. It’s a tactic that came easily to Aherne, and he never made better use of it than in his second stellar outing for Columbia.
One of Aherne’s daffiest films — and one of his most delightful. He’s the contented author of cheap murder mysteries; Loretta Young is his wife, who keeps pushing him to broaden his literary horizons. She’s decided that by moving to Greenwich Village, he’ll soak up atmosphere and write wonderful, “legitimate” novels — so she’s secured them a basement apartment on Gay Street. But when they wake up their first morning to discover a dead body in the garden, will the husband go from writing mysteries to solving them?
A Night to Remember boasts some great horror elements: the pigeons that attack the couple as they walk up their front stoop; a turtle that keeps wandering unseen from apartment to apartment, pinning unsuspecting residents to the floor. (At times it feels like the couple has moved into a haunted house.) The mystery is a solid one, and the supporting cast — including Sidney Toler, Gale Sondergaard and Lee Patrick — consistently strong. But there would be no film without the performances of Young and Aherne as young marrieds Nancy and Jeff Troy. Nancy is effervescent and well meaning: a wife prepared to push her husband to success. Jeff is both more skeptical and more serene: a man less inclined to upset the status quo. A Night to Remember could have been a frivolous film and no more, but Young and Aherne never condescend to the material. They define Nancy and Jeff as clearly as they do their more dramatic roles. It’s reasonable to imagine it was an important movie for both of them. For Young, it was about rebuilding her career, after her refusal to re-sign with 20th Century Fox (and go freelance instead) had made her a Hollywood pariah; for Aherne, it meant showing Columbia he could do more than feed straight lines to Ros Russell.
Scenarists Richard Flournoy and Jack Henley ensure the danger is never so real — nor the murder mystery so all-consuming — that the pair don’t have time for some clever repartée. And director Richard Wallace — not a man known for his lightness of touch — manages the banter like a pro. Young and Aherne find a comic rhythm that suits them both, and their sense of fun is contagious. When Nancy and Jeff meet another couple in the building, the husband informs Jeff, “My wife tells me you’re a novelist,” and Jeff responds slyly, just loudly enough for his wife to hear, “That’s odd. She never told me.” And she’s not about to let him get the last word: “Oh well, darling, I don’t tell you everything.” When they find a horseshoe in their new home, and she insists, “Close your eyes and make a wish,” he instantly knows what that would be: “I wish my dear wife had never found this place.” And she’s quick to counter, “I wish my dear husband weren’t such a dope” — then recognizing she’s been a bit harsh, adds, “I wish you would just soak up some of this lovely atmosphere and write a best-seller in which no one was murdered.” He lifts her veil and kisses her, and she’s through with banter: “I wish my husband would do that again.” And he pulls her in for a clinch.
Aherne clearly relishes the opportunities for physical comedy that his film career rarely afforded him. (He’s particularly delightful wrestling with a doorknob — to a door that opens easily for everyone but him.) When Jeff pulls out a fencing sabre to attack a potential intruder, and practices by taking wild stabs into the air, Nancy moans, “Oh no, you’ve only had three lessons.” She loves her husband, but can’t help puncturing his pretensions. Yet she’s determined to stay by his side as he solves the mystery: “If you’re going to be murdered, I’m going to be murdered too.” And to Jeff’s great credit, although fear strikes every time an intruder wanders into their home, or a gunshot is fired, or a body is found, he’s never paralyzed by it. He summons his strength and acts the role of hero, one that clearly doesn’t come easily to him. (He’s so eager to prove himself to his wife that he confronts a guy twice his size at a bar, knowing full well he might be sucker punched, as indeed he is. “Yep, that’s what I figured,” Nancy wisecracks as she removes her hands from her eyes and sees her husband lying on the floor.) Only the final few seconds — when Jeff faints at how close he came to death — feel phony; he’s channeled his terror into bravery far too many times for a gag like that to ring true. That such a standard piece of slapstick doesn’t work is a mark of how much effort Aherne and Young have put into making their characters a full-blooded and convincing pair, and not merely the tools by which a mystery is solved. Their chemistry and commitment are key reasons that this film works while countless other “amateur detective” films — e.g., Errol Flynn’s Footsteps in the Dark (1941) — don’t.
(As an aside, Lux Radio — arguably the most acclaimed anthology series on the air at the time, often featuring adaptations of films with the original stars reprising their roles — did a version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street in 1946, with Aherne once again in his original role, and Loretta Young stepping in for Kit Cornell. It’s readily available on YouTube — amusingly, it uses the same stock music as Beloved Enemy — and although, of course, it’s trimmed down to its bare bones, it’s still a worthy listen. Young, naturally, didn’t have nearly the preparation that Katherine Cornell did, but she gives a credible performance, and even though you can hear Aherne constantly adjusting his performance to better suit Young’s, it’s still the only way to hear even a fraction of what audiences found electrifying about him in 1931.)
Aherne’s only other film of note in the 1940’s is the melodrama The Locket (1946), about a young woman (Laraine Day) whose childhood trauma sets her on a troubled course. The origins of the screenplay are almost as fascinating as the film itself. Norma Barzman's initial treatment was inspired by a true story recounted to her by financier George Peabody Gardner and his sister Belle. As children, the Gardners had befriended the daughter of the family housekeeper. The girl was wrongfully accused of stealing a locket, leading to the housekeeper’s dismissal. Years later, the Gardners learned that the daughter had subsequently suffered from depression and been implicated in a theft — a situation for which they couldn’t help but feel partially responsible. Barzman's screenplay, entitled What Nancy Wanted, made its way to RKO, where Sheridan Gibney was assigned the rewrite. Although both Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland lobbied for the part, RKO decided to borrow Laraine Day from Paramount; Day would later call it her favorite of all her roles.
The screenplay is conceived as a series of flashbacks within flashbacks, as a bridegroom-to-be, on his wedding day, receives a visit from a man (Aherne) claiming to be the bride’s first husband. His story incorporates a tale related to him by her ex-lover (Robert Mitchum), whose recollections incorporate her own memories of a childhood trauma. How much is true, and how much can be trusted? And how can one woman — guilty or not — have destroyed so many lives?
The Locket doesn’t feature one of Aherne’s showier parts — at times, his character seems to function mostly as the quiet voice of reason. But that said, as the one narrating the proceedings, he’s the motor that keeps the vehicle running, a task he handles flawlessly. He finds wonderful touches, as in the way — when he narrates — his pitch is higher and his voice lighter than they are in the scenes he’s describing: as if having undergone an unthinkable ordeal has cleansed him or freed him in some way. Aherne is paired well with Day, but it’s with Mitchum that the scenework crackles; each time Mitchum attacks and Aherne parries, it’s like watching ’40s grit meet ’30s glamour. The climax of the flashback is Aherne’s breakdown, and the screenplay glosses over it much too quickly; you watch and reflect that Aherne could’ve done something remarkable there, had he had the chance. But there’s a moment right before, when Aherne stares at Day — and realizes the woman he married is not only a thief, but a sociopathic killer — that’s a masterpiece of silent acting. Aherne’s talents weren’t being utilized to their fullest in the ’40s, but they were weathering the years well.
“The quiet voice of reason” would be a good way of describing Aherne’s (few) movie roles in the ’50s. All are supporting roles, but at least the films overall are superior to the ones in the ’40s. (Even into the ’50s, Aherne kept making disastrous career moves. When Hitchcock called him about playing the district attorney in I Confess, he cautioned that they only had a limited amount of money to pay him, but eager to work with his old friend, Aherne acquiesced. It set a horrible precedent; it told Hollywood he would work for peanuts, and for his next few films, that’s all they would agree to pay him.) He only made only six films during that decade – he mostly contented himself with stage work (he headed up the first national tour of My Fair Lady, as Henry Higgins), TV guest shots, running his farm and flying his planes — but three of his films are worthy vehicles with fine performances by Aherne: Titanic, A Bullet Is Waiting and The Swan. He doesn’t get to demonstrate a fraction of what he can do, but his skill and presence remain unmistakable. And fittingly, the decade (and in some ways his career) is capped by the acting turn most people remember him from today.
In this second-season entry, Aherne is an aging actor whose life has grown aimless since losing his wife decades earlier. For years, he’s been going through the motions. On this day, as he watches his second (and much younger wife) cavorting with her latest conquest right under his nose, he takes his daily heart pill and hopes for the time when it stops working. (“When a man my age marries a woman her age,” he informs his valet, “he gets exactly what he deserves.”) Any hope he once had of finding renewed purpose has long since vanished: “They say when a man achieves years, he achieves reason and contentment. I haven’t.”
Templeton is beginning rehearsals that day for a new play, but he can’t even summon the enthusiasm to arrive on time, and he’s in for a shock when he reaches the theatre. The backer — a vulgar man given to suggestions like “don’t forget your lines” — has replaced Templeton’s longtime director with a young hotshot. (It’s Sydney Pollack, well-cast as a self-proclaimed auteur who sees the director as “the only significant person” in the staging of a play and who has no regard for Templeton’s credits, nor patience for his eccentricities.) Making his way to where the actors have gathered for the readthrough, Templeton is greeted with a brutal dressing-down by the new director, shaming him for his tardiness. (As Templeton holds in place behind the theatre’s counterweight rigging, the vertical poles cast shadows across his face that resemble the bars of a prison.) Humiliated and scared and struck dumb, Templeton rushes out the stage door — where (spoilers!) he emerges in 1927, to throngs of admirers asking for his autograph after his latest performance.
As he tries to make sense of this inexplicable anomaly in time, the fellow manning the stage door tells him that his wife — his first wife, Laura (Pippa Scott), who died tragically when she was just 25 — is waiting for him at a nearby theatre haunt, and of course Templeton rushes there eagerly. But his time with Laura and their friends turns out to be less of a reunion and more of an intervention – one that leaves Templeton momentarily stupefied, until he seizes on the truth. And realizing the lengths to which his late loved ones have gone to refocus and re-energize him emboldens Templeton to regain his former sense of self.
In his only Twilight Zone script, writer E. Jack Neuman (who would develop the long-running series Police Story, among others) creates a character who would be just as compelling whether or not he took that requisite trip to a dimension beyond sight and sound; Booth Templeton is the richest role Aherne had had the opportunity to develop in the twenty years since The Lady in Question. He seizes upon every line to fashion a rich and clear backstory, one that informs and heightens each move he makes. He pours as much detail of character and depth of emotion into one 27-minute episode of television as he previously packed into a full-length feature, and director Buzz Kulik — well aware of Aherne’s pedigree — goes for frequent close-ups, of which Aherne takes full advantage. A lot of his work in “The Trouble With Templeton” plays without the benefit of dialogue — in tight shots that highlight multiple emotions: anticipation, joy, shock, anger, fear, frustration — and as you watch, you might be reminded of similar, stellar work Aherne did in The Fountain 25 years earlier. And perhaps, if you look closely enough, you might see allusions to some of his greatest films: the search for solace in a troubling world (The Fountain); the loss of true love, too soon (Beloved Enemy); the blurring of real life and theatrical artifice (The Great Garrick); and the disillusions that can consume one’s soul (Juarez). “The Trouble With Templeton,” which Aherne took on at the age of 58, utilizes the lessons learned over a half-century onstage and onscreen. It’s a splendid late flowering.
Aherne, who passed away in 1986, was a leading man of rare talent, who excelled at both comedy and drama, and was equally at home playing the voice of reason and the voice of delusion. He was a perfectionist who demanded as much of the viewer as he did of himself. He didn’t coddle his audiences, or conform to their wishes or expectations; he gave the same kind of searing, exacting performances onscreen as he did onstage: embracing ambiguity, inviting controversy and basking in unpleasant traits and truths that his contemporaries might have chosen to overlook. In that respect, he was a bit of an anomaly in Golden Age Hollywood. But he never landed as the studios hoped and has languished ever since in relative obscurity. His extreme good looks were doubled by his acting ability, but today even some film aficionados don’t know quite who he is, and if they do, they lump him alongside other wannabes whose talents didn’t measure up. Aherne‘s talents measured up; his judgment did not. And once his bad calls had prompted the studios to lose interest, there was no way of reclaiming the career he deserved. Fortunately, the films and performances survive to remind us of what he achieved — and what might have been.There are two kinds of actors. There are those who, like Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, James Stewart, John Wayne and Cary Grant, play themselves and continue to do so in every part, to the great delight of the producers, the stockholders, their fans, and their bank managers. There are also those, like Paul Muni, Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness and Rex Harrison, who are not interested in projecting their own personalities but in trying to look and sound like the characters they have to play, and these are known in the profession as "actors’ actors." They seem to do their best when they hide their own personalities behind a make-up or a prop, like the actor in the old theatrical story who was unable to feel at home in his part until the director gave him a green umbrella to carry, when everything suddenly came right for him …. The green umbrella lot, to which I belonged, can be a sore trial to directors, and especially to movie directors, who have to work fast, because such actors have to evolve their creations slowly, and it is not immediately apparent what they are going to do.
Helen: Maybe it would.
Riordan: Every evening for a month I’d have asked you to meet me at the hilltop. What would you have said when I asked you?
Helen: I’d have said, thank you.
Riordan: And all through the summer evenings we’d have walked together in the hills side by side, not talking much. Wouldn’t we? And one evening I’d have put my arm around you, and us walking alone in the moonlight. What would you have said then?
Helen: I don’t think I’d have said anything.
Riordan: And then we’d have walked slower and slower and stopped, and I’d have said, it’s an honest and a beautiful woman you are.
Helen: Please, don’t.
Riordan: I’d have said, I love you. I love you. And after we were married, we’d be on our farm in County Galway riding fine horses together…
Helen: Please, don’t.
Riordan: Sitting down in our own cool house with the country cloth on the table and the white bread and the strong red tea in our cups…
Want more Classic Hollywood? If so, I take an expansive look at the career of one of my favorite Classic Hollywood directors, the sadly forgotten William Dieterle, here. I examine The Curious Career of James Craig, and Randolph Scott’s 10 Best Films of the Fifties. I take a look here at all the films Errol Flynn did for Warner Bros. between 1935 to 1950: from his first starring role in Captain Blood to the termination of his contract after Rocky Mountain. I delve into one of Hollywood’s most extraordinary actresses, Margaret Sullavan, and her 16 films here. I serve up The 10 Best Screwball Comedies, and The 25 Best Film Noirs, and some of the titles are sure to surprise you. My other essays are all about TV, past and present, but if you take to TV as much as film, there's an index of the more than 100 TV essays I've written; you might see something you like, be it a drama series or a sitcom or one of my “best of” lists.
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