Norma Shearer

User avatar
MissGoddess
Posts: 5072
Joined: April 17th, 2007, 10:01 am
Contact:

Post by MissGoddess »

Thanks precoder, for that background on Private Lives. It's been a while since I read the published diaries of Coward but I remember the often hilarious accounts of his feisty friendship with Gertrude.

Miss G
User avatar
moira finnie
Administrator
Posts: 8024
Joined: April 9th, 2007, 6:34 pm
Location: Earth
Contact:

Post by moira finnie »

I just came across this relatively new Norma Shearer website, (thanks to Mick LaSalle) called Lady of the Night. It is filled with info and unusually fine and rare photos of Shearer. I hope you might like knowing about it too.

On Monday, August 4th (Marie Dressler day on TCM!) there are a couple of very rarely seen Norma Shearer appearances included in the lineup that day:
Aug 04, 6:00AM EDT
The Hollywood Revue(1929): Sketches and songs give MGM's silent stars a chance to show their stuff in talking pictures. The cast includes Jack Benny, Conrad Nagel, John Gilbert, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Bessie Love and Lionel Barrymore. Garbo was a no-show.

Aug 04, 2:15PM EDT
Let Us Be Gay (1930): A visit to Paris brings divorced spouses back together. Norma Shearer, Rod LaRocque, Marie Dressler. Not what we might think, based on that title.
[/url]
Avatar: Frank McHugh (1898-1981)

The Skeins
TCM Movie Morlocks
User avatar
charliechaplinfan
Posts: 9040
Joined: January 15th, 2008, 9:49 am

Post by charliechaplinfan »

I've just finished reading Mick Lasalle's book Complicated Women, he's got me sold on Norma Shearer. I recently saw her in Private Lives and thought she was so much better than I'd been left to believe.

Have we ever had Mick Lasalle as a guest here?
Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself - Charlie Chaplin
feaito

Post by feaito »

Thanks for the info about teh new Shearer site Moira. I'll add it to my Favorite sites.

I also happened to love "Private Lives", IMO, Norma's best talking comedy. She glows in it!

I have never seen "Let Us Be Gay" (1930) and it has always intrigued me.

Check "Strangers May Kiss" (1931), one of the best Norma Pre-Codes I've seen. Risquè and daring. Even more than "The Divorcèe" (1930) and "A Free Soul" (1931) , in my opinion. A real discovery and a small gem!
SSO Admins
Administrator
Posts: 810
Joined: April 5th, 2007, 7:27 pm
Contact:

Post by SSO Admins »

charliechaplinfan wrote:Have we ever had Mick Lasalle as a guest here?
We did indeed.
User avatar
charliechaplinfan
Posts: 9040
Joined: January 15th, 2008, 9:49 am

Post by charliechaplinfan »

I'm going to search the archives interview thread. I liked his book, he sold me on the precode era.
Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself - Charlie Chaplin
User avatar
molo
Posts: 25
Joined: August 5th, 2008, 9:49 pm
Location: Richmond

Post by molo »

When I saw this thread I was moved to write a little essay on Norma Shearer. I hope you will indulge me. :)

Norma Shearer has always fascinated me. I think it's because when I first discovered her as a kid in the mid-seventies she was a complete enigma. People like Pauline Kael and David Thomson didn't like her, I don't think her pre-code career had been properly reexamined, and yet she had been a major star with a large following.

I saw A Free Soul and The Divorcee and I could see why she was popular. She had that aristocratic voice and the roles were daring. When properly photographed she could be enchantingly beautiful. I liked her. It was the first time I started to watch a star performing on screen with a critical eye. Her acting could be mannered, her voice could come off shrill in some of those early talkies, but she also had a way of looking into the camera or the eyes of her leading men that suggested a smoldering sexuality simmered just under her oh so sophisticated surface.

I moved on to her silent films. She was in MGM's first film He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney and John Gilbert. She was very good in The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg and even showed a little comedic flare. I have since seen a few more of her silent films and I think she was well suited to that genre.

I saw more of her early sound films. In that incredible short film The Stolen Jools she was the victim of the crime which had half of Hollywood's stars as potential suspects. It's all very silly and Shearer comes off as being a little too much in on the joke. She is a little better at playing herself in another short The Christmas Party. It’s in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 that I found just a tiny piece of film with Shearer seemingly being herself. It comes between the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene with John Gilbert and the hip jive version they do afterwards. There is something in that brief interlude that rings of the true Norma. It’s in the way she tells Lionel Barrymore that he’s just being sweet, and the way she tells Gilbert that she doesn’t like being called “Auntie.” Also the way Gilbert gently kids with her and brings up Thalberg. There is something about this ancient piece of film that’s like a moment frozen in time. It’s actually rather melancholy in that respect.

When Gavin Lambert published his biography of her I jumped at the chance to gain more insight into her personality and life. It's a good read. Shearer appears to have been a very practical person. She may have taken on daring roles but she was always fully aware of how she stood with her own fan base. She wasn't one to make a false step in either her professional or her private life, at least not during the Thalberg years. He might have worked to make her the first lady of motion pictures, but I think Shearer was fully aware of her own limitations.

I continued exploring the films. She is charming in Their Own Desire. In Let Us Be Gay she appears without makeup in the early scenes. It was a different role for her but she put on the glamour in short order. It’s one of her better early films but those initial scenes make me wonder what else she could have done. She marched on as “Queen of the lot”. Riptide is an interesting failure. She was perfectly suited for the role of Elizabeth in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
She was Marie Antoinette in one of the most lavish productions ever launched by any studio. Her final scenes in that film show a remarkable pathos that lingers in the mind. She goes from frivolous girl to daring Queen to dignified symbol of the old order brought down through violent revolution. It’s quite a remarkable performance actually.

No longer having Thalberg as her mentor she aped Garbo in Idiot’s Delight and is probably best remembered as Mary Haines in The Women heading an outstanding cast. It was her last big role. She then made Escape which is one of my favorite of her films. She gives a wonderfully understated performance opposite Robert Taylor and Conrad Viedt. She herself admitted that her last two films were miscalculations that were her own fault in choosing them.

Her relationship with Thalberg was another thing that always intrigued me. I think it was a great personal and professional match for her. They appeared happy and in love. She took care of him, she bore him children and she patiently bided her time before removing Thalberg from the clutches of his mother. She didn’t act impulsively when something was important. When she and Thalberg were dating, she jokingly referred to herself as Irving’s spare tire. Indeed she had once appeared as “Miss Lotta Miles” for Springfield tire ads. When Irving died she famously sent out cards to all who had offered support referring to herself only as Mrs. Irving Thalberg. It was a sensible course of action but also one more small tribute to the man who would always be the love of her life.

Shearer also had her idiosyncrasies. Lambert tells of one instance when she purposely wore red to a charity ball where all the women participants were told to wear white, and in the process unnecessarily angered Carole Lombard. Her sister Athole suffered from mental illness. This would haunt Shearer throughout her life. She always feared she would succumb to it. Her main charity was the Motion Picture Retirement Home. She was never that active in supporting the war effort like most of her contemporaries. It wasn’t that she wasn’t patriotic it’s just that the Motion Picture Home was her main cause and that was that. This makes sense in that Shearer had a phobia about aging and death and she would spend her last days at the home she had so long supported.

She never fully embraced her family, not even her own children and, later on, her grandchildren. She had a long second marriage to Martin Arrouge. He was younger than her and she often called him Irving. He never corrected her. She gradually withdrew from public life. She was riddled with her own inescapable anxieties. She ended her life bedridden and blind in the Motion Picture home basically forgotten and alone. Lambert recounts how in her last days she reached out to a visitor she could no longer recognize; “Are you Irving?” she asked.

When Norma Shearer died in 1983 her contemporaries appeared to have their status set. Garbo remained a legend. The late Joan Crawford had her legacy turned on its head by an infamous memoir and her persona turned into a cartoon by Faye Dunaway’s over the top performance. Shearer was simply gone. She would not live to see her own modest revival. A renewed interest in pre-code films led people to rediscover her. Mick La Salle’s enthusiastic embrace of her in his book Complicated Women brought her to the forefront again. Turner Classic Movies made a documentary of that book in which Shearer featured prominently. Another documentary Thou Shalt Not: Sex Sin And Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood along with nicely packaged and promoted DVD boxed sets have brought Norma Shearer back to the mainstream of conversation again if only among classic film buffs.

I have to smile a little at her resurgence. I think back to the seventies and my little old film books with me staring and wondering about this woman I had never heard of before. I think of decades seemingly alone in the wilderness seeking out forgotten films and blabbering on to doubtful friends about this forgotten actress. Waiting a year or two to see just one film when today over a dozen are easily accessible. Yes, I have to smile and maybe feel a little vindicated and validated in my long held opinions. Most of all I wonder: What would Norma think about all this?

Sources: I have been reading most anything I could find on Shearer for decades but I would have to cite two sources from which I drew information for this essay:

Norma Shearer: A Life by Gavin Lambert, New York : Knopf 1990

A Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson, New York : A.A. Knopf 3rd edition 1994
User avatar
charliechaplinfan
Posts: 9040
Joined: January 15th, 2008, 9:49 am

Post by charliechaplinfan »

Molo, I found your article very interesting and informative, thank you for sharing your thoughts about Norma Shearer, I for one have learnt things I did not know before.
Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself - Charlie Chaplin
feaito

Post by feaito »

Excellent essay Molo!! I found it very enlightening and at the same time it reflects much of what I feel about a Norma, who's also intrigued me since I was very young. I became a fan of Ms. Shearer, without even having seen her on film. It's her persona that attracted me in the first place.

I haven't read Lambert's biography which is hailed as the best book written about Norma, but as a fan I recommend you to try to find "Norma" by Lawrence J. Quirk, which I obtained (a used copy) at Amazon and is a nice read and "The Films of Norma Shearer" (of the Citadel Press series) which I also got from there.

Fernando
User avatar
Ann Harding
Posts: 1246
Joined: January 11th, 2008, 11:03 am
Location: Paris
Contact:

Post by Ann Harding »

molo wrote:A Biographical Dictionary of Film by David Thomson, New York : A.A. Knopf 3rd edition 1994
Intersting essay on Shearer, Molo! :wink:
But I want to say something about the reference above. I read through the latest issue of this book during my last trip in London and let me tell you: it's just AWFUL!!! It contains tons of mistakes and the comments on directors are extremely mediocre. Example: I was quite flabbergasted to learn that Borzage was born of Swedish parents???? :o :shock: :evil: Julien Duvivier was a mediocre director (based on the vision of just a few of his English-speaking films....) :roll: :? Extremely mediocre book IMHO! :?
User avatar
molo
Posts: 25
Joined: August 5th, 2008, 9:49 pm
Location: Richmond

Post by molo »

I haven't read Lambert's biography which is hailed as the best book written about Norma, but as a fan I recommend you to try to find "Norma" by Lawrence J. Quirk, which I obtained (a used copy) at Amazon and is a nice read and "The Films of Norma Shearer" (of the Citadel Press series) which I also got from there
Well now I'm embarrassed because the Quirk book somehow slipped completely under my radar! I have already ordered it. Thanks so much for bringing it to my attention. I do have The Films of Norma Shearer.
But I want to say something about the reference above. I read through the latest issue of this book during my last trip in London and let me tell you: it's just AWFUL!!! It contains tons of mistakes and the comments on directors are extremely mediocre. Example: I was quite flabbergasted to learn that Borzage was born of Swedish parents???? Julien Duvivier was a mediocre director (based on the vision of just a few of his English-speaking films....) Extremely mediocre book IMHO!
Ann Harding,
Now don't hold back tell me how you really feel! :lol:
Seriously though, Thomson's book is basically one big editorial and he makes no bones about that. I agree that it has a lot of inaccuracies. One of the worst is his repeated failure to edit out the now debunked story that Clark Gable killed someone in a drunk driving accident. Also his filmographies have strange ommissions. You won't find Summertime among Katherine Hepburn's credits for example.

As I mentioned, Thomson is no fan of Norma Shearer either. It's also interesting how he changes his mind from one edition to the next. For example he did a total 180 on Harlow after obviously reading David Stenn's biography. I thought the book was fairly positive but Thomson's view of her went down for some reason.

The information I gathered from him for this essay was relatively minor and independently varified. I agree he can be infuriating but I like reading his opinions and the man does have a passion for writing about film. I disagree with him more often than not, but I do find his opinons on John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, John Wayne, Joan Crawford and Cary Grant too name a few, to be thought provoking whether I agree with them or not. I do respect your opinion of him though.
User avatar
traceyk
Posts: 294
Joined: May 25th, 2007, 11:59 am
Location: Ohio

Post by traceyk »

I too, discovered Norma Shearer through the LaSalle book. I think my favorite of her pre codes is A Free Soul. She's so sexy and confident and not running from a bad relationship or trying to balance the books like in Strangers May Kiss or The Divorcee. The look on her face the first time she sees Gable is priceless--instant lust (kind of like my own first reaction to him). And later she complains that he's talking too much when all she wants is to take him to bed. I didn't particularly like the ending, but the rest of the film was great.

I have to like Private Lives. One of the prerequisites of a good movie for me is great dialogue and it has it. I read that Tallulah Bankhead did a revival of this play. That would have been something to see!
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. "~~Wilde
moviemagz
Posts: 62
Joined: April 15th, 2008, 10:27 pm

Post by moviemagz »

molo wrote:When I saw this thread I was moved to write a little essay on Norma Shearer. I hope you will indulge me. :)

Norma Shearer has always fascinated me. I think it's because when I first discovered her as a kid in the mid-seventies she was a complete enigma. People like Pauline Kael and David Thomson didn't like her, I don't think her pre-code career had been properly reexamined, and yet she had been a major star with a large following.

When Norma Shearer died in 1983 her contemporaries appeared to have their status set. Garbo remained a legend. The late Joan Crawford had her legacy turned on its head by an infamous memoir and her persona turned into a cartoon by Faye Dunaway’s over the top performance. Shearer was simply gone. She would not live to see her own modest revival. A renewed interest in pre-code films led people to rediscover her. Mick La Salle’s enthusiastic embrace of her in his book Complicated Women brought her to the forefront again. Turner Classic Movies made a documentary of that book in which Shearer featured prominently. Another documentary Thou Shalt Not: Sex Sin And Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood along with nicely packaged and promoted DVD boxed sets have brought Norma Shearer back to the mainstream of conversation again if only among classic film buffs.

I have to smile a little at her resurgence. I think back to the seventies and my little old film books with me staring and wondering about this woman I had never heard of before. I think of decades seemingly alone in the wilderness seeking out forgotten films and blabbering on to doubtful friends about this forgotten actress. Waiting a year or two to see just one film when today over a dozen are easily accessible. Yes, I have to smile and maybe feel a little vindicated and validated in my long held opinions. Most of all I wonder: What would Norma think about all this?
Your introduction to Norma sounds similiar to mine. In the late 70's I started reading "classic movie" books as a teenager (even though I had very limited access to these films themselves, only one channel in my area as I recall showed classics with any frequency and then it was some 80 miles away so the broadcast signal was not always good) and Norma's name kept popping up briefly in these books. Luckily the broadcast was strong one Sunday night in 1978 or 1979 for the 11 pm late show when MARIE ANTOINETTE came on and knocked me for a loop. And then months later on the same late show THE WOMEN showed up. Late that year, birthday money in hand, I purchased a softcover copy of THE FILMS OF NORMA SHEARER (which I still have). I don't think I had a chance to see another Norma Shearer film for almost ten years though!! And it was certainly not until the TNT came along in the late 80's that I saw most of her films.

Shearer's precode work definately had not been "rediscovered" until TCM came along, I think even TNT didn't show that those early talkies very often (there was this widely believed myth, as Martin Scorcese notes in one TCM documentary, that early talkies were terrible and didn't hold up).

I do remember when Shearer died, it did make the national newscasts which was a bit of a surprise considering how long she had been retired and how unknown she had become to the general public. In fact I think it was the only time I ever heard her mentioned on television prior to TCM.
moviemagz
Posts: 62
Joined: April 15th, 2008, 10:27 pm

Post by moviemagz »

feaito wrote:Excellent essay Molo!! I found it very enlightening and at the same time it reflects much of what I feel about a Norma, who's also intrigued me since I was very young. I became a fan of Ms. Shearer, without even having seen her on film. It's her persona that attracted me in the first place.

I haven't read Lambert's biography which is hailed as the best book written about Norma, but as a fan I recommend you to try to find "Norma" by Lawrence J. Quirk, which I obtained (a used copy) at Amazon and is a nice read and "The Films of Norma Shearer" (of the Citadel Press series) which I also got from there.

Fernando
Oh wow, I can certainly relate to becoming a fan of somebody before seeing them :D - especially silent stars. It's funny how we can tell who we will like even by just looking at stills of them. Corinne Griffith and Mae Murray are two that I became obssessed with before ever seeing them move. I even bought a couple of lobby cards of them before having seen them in a film!!
User avatar
molo
Posts: 25
Joined: August 5th, 2008, 9:49 pm
Location: Richmond

Post by molo »

Your introduction to Norma sounds similiar to mine. In the late 70's I started reading "classic movie" books as a teenager (even though I had very limited access to these films themselves, only one channel in my area as I recall showed classics with any frequency and then it was some 80 miles away so the broadcast signal was not always good) and Norma's name kept popping up briefly in these books. Luckily the broadcast was strong one Sunday night in 1978 or 1979 for the 11 pm late show when MARIE ANTOINETTE came on and knocked me for a loop. And then months later on the same late show THE WOMEN showed up. Late that year, birthday money in hand, I purchased a softcover copy of THE FILMS OF NORMA SHEARER (which I still have). I don't think I had a chance to see another Norma Shearer film for almost ten years though!! And it was certainly not until the TNT came along in the late 80's that I saw most of her films.
Shearer's precode work definately had not been "rediscovered" until TCM came along, I think even TNT didn't show that those early talkies very often (there was this widely believed myth, as Martin Scorcese notes in one TCM documentary, that early talkies were terrible and didn't hold up).
Hi Moviemagz,
Yes I think our paths to Shearer were similar. I remember seeing a picture in a Clark Gable biography that was from a A Free Soul.
The caption read something like "In A Free Soul, Clark is called on to slap the aristocratic Norma Shearer, it made him a star." and that was the first I heard of her. It was very rare indeed for a Shearer film to be shown on television here in Richmond. Thank goodness we now have TCM. I'm glad she was mentioned on the news at the time of her death. My memory is faulty, and I don't have my Robert Osborne Oscar book handy, but I remember many years ago the Academy did a tribute to Thalberg and his family was in attendance. I don't think Norma was there. I'm not sure she was still alive but I think Irving Jr. and Katherine might have attended. It's sad to think that they too are both gone now.
Post Reply